Infertility often prevents many couples from using their own sperm or eggs to conceive a child. Poor quality of sperm, eggs or embryos, medical conditions like an ovarian failure or premature menopause, chemotherapy, surgery or abnormal gametes are some of the many varied reasons due to which infertility patients may be incapable of having a baby with their own eggs or sperm. Same-sex couples or single women also need assistance to have a child of their own. Donor programs for fertility treatment can give many such patients their only opportunity of having a baby and starting a family.
Going through an egg, sperm or embryo donation program involves a number of important steps, including choosing the right donor, deciding whether to opt for fresh eggs or frozen donor eggs and undergoing the most optimal procedure (IVF/IUI/ICSI).
Sperm Donation Programs
Sperm donation treatments are a great solution for couples struggling with severe male factor infertility. Patients usually opt for sperm donation only when there are no other ways to successfully retrieve their own sperm or when they have very low sperm counts or genetic defects in Sexually transmitted diseases or have undergone chemotherapy.
How does the sperm donation process work?
Like egg donation, sperm donation allows the option of using healthy donated sperm from an anonymous donor. The donor sperm available in a reliably certified clinic are usually from non-smoking males between the age of 18 to 35 or 40, to prevent the risk of any age-related genetic defect.
Doctors then use the chosen donor sperm to fertilize the eggs of the female partner rough the procedure of IVF, intrauterine insemination (IUI) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). IVF and IUI using sperm donation particularly enjoy a high success rate due to important technological advancements.
Egg Donation Programs
Donor egg IVF can provide some of the most successful results to infertile patients. It is an exciting fertility treatment option for women struggling with chemotherapy or radiation therapy, premature menopause, ovarian failure syndrome, genetic disorders, or results of salpingo-oophorectomy. Those who have failed to conceive after more than three attempts at in vitro fertilization with their own eggs should also opt for egg donor IVF.
What is it and how does it work?
Egg donation programs involve fertility treatment using the healthy eggs of young donors to produce good quality embryos. The embryo is then transferred to the recipient woman’s uterus in order to achieve a successful pregnancy. The egg donation process starts by choosing the kind of donor whose eggs you wish to use.
The recipient mother is first kept on hormone therapy in order to stimulate her endometrium to accept the developing embryos that will be transferred. The egg donor simultaneously uses gonadotropin injections to stimulate the growth and maturation of multiple eggs within her ovaries. Once the eggs have matured, the fertility specialist retrieves the eggs from the donor’s ovaries and they are fertilized with the sperm to produce embryos. The mature embryos are finally transferred to the recipient’s uterus following the in vitro fertilization procedure, three to five days after fertilization. For the majority of cases, the donor egg IVF recipients are able to achieve a positive pregnancy test as early as 11 days after the successful embryo transfer.
Donor fertility programs are safe and often highly effective treatments to achieve successful pregnancies and conceive healthy babies. More and more couples in India are now opting to use healthy donated sperm, eggs or embryos to boost their chances while undergoing IUI or IVF.
