When Your Patients Want More Details About Their Donor

As physicians in the fertility field realize, there has been a significant change in the provision of egg donation therapy in the UK. Despite the HFEA liberalizing their regulations, many UK patients still travel to pursue egg donation. We recognize that there are many advantages and disadvantages of pursuing treatment locally, in Europe, and overseas. It is our goal to share our experience, in working with patients from the UK, so that as you can be well-informed and can identify, after careful evaluation, if we meet their needs. 

We believe patients who have questions about donor choice or the anonymity of their donor would fit well with our programme.

As you know, Shady Grove Fertility has the largest donor egg programme in the United States and have over 8,000 donor egg babies born. We are able to provide intended recipients with more information about the egg donors unlike most European countries, where very limited information is provided.

Donor Medical History and Details

Recipients are able to view donor profiles that include a detailed medical history, ethnic background, family history (3 to 4 generations), personal information, strengths and weaknesses, and detailed physical characteristics, including childhood photographs. Most donors in our fresh donor database provide adult pictures as well, and all donors in our frozen egg bank database provide adult photos.

We acknowledge that recipients in the UK have a number of options and it is clearly the simplest and easiest option to stay with their local center and use the donors available to them. We believe that there is a subset of patients that we see that are very motivated to have more information about their egg donors.  They are comfortable traveling to the United States for treatment and are able to pay the moderately higher costs of treatment in the U.S.  We hope that if you have recipients who are interested in having more information about their egg donors that you consider referring them to us for co-management.

Sincerely,

Michael J. Levy, M.D. 

For more information about Shady Grove Fertility’s Egg Donation Treatment Programme please email Amanda Segal, our International Patient Liaison at [email protected].