“This is an industry that is not regulated at all. What you can’t get on Google is whether an agency is going to push you toward using an egg donor so that clinic can boost its stats.”

The misconception that the fertility industry is unregulated is so persistent, even so-called experts perpetuate it (out of ignorance and laziness). Fertility medicine is highly regulated by the FDA, and there are some firm ground rules set by the ASRM as well.*

On the second part of her statement: I do not know why an agency would have any interest in increasing a clinic’s statistics; I guess if the agency were affiliated with the clinic, this statement may make some kind of sense. But statistics are highly accessible to anyone, and you don’t need to hire a consultant for $125 an hour. I encourage all our clients to go to SART, click on For Patients, the Find a Clinic: plug in your zip code for a clinic near you or click on a state for all its registered clinics. There you can find the clinic’s CDC-reported statistics for the past few years, where they separate their cycles by donor and non-donor, and in the cases of non-donor, ages of their patients. If your clinic’s statistics seem less favorable than some others, discuss them with your doctor. Some fertility clinics take on more difficult cases, and this skews the results somewhat.

Fertility is stressful and painful; it can cause marital conflicts, financial distress, and a host of other problems.  There are a number of psychologists who specialize in this field. We recommend them to our clients when the counseling offered by the IVF clinic is not enough. But paying yet another party (in addition to the clinic, psychologist, insurer, agency, lawyer, donor, etc.) seems just too much for most people.

* For more information on fertility regulation, see David Adamson, “Regulation of Assisted Reproductive Technologies in the United States,: 39 Family Law Quarterly 722 (2005), as well as the ASRM Web site.

We believe that by expanding our pool of egg donors, gestational carriers, and clients, it will be even easier for donors, recipients, gestational carriers and intended parents to take advantage of our services.  Press releases are linked below:

• Washington, DC
• Atlanta
• Miami
• Dallas

“Our new locations will offer the opportunity for our egg donors, gestational carriers, and intended parents to work locally, or take advantage of our recruitment efforts in other cities across the country. This makes NAFG unique among surrogacy and egg donation programs.”  – Sanford Benardo, Founder and President, Northeast Assisted Fertility Group

Your child will love you no less with the knowledge about his or her conception. It does not threaten the family unit at all, but inspires new connections. Take a look at this Science Daily article: “Re-shaping The Family: What Happens When Parents Seek Siblings Of Their Donor-conceived Children“.

Parents who have conceived children with the help of sperm or egg donors and then try to find the egg donors — and also other children conceived with the donors’ help — often end up creating new forms of extended families, according to new research.

Date: Saturday, February 7
Time: 7:30AM

We will post more details as they become available.  Click here for CBS’ official page for The Early Show.

Sanford will speak on “Finding a Donor and the Legal Issues” between 11:15 and 12:45. Other contributors will include NAFG team member Spencer Billings Nineberg, social worker Nancy Doctor, and Dr. Samuel Pang and Ann Moegle RN from Reproductive Science Center in Lexington, MA.

For more information, go to www.resolveofthebaystate.org.

“Benardo said the egg donation and surrogacy agency has seen applications from potential egg donors double — the [egg donation] agency pays female donors a flat rate of $10,000 after a woman’s eggs are retrieved.”

The article acknowledges that making money through egg donation is not quick and easy. Furthermore, the depressed economy is diminishing the demand for egg donors, making it even harder.

Recipients can always view all the egg donors at once (organized with the most recent additions on top), but now they can also search by criteria: location, eye color, hair color, ethnicity, height, and education level. Recipients can also isolate all the repeat donors and exclude the reserved donors, if they like.

To see it for yourself, just contact me with your e-mail address and clinic name and location, and I’ll provide a user name and password. There is no fee to view our database.

We hope this new database makes searching for egg donors easier for our clients. But it of course does not replace our personalized customer service.

Recipients may contact Kathy Benardo, the egg donor program manager, any time by e-mail or phone: kbenardo@assistedfertility.com, (800) 710-1677.

The CNN segment on egg donation (“Egg Donors on the Rise”) was pretty fair, but it left some large components out of the story:

• The Doctors.
  • The reporter did not speak to any fertility doctors who perform these medical procedures to get their opinion on the alleged surge in egg donation. This may be because doctors are probably not seeing any actual increase. As we’ve said many times on this blog, any woman can apply to be an egg donor, but the majority will never actually donate because they are not qualified, or cannot find an egg donor recipient to be matched with. Fertility treatments are expensive, and the economy may affect patients’ ability to pay for them just as much as it motivates women to donate.
  • Doctors could also speak to the efficacy of egg donation (about 50% of embryos transfers result in a live birth), as well as the risks, which I believe were overstated in the piece. The chance of hyperstimulation is about 1%, and since it is always treated, it is not severe.
• The Donor Egg Recipients.
  • Infertility is why egg donation exists in the first place. Maybe it would have been hard to find a family willing to admit on national TV that they used an egg donor, but they could have acknowledged the disease of infertility (I was able to, briefly). It affects millions of people.

I was also surprised to see Debora Spar (an economist who is now president of Barnard College) express such a negative view of compensated egg donation. It seems at odds with the attitudes expressed in her book, The Baby Business, which describes the need for political debate and regulation. She is extremely knowledgeable, but her five-second sound bite left a bad taste in my mouth. Fertility treatments are indeed highly regulated by the FDA and professional organizations (the ASRM, for example), yet analogies to the “wild west” persist.

Nothing in the story was new, but the background of the bad economy makes the headline “Women Sell Their Eggs for Money!” all the more sensational. Commercial egg donation has been around for at least fifteen years. If it weren’t for the compensation, it would be difficult to get donor eggs for infertile couples. So egg donors are paid, according to ASRM regulations. In the United States, it’s legal and safe. As usual, most journalism is not particularly interested in the reality of egg donation and surrogacy, which is indeed fascinating but too complicated for a three-minute story.

I would recommend Liza Mundy’s Everything Conceivable (Knopf, 2007) for a multifaceted, intelligent, and compassionate journalistic treatment of the subject.  (See also Randi Kaye’s “Eggonomics” entry on the CNN site.)

Time: 10:00 PM

<Click to watch the CNN video, “Egg Donors on the Rise”>

Tune to CNN for Anderson Cooper’s coverage of egg donation, which features Northeast Assisted Fertility Group:

TONIGHT: Dough for eggs!  Tough times can mean ‘eggceptional’ measures. See why women are lining up in clinics across the nation to donate their eggs! You won’t believe the going rate.  Go to CNN.com to read the rest.

Click here to watch the Anderson Cooper 360 webcast, or tune into the studio webcam.  CNN is also welcoming bloggers (or anyone interested in egg donation) to join the Anderson Cooper Live Blog to discuss the segment in real time.

NAFG’s position remains steadfast: we believe that infertility is a disease, for which egg donation is an effective treatment. NAFG egg donors are paid only for their time and effort, and not for the outcome of the egg retrieval.  Our recipients, in turn, get the opportunity to have a child. As long as egg donor compensation is not coercive, we believe that all parties will benefit — with minimal medical or financial risk.

Donor Reserving, Screening, and the Egg Donation Contract

Once you’ve made your choice, signed the contract with the egg donation agency, and paid your fee, your clinic can start the screening process. The agency will typically send an official “match sheet” (with the names of you and your egg donor), and the donor’s complete file to the egg donor coordinator at your clinic. The donor will have to fill out the clinic’s own application as well (obtained through the agency or directly from the clinic). One of the nurses will set up the egg donor’s screening appointments, which may occur all in one day, or broken up into about three separate appointments. Screening comprises a meeting with a social worker/psychologist (an MMPI test, a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, is sometimes administered), a meeting with a genetic counselor, a doctor’s examination, and a series of blood tests for infectious and hereditary diseases.  It takes about three to four weeks to get the results back.

Most egg donors pass their screenings. Any donor who does not will be informed by a doctor directly. If your donor does not pass, your clinic will inform you, and your agency should work hard to find you a replacement quickly. If some genetic findings are inconclusive, you will be counseled by your doctor about the possible risks, and may choose to find another egg donor.

When working with a private agency, an egg donation contract is customarily required to outline the rights and responsibilities of the donor and recipient(s). (When using a donor from a clinic’s program, medical informed consent forms are all that’s usually needed.) If there are lawyers who own or work for the agency, outside lawyers should be recommended to draft the contract in order to avoid any potential conflict of interest. Agencies are used to working with the same handful of lawyers for these contracts, and they offer very similar basic models. Your attorney’s fees should amount to about $1,000. The egg donor also gets assigned her own lawyer to review and explain the terms, which costs the recipient around $400. You could of course get your own lawyer to draft the contract, but it will probably take more time and end up costing you more. There is a relatively small community of experienced assisted reproduction lawyers who do this work frequently. It is best to choose from within this group.

Egg donation is said to fall under an “unsettled area of law,” meaning that there is no established legal precedent that governs it. At this point in time, anonymous donor eggs have been considered in the same way as anonymous donor sperm. The egg donor has no claim and holds no responsibilities to any eggs, embryos, or resulting offspring. As soon as the eggs are retrieved, they are viewed as the property of the recipient. The recipient may fertilize the eggs, implant them, cryopreserve them (as eggs or resulting embryos), and or handle/dispose them in any way the recipient chooses, in accordance with FDA regulations. In anonymous arrangements, she may be informed of the number retrieved but not whether a pregnancy or live birth results.

The compensation schedule and amount is also included in the contract. It should not be acceptable for the egg donor to be held responsible for any medical fees if she does not pass her screening, or for any punitive fees of any kind should she not be able to complete her donation (except in cases of willful fraud). She should not have to put herself at financial risk in order to donate eggs (the medical risk should suffice); the financial responsibility should be the sole responsibility of the recipients. Travel and per diem expenses should be reasonable, as negotiated by both parties. The name of the oocyte donor insurance policy should also be specified; this is typically purchased by the IVF clinic (as part of the patient’s fee) or if not, the agency purchases it with recipient funds. It costs $400 in most states ($180 in Massachusetts and Rhode Island).

In our experience, the contract phase goes very smoothly. Any wrinkles are usually easy to iron out: after all, it is in the recipient’s best interest to create and maintain good will in the relationship with the egg donor. Once both parties sign the contract (anonymity is maintained by assigning codes to replace names) and the agency receives the compensation and expense funds to hold in trust, the actual IVF cycle can begin.