Pandora's Box? Gail Sexton Anderson, Ed.M.

Heartfelt Egg Donation coordinates and encourages open and semi-open communication and arrangements between intended parents and egg donors if they decide this is the best route for them. I truly value Gail Sexton Anderson's voice in the egg donation community. Have a look at her recent blog post below and her insight regarding direct contact between parents and egg donors.

Pandora's Box? By Gail Sexton Anderson, Ed.M. 

Some fear that allowing intended parents and egg donors to have direct contact could be opening Pandora’s box.  My experience, of over 13 years, working with couples and egg donors is that knowledge soothes the fear of the unknown rather than creating problems. I have conducted many meetings between couples and egg donors and I can say they have been wonderful meetings were all parties walked away feeling better for having met.

When the donor gets the opportunity to meet the couple she is helping she has a stronger sense of commitment to the process. I’ve found that many donors would say to me after having met the couple that they were surprised how nice the intended parents are.  They had been expecting some wealthy and superficial individuals rather than a normal everyday caring couple longing to be parents. The donor often finds it more rewarding to when they get the opportunity to meet the couple.  Donors who done completely anonymous cycles as well as cycles were they have meet the intended parents wish they had been able to meet the all of their couples.

When intended parents meet their egg donor it acts to reinforce their choice and to take away many of the fears they may have.  I have found that most intended parents have the desire to feel like they know the egg donor.  It can be a very scary thing to put so much trust into an individual who will in essence be taking the mothers place in the gene pool. The meeting can help the couple to experience the egg donor as a multifaceted individual whom they can feel comfortable moving forward with in an IVF cycle.  I have found that intended parents also feel a strongly sense of closure when they have been able to meet their donor.
I’m not suggesting that all couples and donor should meet but I am suggesting that we are not complicating issues but actually simplifying issues by not creating such a taboo around meeting and future contact. The bottom line is that the more the parties know about each other more the comfortable they usually are.  Not knowing may cause the parties involved to make assumptions about each other that may not be founded in reality and may also cause anxiety in many cases.

I am finding that many intended parents are becoming more and more open to having some sort of contact with their egg donor and even more so wanting to have the option for future contact for the benefit of their future child.  Trying to keep these parties apart creates more fear than is really merited.  Most couples and egg donors have good boundaries and are not likely to become burdens to the each other.

Let’s also remember, at the bottom of Pandora’s box was hope.

Survey: Families through Gamete Donation Language

One of the challenges and frustrations many parents have with Third Party Reproduction is the language and definitions associated with egg donation. 

 

The Language Committee of Parents Via Egg Donation,  a nonprofit organization, is creating a document to reflect the language of families created through gamete donation. Just as Positive Adoption Language (PAL) finally legitimized and clarified the role of birth and adoptive families, so too, do we intend to educate as to how and what to call the various participants of families created through assisted reproductive options.

The intent is to distribute this document to the media and to others so that journalists will have appropriate language to use in describing our families. To do this, we would like to know what language you as parents, siblings, and professionals in the field of family building prefer to use.

Answers to these questions are completely anonymous. Please help us know what language is appropriate to use when describing families of gamete donation. The entire survey should take approximately 15 minutes.

The survey can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/gametedonationlanguage

*** When you take the survey please remember to click NEXT at the bottom of the screen ad continue on to the second page. There is another page with another set of questions. I think there are 30 some questions in all. 

 

Thank You.

Carole Lieber Wilkins, MFT and Britta Dinsmore, Ph.D., Co-Chairs
Parents Via Egg Donation

Study: Egg donors happy they helped out

By Alan Mozes
HealthDay Reporter

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 27 (HealthDay News) -- Most women who serve as egg donors retain a positive take on their experience a year later, new research indicates.

Researchers polled 75 egg donors at the time of egg retrieval and one year later, and found that the women remained happy, proud and carefree about their experience. "Up until now we've known that donors are by and large very satisfied by their experience when it takes place," said study lead author Andrea M. Braverman, director of complementary and alternative medicine at Reproductive Medicine Associates of New Jersey in Morristown. "And now we see that for the vast majority the positive experience persists."Braverman and colleagues from the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway, N.J., were scheduled to present their survey findings Wednesday in Denver at a meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

A year after donation, the women said they seldom worried about either the health or emotional well-being of the children they helped to spawn. They said they only think about the donation occasionally and rarely discuss it. The donors also reported that financial compensation was not the number-one motive for facilitating another woman's pregnancy. Rather, a desire to help others achieve their dreams was pegged as the driving force, followed by money and feeling good.

Women who said the donation process made them feel worthwhile tended to be open to the notion of meeting their offspring when they reach adulthood. And most donors were receptive to the idea of meeting the egg recipients and participating in a donor registry. "These findings are only one year out, and this is part of a five-year ongoing study," cautioned Braverman. "And life changes a lot in five years, so it'll be interesting to see if this lasts that far out. We can't say yet. But so far we're seeing that the feelings persisted during the beginning of the journey. A year out, we're not seeing a change in donors' experience. And that's kind of a good thing."

Linda Applegarth, director of psychological services at the Center for Reproductive Medicine and Infertility at the New York Presbyterian Hospital--Weill Medical College of Cornell University, described the study as "very useful," but expressed little surprise with the findings. "I actually routinely meet with donors a year post donation, particularly with donors who want to donate again," she said, noting that about 65 percent of her center's donors choose to repeat the process. "And I would say anecdotally that my experience matches the study findings," she added. "Many do choose to donate again because they have had a very positive experience," Applegarth explained. "And in addition to whatever had motivated them to donate in the first place, after they've donated, the experience often takes on new meaning for them, in a positive way. So their motivation becomes more multi-faceted, because they really do know that they've made a difference." Donors don't obsess about the experience, Applegarth said. "They move on with their lives. And this, I think, speaks well to the fact that there are any number of us who work with donors and try to be very sensitive to them and what they're doing, and want to make sure that they have a good experience with the donation," she said."We consider the donors as patients, and in that respect they're as important as anyone involved in the experience," Applegarth added.

Touching on the issue of egg donation from a different perspective, a second study to be presented at the conference found that women who serve as donors have a significantly different psychological profile than women who actually provide the service of carrying a baby to term. Compared with egg donors, the so-called "gestational carriers," or surrogate mothers, were found to have a higher degree of "belief in human goodness" and "contentment with life," researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago found. Carriers were also observed as having a stronger sense of "social responsibility."