Testimonial: A Kind Thank You

January is always a contemplative month. Like many, I look back on the previous year and all that's happened and think about the possibilities of the new year not just for me personally and professionally but for the prospective parents and donors I work with at Heartfelt Egg Donation. The most exciting thing about doing what I do is learning that there are successful pregnancies and babies being born to well deserving parents. 

This letter came recently and I truly appreciate the kind words.

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Dear Suzanne, 

Lord knows that this letter of thanks is very long overdue but I hope that you will accept my apology for the delay nonetheless. 

At this time of year as we all reflect on our many blessings I am constantly reminded of how fortunate I am that I found you and your agency to help me in my endeavor to create a family. Words cannot adequately express my sincere gratitude for everything that you did for me. 

First and foremost, you are a person true to your word which is a rarity in today's society. You have integrity and to me that is priceless. I would recommend you to anyone going through the donor process. You were reliable, returned every phone call and e-mail in a timely fashion and made me feel very secure during an otherwise stressful time. I never once had to worry about things on your end. I honestly felt at all times that you had everything under control and that you had my best interests at heart. The fact that my husband and I received a refund from you of money that was not spent adds testimony to your honesty. 

I am truly grateful to you and my donor for providing me with this incredible opportunity to form a family that I wouldn't have been able to do on my own. I don't want to jinx anything but I can say that as long as things continue to go well there will be lots of celebrating in the new year on the East Coast. 

I'll keep in touch, 

S.

25 Reasons to Donate Your Eggs, by Abbie Waters

Provided by: Abbie Waters of FertilityNation.com.

You’ve started thinking about donating eggs. You’ve done a little research online looking at egg donor agencies and programs. Maybe you’ve even made a list of the pros and cons of egg donation. But you’re still on the fence, unsure of what to do. To help you make your decision, here are 25 more things to think about!

25 reasons to get off the fence and become an egg donor
1. It will help you get over your fear of needles.
2. You’ll be making a child without getting stretch marks.
3. You’ll get to witness the wonders of modern medicine first hand.
4. It will make you feel powerful in your ability to make positive social change.
5. Many women and men desperately need eggs to make their families, and you could help them do that.
6. The entire egg donation process only takes a few months.
7. You’ll learn cool words like human menopausal gonadotropin.
8. You’ll learn more about the ethics of egg donation and assisted reproduction.
9. You’ll get to see ultrasound images of your ovaries. If you ask, you can probably get some copies for your wallet.
10. You’ll learn more about your body, your menstrual cycle, and human reproduction in general.
11. Donating eggs will give you an appreciation of the beauty and power of your body.
12. Donating eggs will give you an amazing symbolic connection to a family.
13. The experience will deepen your capacity to empathize with others’ suffering.
14. If your recipient is infertile, you can raise public awareness about infertility.
15. If your recipient is gay, you can raise public awareness about gay parenting.
16. The compensation could help you pay off your debts or start your retirement savings.
17. “I’m an egg donor” makes a great conversation starter at parties.
18. All the medical examinations and meetings with the egg donor agency will develop your communication skills.
19. Going through the entire process shows others that you are a dedicated person who accomplishes your goals.
20. You’ll be able to look back on the experience with pride.
21. The egg stimulating drugs they give you will temporarily make you a living fertility goddess.
22. You’ll have plenty of time to update your Facebook profile while waiting at doctor’s appointments.
23. You’ll be a member of a very small, very unique “sorority” of women who have donated eggs to others.
24. It will be a story you can tell your children and grandchildren.
25. You might be lucky enough to experience the joys of Lupron-induced hot flashes!

So what about you? What reasons would you give to a young woman thinking about becoming an egg donor?

Video: Meet the Twiblings and More on the Twiblings - MSNBC/NYTimes

This is a wonderful story regarding Third Party Reproduction, specifically gestational carriers and egg donation. You may click on these links for the original NY Times piece and for the reply to comments posted from the Author and Mother, Melanie Thernstrom. I love that Melanie has nicknamed her egg donor their Fairy Goddonor. To some it may seem silly but to those who go through this it makes perfect sense and is an easy term for their children to understand. I appreciate Melanie and her gestational carriers, Melissa and Fie, for being brave with sharing their story.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year from Heartfelt Egg Donation! We are so grateful for all of our 500+ Facebook community friends, colleagues and beyond. Cheers to you and a New Year bursting with possibilities!

Lemon Blossoms - renewed faith, hope and possibilities

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."

How many eggs do you have anyway? By guest blogger Sharon LaMothe

I attended a fascinating session lead by Dr. David Adamson, MD at this years SMART ART XI. His topic was Careers, Babies and Biological Clocks. I wanted to share one particular tid-bit that I don't think is in your typical woman's magazine or doctors office reading material.

Just how many eggs do we women have anyway? Have you ever wondered? I never have. I just figured that I had what I needed and left it at that. I never gave my husbands sperm a thought either...it seemed to be there when it was needed (and sometimes even when it was not! BTW male fertility drops to 70% in their 50's) But I never had a sit down with girl friends and chatted over how many eggs we had left or where they all came from. We might have talked about their expiration date but we used the word 'menopause' to describe those topics!
        
Dr. Adamson showed a slide that said this: In Utero (aprox at 5 months) an unborn baby girl has about 4 Million Eggs. At birth that same baby girl will have about 700,000 eggs and at puberty a young girl would have approximately 350,000! And just so you know...at menopause the number is about 1000 eggs and they are not doing well! Most of these eggs are lost to artesia, not ovulation which means that they are lost to the cells dying.

As you can see, we are born with all the eggs we will ever have. Amazing to know but now the question is just what will we do with those eggs?


Sharon LaMothe Infertility Answers, Inc. http://infertilityanswers.org/ LaMothe Services, LLC http://lamotheservices.com/ *Please note: Sharon LaMothe is not a MD, is not an attorney nor does she hold a mental health degree. All advice given is solely the experienced opinion of Ms. LaMothe. If you have any medical, legal or psychological questions or concerns, please contact your own Doctor, Attorney or Mental Health Professional.

Invitation: Donor Gametes, the Next Generation: Caring for Our Children

I just received this invitation from The American Fertility Association. If you are one of the first 15 to register you'll be in luck and can get personal support and have your questions answered regarding the use of donor eggs, sperm or embryos. If you are already parenting children conceived via these methods you may also participate.

You're Invited to a FREE Telephone Coaching Support Group Thursday, November 18th  Donor Gametes, the Next Generation: Caring for Our Children  Are you considering the use of donor sperm, egg, or embryo to create children? Or, are you already parenting children created by donor sperm, egg, or embryo? During this one hour group conference call, you will receive information on: · The pros and cons of disclosure to children of their genetic origin · What and when to share this information with children if you so choose · How or whether to share this information with family or friends · Questions you may have if you have already begun to share this information You will also have the opportunity to share information and support one another in making the decision about disclosure and implementing this aspect of parenting. WHEN: Thursday, November 18, 2010 WHERE: Telephone Conference Line  (call-in information will be given at time of registration) TIME: 9:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern time FACILITATORS:   Joann Paley Galst, Ph.D.  Patricia Mendell, L.C.S.W. COST: FREE! Registration limited to the first 15 responders who also send information regarding their particular situation and  any questions they would like addressed. For further information and to register contact: Joanne Paley Galst, jgalst@aol.com, 212-759-2783 Patricia Mendell, pmendell@aol.com, 212-819-1778

Series: Egg Donor Frequently Asked Questions - #6 and #7 Risks and Side Effects of Donating Eggs

Will donating eggs now affect my fertility or the ability to have children in the future?

No. All currently available information shows that there is no decrease in a donor's ability to get pregnant after completing a normal retrieval.  You will not “run out” of eggs or go through menopause any sooner.

What are the primary risks and side effects of taking the fertility medication?

The primary risk is a condition called Ovarian Hyper-Stimulation Syndrome. This is relatively rare (1-3% of cases). Your physician will monitor you carefully in order to avoid this possibility. Side effects include weight gain and a feeling of extreme bloating. Also, as with any procedure, a risk of infection exists, you will most likely be given antibiotics to avoid this.

At Heartfelt Egg Donation, LLC we do our best to educate prospective egg donors regarding possible side effects and risks associated with egg donation. Prior to the egg retrieval procedure, the treating physician and their staff will provide additional risk education.

Possible Medications, Side Effects and Risks:
These medications will be totally out of your system within a few days after completing the treatment. There is no evidence that these medications cause cancer or have any long term side effects. Not everyone will experience side effects and the degree to which they occur may vary widely among individuals.

• Birth Control Pills - An oral tablet used to synchronize your cycle to the Recipients. Side effects may include: headaches, bloating, nausea, breast tenderness and vaginal spotting.

• Lupron® or Antagon® - This suppresses the pituitary gland from allowing you to ovulate. This medication is given by injection. Side effects may include: hot flashes, sweats, headaches, nausea, breast tenderness, decreased libido, joint pains, emotional lability, dizziness, general pain, nervousness, skin reactions, vaginal dryness/itching, weight gain/loss.

• Gonal-f®, Pergonal®, Repronex®, Follistim® - This contains natural pituitary hormones that are responsible for ovarian stimulation and aid in the production of eggs. This medication is given by injection. Side effects may include: ovarian hyperstimulation, ovarian enlargement/pain, ovarian cysts, abdominal pain/cramps, allergic reactions (fever, chills, musculoskeletal aches, joint paints, nausea), headaches, nausea/vomiting/diarrhea, skin rashes, swelling or irritation at the site of injection, dizziness, increased heart rate, breast pain, back pain, emotional lability, weight increase.

• Human Chorionic Gonadotropins (HCG) - This simulates the body's normal LH surge causing the final maturation of the eggs. It is expected that ovulation will take place 36-40 hour later. This medication is given by injection.

• Antibiotic - A broad-spectrum antibiotic to prevent infection. This is an oral tablet.

• Pre-natal Vitamin - A multivitamin that is given for good general health and egg quality. This is an oral tablet.

• Low Dose Steroid - May be given to suppress the production of male hormones during the treatment cycle and helps with egg quality. This is an oral tablet.


Rare Complications
In the unlikely event that there are medical complications, Heartfelt Egg Donation, LLC purchases an Accident and Medical Complication Insurance Policy for the Donor and Intended Recipient on behalf of the Intended Parents.

• Minor discomfort or abdominal pain might occur following the egg retrieval and is controlled with pain medications.

• Bleeding from the site where the needle is introduced (in the vagina) can occur. Almost always it is controlled by applying pressure to the site. In the rare event that there is internal bleeding, surgery might be required to stop the bleeding.

• Vaginal and pelvic infections may result. As a preventative measure, the treating physician may prescribe antibiotics during the egg retrieval. Complicated infections may cause tubal damage and interfere with fertility in the future.

• The production of a large number of eggs (>30) which may cause abdominal swelling, discomfort and difficulty breathing. In rare instances the fluid that accumulates in the abdomen might have to be removed (through the vagina with a needle) to alleviate symptoms and in some cases admission to a hospital might be required for a few days. This complication can be prevented and physicians take all necessary measures to do so.

Series: Egg Donor Frequently Asked Questions - #5

Why is it important to be height and weight proportionate as an egg donor?

It is necessary for you to be within a healthy weight range so that you are not at an increased risk for medical complications while participating in an egg donation cycle.

You may visit the Centers for Disease Control website to determine your BMI or Body Mass Index. All of our egg donors fall within the normal range for height.

Series: Egg Donor Frequently Asked Questions - #4

Can I donate eggs if I just had a baby and I'm breast feeding?

You may not donate while you are breast feeding. It is also necessary for you to have at least three regular menstrual cycles prior to participating in an egg donation cycle. You may start the application process with Heartfelt Egg Donation.

To become an egg donor with Heartfelt Egg Donation, LLC please visit the Donor section of our website for more information. 

Series: Egg Donor Frequently Asked Questions - #3

Can I donate eggs if I've had a tubal ligation?

Yes, you may be an egg donor if you have had a tubal ligation. Your eggs will be retrieved prior to being released in the fallopian tubes.