Despite its provocative title (“Do Egg Donors Lie?“) this article was fair, but more interesting to me were the comments, which could not have been a clearer demonstration on how to separate the egg donation myth from the egg donation reality. Throughout, ignorant, typically negative comments from women who have only read or heard about egg donation are set straight by women who were egg donors or IVF patients themselves. Just about every woman who identified herself as a former egg donor had a positive experience.
There is apparently much confusion about how egg donors are selected, and what they go through once they are selected.
The egg donor screening process
You do not have to have a perfect family medical history with no illnesses at all in order to be accepted (that itself would arouse suspicion). You do have to be in excellent physical and mental health (free of genetic disease, not a smoker or drug user), and a normal body mass index (we use 27 as the BMI cut off). Egg donor agency directors review hundreds of applications and know how to sift out the promising applications from the not-so-promising. Much depends on individual judgment and the needs of the particular egg donation agency or clinic. A woman may be perfectly healthy and fertile but we may pass her by because we do not think we have a good match for her.
But the questionnaire is just the first step.
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