Our Second Time Picking an Egg Donor
It’s been over a month since I have written about our surrogacy journey.
I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to write after our failed third transfer and adjusting to the reality of having to start over.
My husband and I needed some time.
Never during this time did we think we were not going to keep trying. I have written about this before, but I believe the repeated intentionality of surrogacy for gay parents demonstrates how much these children are wanted and will be loved.
So where are we now? After 3 years, we are back at selecting an egg donor. Our reproductive endocrinologist recommended that we select a new egg donor, given that last time we only ended up with 3 PGT (preimplantation genetic testing) embryos.
I wrote about selecting our previous egg donor. She was young, healthy, and had a good AMH level. We don’t know why it didn’t work with her eggs, but in reading more about egg donors, I found research that supports the same or maybe better outcomes with slightly ‘older’ donors (e.g. between 25 and 29 years of age). This seems counterintuitive given that fertility in women declines with age. My impression of this is that being an egg donor is hard. The cycle medications have a number of side effects and a strict schedule. It’s possible it is just easier for a slightly older, more mature woman to be compliant, and so they can have better outcomes.
If the results from our first round of embryo creation had anything to do with my husband and my sperm, we are #spermmaxxing on social media to do everything possible to increase our own fertility prior to our 2nd deposit. Feel free to follow that part of the journey on Instagram and/or TikTok.
We are not leaving anything to chance and doing everything possible to make ‘Take Deux’ of our international surrogacy journey a success.
Criteria for Selecting Our Egg Donor
Egg donor selection is not easy for gay intended dads. You are trying to get a donor who looks like both of you, in female form. This is because most intended dads split the eggs into two batches, half fertilized by one dad and half by the other. This is more common in fresh egg retrievals like we are doing as opposed to frozen egg batches.
In order to save time and/or cost, some intended dads select frozen eggs with about 6 to 8 mature eggs in a batch. With this number of frozen eggs, it is likely that you will end up with 2 or fewer embryos for transfer. This makes it hard to get embryos from each intended dad’s sperm. Fresh egg retrievals usually result in over 20 mature eggs. This is much easier to divide and fertilize with each dad’s sperm and still end up with around 6 embryos for transfer. However, fresh egg retrievals take more time and add cost to the process. There is no one way to go about this process, and intended dads have to choose the path that is best for them.
When selecting an egg donor, I believe the key is to agree on your criteria, and to keep the criteria to a minimum. The more criteria you have, the harder it will be to find a suitable donor.
Here is a table of our criteria, the description, our rationale for picking it, and how it compared to our first donor selection:
| Criteria | Description | Rationale | Comparison to Round 1 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Age | Less than 29 years old | Outcomes with donors younger than 30 are similar to those younger than 25. | We indexed higher on a younger donor and chose a woman who was 21. |
| Ethicity | Hispanic | My husband is half Mexican, so we want our children to have Hispanic heritage. | We only looked for Mexican donors and so were more strict. |
| Appearance | Look like us | Hard to find someone who is Mexican and also has blond hair and blue eyes, but you do the best you can. | This was not a high priority for us the first time. We didn't think about our appearance in relation to our donor's nearly as much. Honestly, we just wanted her to be good looking. |
| Passion | What do they really care about? | We don't care about schools attended or traditional accolades. We want her to show she has a deep interest in something. While this is not entirely genetic, we believe it's a good starting point for a happy life. | This was the same. It's a hard criteria to pinpoint, but you know when you find it. |
| Open | Willing to meet us and our child in the future | We want our child to be proud of their story and know their background as much as they want. | This was the same. Research shows that children who learn and can explore their origins are psychologically more comfortable. |
| Siblings | Have as many siblings as possible | We thought this could be a surrogate for fertility in the family. | We didn't look at this at all in round 1, but given our first donor looked good on paper we wanted some additional fertility criteria to select for round 2. |
| Medical History | No concerning medical history | Cancers, genetic conditions were all a hard no. | This was the same. We don't want to risk any genetic issues with our child. |
| Mental Health | No mental health issues | My husband and I both have mental health issues in our family. | This was the same, and, honestly, most egg donors don't have any mental health history. |
| Family HIstory | No concerning medical history | This is the same as for the donor with regard to red flags (e.g. cancers) but common things like high blood pressure are fine. | This was the same. |
| Anti-Müllerian Hormone (AMH) | Above 2 and less than 6 ng/mL | This is the ideal fertility range. Higher values could indicate potential issues like polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) and are not better. | This was the same. |
| Antral Follical Count (AFC) | About 20. | Like AMH, this is best in a specific range and higher is not necessary better. | This was not available at all the first time, and it was not availble for all donors this time either. |
| Body Mass Index (BMI) | Less than 28 | Fertility does correlate with weight. This is another surrogate marker that we wanted to include to optimize or chances of a good retrieval, and it could also contribute to our child's body habitus. | We didn't look at this last time. Our first donor was not obese based on BMI, but we wanted to do everything to optimize for success. This was challenging as some donors were on GLP1 weight loss medications, so we did not include those as their BMIs were recently changed. |
Narrowing Down the Selection to Our Top 3
After going through these criteria, we were able to narrow it down to 10 potential donors. We then went through all their information and pictures again and ranked them. We proceeded with the top 3, and we asked our agency if we could get a short video of them talking about themselves.
This is something I would 100% recommend to intended dads.
In this era of AI editing, pictures can easily be enhanced. These donors are not trying to deceive anyone, but they do want to put their best images forward. However, a video is more authentic, and it allows you to hear their voice, see how they move, appreciate how articulate they are, and get a real sense of them as a person.
Some intended dads want to have a Zoom call with a donor, and I have spoken to others who wanted to meet her in person. Depending on your agency and the donor, all these are possible. We didn’t feel we needed this. What we really wanted was the sense of her as a person, moving and being in the world, and we thought we could get this in a short video.
Picking ‘The One’
It takes a few weeks to get videos back from the donors. One donor didn’t respond to the agency, so they removed her from their database. I’m not sure how often this happens, but I don’t believe it’s uncommon for someone on a large database to change their mind and no longer want to donate. This is something else to keep in mind when you are selecting a donor. It’s always good to have backups in case someone is no longer interested in donating.
Two of our potential donors did send videos, and each video was about 2 minutes long. While both videos were great, one just stood out. She was animated, articulate, passionate, and loved her life. She felt like someone we would be friends with, and as much as possible, she looked and acted like each of us in different ways. We knew she was our first choice, and having done this two times now, I can say that you just know. It was the same with the first donor.
Something that we did this time that was different from the first round is we showed the video to a few of our closest friends. My best friend cried watching the video. It’s like she knew as well. It felt really good to be more open about this process and to get feedback and validation for our choice. It’s still our choice, but it’s always good to have those closest to you share their support.
Next Steps: Our Second Sperm Deposit
We have officially ‘matched’ with her, but now she has to go through genetic and medical screening. Then we will proceed with contracting before her retrieval. Our agency estimates that for new donors, the time is usually 4 months or less from matching to retrieval.
During this time, my husband and I will make our pilgrimage back to LA. In June, we will return to our ‘special’ rooms in the clinic and deposit our sperm to freeze. It’s definitely one of the weirder parts of this journey, but compared to what everyone else (e.g. egg donors, surrogates) has to go through, our contribution in the clinic is minimal and definitely not painful.
Both my husband and I are ready to move forward with haste in this journey. We have learned so much the first time, and the worst - having to start completely over - has already happened. The support and encouragement we have given to each other and received from our loved ones has made the continuation of this process possible.
We will be dads. It’s just going to take a little bit longer.
