Donor egg pregnancy

While I am all for women having options for having children, I object to the mainstream media's proclamations that women can have their own babies even in their late forties or fifties! Those women, unless they underwent IVF in their earlier years and had frozen embryos, are probably using donor eggs.

There is nothing wrong with using donor eggs except when it misleads young women into thinking that they can wait forever to have a family. If they want their own biological children, they will be sorely disappointed. Now, if they don't care about the biology part of it, that's fine. But a lot of young women think that it is completely possible to delay child-bearing and still have their own biological children.

There is a limit to fertility. Even if you go to a reproductive specialist, they are not magicians. They can't make your ovaries produce eggs past a certain age, and that age does vary from woman to woman, but really, past 45 years old, you have waited too long. The statistics for successful pregnancy with IVF fall after age 40.

I do want to scare younger women into thinking about this now. If you're not in the right relationship, I am not recommending that you have a baby with an unsuitable partner just to have a baby. One option for you is to go through IVF and use donor sperm to make embryos, and then freeze those embryos for later. Embryo freezing is quite successful now. Egg freezing is a new process, but no one can tell you for sure that your eggs will thaw successfully or even be useable in the future. It is still too new for any meaningful statistics.

If you are fine with the idea of donor eggs, then don't worry. That's a great option that has high pregnancy success rates. Your own age doesn't matter--the age of your donor does. That's why all egg donors are in their twenties and early thirties. You can think of egg donor pregnancy as a different form of adoption except that you can control the environment during the pregnancy. And if, at that point in your life, you do have a great husband, you can certainly use his sperm, so at least the child is biologically related to one of you.

I wish so dearly that my doctors had discussed this with me sooner. I don't know how exactly my life would have been different, but I would have made sure it was different.