how to choose between frozen donor banks?

[Anonymous]

After several rounds of IVF, DH and I are moving onto donor. We're looking at frozen donor eggs for a couple of reasons: 1. more affordable, 2. smaller egg cohorts are ok since we only want one child (though open to another if need be), but we don't want leftover viable embryos, and 3. the scheduling is easier than trying to coordinate a fresh cycle. However, it feels overwhelming choosing a donor, and genetic testing is making it more complicated.

It seems that different donor banks use different tests and we have to chose which bank (and genetic panel) we're going to go with from the beginning. If DH gets the genetic tests favored by bank A, but then we chose a donor from bank B, it won't be good enough for DH to just take the genetic panel associated with bank B....we'd have to get the donor from bank B to take the genetic tests from Bank A (because DH already took that one), just to be sure that no one is missing anything. I assume that this is all for liability purposes. We could wait on DH's genetic testing until we find a donor that we like, but then I'm worried that all the eggs would be gone by the time that we get his test results back. Ugh!!!! How have other people managed all of this?

[Anonymous]

MMh experience is with sperm donors, not egg donors, but I just did the comprehensive Counsyl screening. Insurance covered most of it and it tested for like 175 things. As it turned out I was negative for all of them so it was fine and I could choose any donor. But if I was positive for something, I’d want to make sure I found a donor who had been tested for that specifically. Sometimes you can pay for a donor to get an additional test if you’re really set on them though. But you don’t want to take a limited test because if you’re positive for something the donor wasn’t screened for, that’s obviously a potential problem.