Embryo donation or disposal

[Anonymous]

After a long and difficult process, we were lucky to have two children through egg donation IVF at SG. Now we are done having any more children (with 100% certainty) and we have two remaining high quality embryos.

My instinct was to do a closed donation process, but I'm hearing that it is relatively rare to make a donation. This gives me some pause. As a practical matter, we have our storage fee coming up very soon (less than two weeks) to force a decision. The anxiety of making a choice now has me leaning toward disposal. I'd love to have any comments to help think about this further. If you have done a donation at SG, I'd love to hear about how it went and how the process works. Who knows, maybe someone on this board would be interested?

[Anonymous]

SGF has an anonymous embryo donation program, and there are many patients on the waiting list wanting to use a donated embryo. Reach out to your nurse or physician, and they would gladly put you in contact with the program coordinator.

[Anonymous]

Agree with PP to contact your clinic for the ins and outs. I believe you will need to have an attorney involved in the process as well, so anticipate costs.

[Anonymous]

There would be an attorney involved, but costs are likely to be borne by the recipient (that's what happens in other donor processes).

You'd be asked to give general info (demographic and health info). How in depth would depend on the clinic.

You may want to consider allowing the child could receive your info later on. Recipient(s) would agree not to contact you, but it's nice to allow the resulting child/children to have access to future health info. Your kids may also be curious about their genetic siblings at some point.

[Anonymous]

I went with disposal after realizing I couldn't continue to grow my family and weighing the implications of donation (I would have definitely wanted to allow for future contact and considered how that might affect my existing child). I also hadn't tested the embryos so wasn't sure if they would have been high quality or not.

I wasn't at SG, but my clinic would have facilitated an anonymous donation. I could have specifically named a recipient, but there wasn't anyone I knew who needed embryos. It is a lot to consider. Good luck to you.