Reply to Seeking advice from women who have gone through more than 5 IVFs

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[quote=Anonymous]This is 18:44 again.  I am sorry that I am writing such long posts.  I am not going to do a good job answering the question about why they didn't recommend using an agency because I don't remember that part of the conversation as well. (We were not going to use an agency anyway and there was so much information coming at me that I didn't attend as carefully to this part.)  However, we are going back to meet with the social worker in a few weeks and I will ask this question to her specifically and post what she says since there seems to be some interest in the answer.

Let me just say that I am not trying to pass judgement on anyone's decision about whether or not to use an agency.  I am just passing along an opinion that was given to me by someone who has worked in the field for many years and seen a lot of DE cycles. Everybody's decision is specific to her circumstances.  To the OP - the social worker at Columbia did say that they have outreach programs in a number of minority communities in NYC to recruit specific ethnicities among their donors (she mentioned certain Asian communities, for example.)  She also said that if they don't have a match already, they will put out feelers in those populations to see of they can find a better match.  I got a really good vibe about their matching process.  For practical reasons, I think you would only find something like this at one of the bigger clinics.

Basically, the doctor was stressing how comprehensive the screening process is for donors in their pool and how they have so many applicants (this is NYC) that they don't have to take anyone who has any potential problem in her physical or psychological work up. He also pointed out that at a place like Columbia that is not-for-profit there is no incentive to take someone on as a donor, while agencies have a financial incentive to keep people in the pool.  He said that they do have people who decide to work with agencies and things work out fine, but often those donors don't have as many screenings or have things in their profiles that would have disqualified them from the Columbia pool (and often don't have comprehensive drug testing since not every agency requires it) --- and the recipient has to pay more money for the cycle.  He wasn't saying that you can't get a great result using a donor agency, just that you are paying more (with the agency fee) and not getting a better outcome for the money.  Also, at Columbia the in-house donors come in to take their meds and agency donors are often not local so they take the meds on their own and (sometimes) the recipient has to pay travel costs for them to come in for the retrieval.  This is not usually a problem, but Columbia went to giving the donor meds at the clinic because they found that donors (especially second time donors) would sometimes alter their dosages if they wanted to change the retrieval day a little bit to make it more convenient (wanted/didn't want a weekend, for example.)  I am sure this is rare, but common enough that a big clinic altered their policies to prevent it.  [/quote]

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