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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hi there,

I know this is an old thread but I'm hoping someone can help my partner and I navigate the jungle of DC fertility clinics. We are looking to do reciprocal IVF using a sperm donor (she is 32 and will carry, I am 28 and will donate); however, we are unsure about where to go/how much we should except to spend. Do any of you have any updates about doctors? It sounds like Dr. Abbassi at CFA got good reviews here...yelp reviews for fertility clinics are alllll over the place. I'll take any advice!!!

Thank you!  [/quote]

Hello,

My wife and I did this w/Abbasi. We had a lot of unforeseen issues, and our insurance paid for quite a lot of things (we were very lucky for this to be the case, I know) so I can't really advise on cost. I can say that if you go with CFA, Abbasi is amazing and if you can do it, cycle through her office in Bethesda - that office is far less hectic and the staff is great. We would occasionally go to DC for monitoring and for the big procedures (retrieval and transfer) but otherwise did everything through Bethesda. I know people have complained about CFA's admin and getting answers on financial stuff but fortunately we had no issues with this.

We also did a consult with SG and did not love how we were treated - my wife had to go through their "donor egg program" which I just found stupid and kind of offensive for their to be any mention of "donor" anything besides the sperm we were buying. I'm sure they don't make straight male partners go through a "sperm donor" program for their wives to use their husband's sperm. Also they told us that they would only process insurance for one of us - not both. Since our insurance did cover a considerable amount of our treatment (there was a cap which applied to fertility treatment which included both of us and once we used this amount of $$ insurance was done with coverage, but we never actually reached the modest cap), had we gone with SG we really would have gotten screwed financially. Granted it took us 2.5 - 3 years to get pregnant, so SG may have changed their tune, but we were happy we went with our gut and went to CFA because we had no idea of the financial implications of paying out of pocket for one of us.

My only other piece of advice is start sooner rather than later. We ran into fertility issues and it took us almost three years to be successful (and I'm currently pregnant so I won't consider it completely successful until we can actually hold our healthy baby!) We didn't know enough to realize that there are lots of kind of preliminary tests to be done - you can do those things and then kind of wait for the big stuff and/or you guys can even get as far as a retrieval, freeze and then do a transfer whenever you like. The one other thing that really helped us is we did PGD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preimplantation_genetic_diagnosis), a pricey procedure (maybe 5k out of pocket) but we were having egg quality issues - we would get embryos that looked good but weren't genetically viable. It was worth it to us to find the one or two viable embryos and only implant those. Again, something we only learned with trial and error but definitely something to discuss with your RE if you're having any issues.

Best of luck to you and your partner. I hope it is a quick, easy, and successful process for you both! [/quote]

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