tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16256078457398459172024-03-05T02:50:45.940-05:00BABIES on ICE: IVF & EMBRYO DONATIONMy eggs, my wife's womb. Two kids. We're done. What to do with the left-over embryos on ice at our fertility clinic? Let's find Jewish dykes who want to become lesbian moms!ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.comBlogger127125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-14549811335826229012007-07-11T09:11:00.000-05:002007-11-13T15:06:08.260-05:00HOW TO READ THIS BLOGI have archived the posts on this blog in date order so you can see what happened from the beginning to the end. I am not continuing to post to this blog since the donation has reached its conclusion. I do check the email, however, and post comments, so feel free to let everyone know what's on your mind. You can get my email address in the "Profile" to the right. There is an email link on the left side of the "Profile". If you put your cursor over it my email address will appear on the left bottom side of your screen.<br /><br />I do not post any sort of commercial spam or links to commercial sites, so please don't send any. Thanks and good luck with your own journey.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-59318740169646919242007-07-10T16:24:00.000-05:002007-07-15T16:52:13.861-05:00TO LIE OR NOT TO LIEHere is an article on egg/sperm donation from the New York Times. I have edited it because it is extremely long. The main point of the article for me is the studies about revealing to a child if s/he was conceived with donor gametes. It's healthier for kids, and we now know this to be true based on science. <br /><br />Another point in this article, this time one I disagree with, is about the difference between the way sperm donors and egg donors are treated. The author of that study, and this article, argue that egg donors are treated better and more valued.<br /><br />Having gone thru egg retrieval twice myself, and once when my wife gave eggs to our friends, I can tell you that what ever egg donors are paid it isn't enough. Painful shots, daily schleps to the doctor for blood tests, potentially fatal surgery and medications? I wouldn't do it again for less than twice my annual salary. When I can donate an egg by having an orgasm (like sperm donors), sign me up.<br /><br />Here's the article with the redundant stuff removed:<br /><br /><blockquote>"By PEGGY ORENSTEIN<br />Published: July 15, 2007<br /><br />In 1992...there were just 1,802 attempts by women to become pregnant using someone else’s eggs, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Three years later, there were more than 4,738 such cycles; by 2004, the most recent year for which data has been published, there were 15,175 cycles, resulting in 5,449 babies. By comparison, some 22,911 children were adopted from abroad that year, and although there are no official figures, one survey estimated that at least the same number are conceived annually via donor insemination. Donor eggs are now used in 12 percent of all in vitro fertilization (I.V.F.) attempts, making it among the fastest-growing infertility treatments. Despite the portentous hype around women like Frieda Birnbaum, a 60-year-old New Jersey resident who in May used donor eggs to become the oldest American to give birth to twins, the bulk of intended mothers are in their 40s. The birthrate among women ages 40-44 has risen 62 percent since 1990, while the rate among those in their late 40s has more than doubled. Among those who used I.V.F. in 2004, about a third of the 43-year-olds used someone else’s eggs; by 47 years old, 91 percent did.<br /><br />With egg donation, science has succeeded in, if not extending women’s fertility, at least making an end run around it, allowing older women who, for a variety of reasons (lack of money, lack of partner, lack of interest, lack of partner’s interest) didn’t have children in their biological prime — as well as younger women with dysfunctional ovaries — to carry and bear babies themselves. It has given rise to the mind-bending phrase “biogenetic child,” meaning a child who is both biologically and genetically related to each of its parents, by, for the first time in history, separating those components. In that way, it is fundamentally different from sperm donation, though it also levels a certain playing field: mothers can now do what fathers always could — conceal the truth about their blood relationship to their children. And as with any new reproductive technology, it has provoked a torrent of social, legal and ethical questions about the entitlement to reproduce, what constitutes parenthood, children’s rights to know their origins and the very nature of family.<br /><br />I first became interested in the implications of egg donation because I tried it. After five years of repeated miscarriages and invasive, futile infertility treatments, a 21-year-old friend offered to spot me her gametes, the cells containing half the chromosomes necessary for reproduction. It wasn’t something I ever imagined I’d consider — it seemed so “Handmaid’s Tale.” Then again, with a donor egg, I could feel a baby grow inside me, experience its kicks and flutters. I could control — that sweetest of words — the prenatal environment, guard against the evils of drug and drink. I could give birth to my own child, breast-feed it. After a year of discussion, my husband and I decided to go ahead, only to find that, when placed in a petri dish, his sperm and my friend’s eggs refused to tango.<br /><br />Although my husband and I went on, improbably, to conceive our daughter spontaneously, I always wondered what it would have been like had that cycle worked. Would I have felt less authentic as a parent than my husband, or would my gestational contribution have seemed equivalent to his genetic one? Would we tell our child? And when? And how? What about strangers on the street who commented on how little the baby resembled me? What if someone said the baby did look like me and I smiled — would I feel dishonest? How would the experience be different from adoption? What kind of relationship would the child have with our friend, the donor? Would my husband feel awkward about pointing out similarities between our child and himself? What if the child someday turned to me and said, “You’re not my real mother?” What if I secretly agreed? What if she wanted to put the date I met our donor on her sixth-grade timeline?<br /><br />...By the late ’80s, though, European researchers perfected a new method of retrieving eggs by using a thin needle, guided by ultrasound and inserted through the vaginal wall. The procedure took 10 minutes and required only light anesthesia. As Liza Mundy writes in her book “Everything Conceivable,” this technique would revolutionize — or, you could even argue, create — the fertility industry by unhooking clinics from their dependence on hospital operating rooms. Suddenly, any doc with a lab and the right equipment could set up his own shop. Using that advance, Paulson and his team made a breakthrough of their own: some of their patients had aged past 40, which was considered the outer limit for medical intervention, while waiting for donors. Would it be possible, Paulson wondered, to push that threshold? He tried transferring multiple embryos created from a young woman’s eggs into the body of a 40-year-old and she became pregnant. In 1990, Paulson published an article in The New England Journal of Medicine announcing that as long as the eggs were young, the age of the recipient appeared immaterial. And just like that, the market for donor eggs was born.<br /><br />...Becky, who asked me to use a nickname, sat down and began scrolling through pictures on the Web site of Ova the Rainbow, one of the (regrettably named) agency sites she browsed last fall during her search for an egg donor. “When I first started doing this it was really emotional for me,” she said. “I kept thinking about that kids’ book, ‘Are You My Mother?’ I’m looking through these pictures of young women and feeling like: ‘Oh, my God! Is this the mother of my future child? Is this the mother of my future child?’ ”<br /><br />I stood behind her, watching the young women go by. Each was accompanied by an assortment of photos: girls in caps and gowns graduating from high school, sunburned and smiling on family vacations, as preschoolers in princess frocks, sporting supermodel pouts in shopping-mall glamour portraits. Sperm banks rarely provide such visuals, which is just one disparity in the packaging and treatment of male and female donors, according to a study published last month in The American Sociological Review. Egg donors are often thanked with presents and notes by recipients for their generous “gift.” Sperm donors are reminded that they’re doing a “job,” providing a “sample,” and performing an act they’d presumably do anyway — which may be why many men in the study were rattled when told a pregnancy had actually occurred. And although the men could admit they were in it for the cash, ovum donors were expected to express at least a smidge of altruism.<br /><br />It was weird to look at these pictures with Becky. I inevitably objectified the young women in them, evaluating their component parts; it made me feel strangely like a guy. Becky clicked on a photo of a 22-year-old brunette with a toothy grin. Each profile listed the donor’s age (many agencies consider donors to be over the hill by 30), hair color (there seemed to be a preponderance of blondes), eye color, weight, ethnicity, marital status, education level, high school or college G.P.A.’s, college major, evidence of “proved” fertility (having children of their own or previous successful cycles).<br /><br />...the notion that blood is thicker than water, that we can pass on our best — or someone else’s best — characteristics (but somehow not our worst) is a powerful one, even though anyone who has biogenetic children will tell you that they can be as different from one another, and from their parents, as strangers.<br /><br />Women using donor eggs know that. But the dream, the hope, of replicating oneself dies hard. “Loss is the first stage of building a family with donor gametes,” says Madeline Licker Feingold, a psychologist who works with couples pursuing third-party reproduction. As part of that reckoning, women have to give up not only on using their own eggs but also on the search for the perfect donor, one who is in every way their match. Or, as Becky put it: “It’s this tension between letting go and clinging to this ideal of the donor being ‘you.’ ”<br /><br />...Becky’s search lasted about two months. Russell participated, too, of course, but since it was her genetic material they were replacing, she had the final say-so. Husbands typically defer to their wives for that reason, according to Feingold. The reverse, in her experience, is less true: women are usually more involved in choosing sperm donors than men are in choosing egg donors. That may be, she says, because women tend to be more devastated by infertility than men, regardless of whether its source is male or female...<br /><br />“But I’m really attached to wanting to birth and nurse a child,” she added. “If this doesn’t work I might be ready to move on to adoption. But it’s not like you can say, ‘O.K., I’ll adopt.’ It’s not that easy. And the home visits are so intrusive. And anyway I’m not there yet.”<br /><br />“Why don’t you just adopt?” That is the first question most people ask if you say you’re considering egg donation. It’s the question I asked myself, as had every potential donor recipient I spoke with. Why create a child where none existed? Why spend the money on something that’s not a sure bet? Why ask another woman, even (or maybe especially) a friend, to inject herself with drugs — drugs whose side effects, although unlikely, could require hospitalization and even, in extremely rare instances, be fatal. (Recipients of donor eggs are required to buy supplementary health insurance for the donors in case something untoward occurs.)<br /><br />The answers among the women I met were both deeply personal and surprisingly consistent. Like Becky, these women longed for the experience of pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding. Often they (or, more often, their husbands) resisted adoption, reasoning that egg donation would be psychologically easier on the child, who would be born — rather than relinquished — into its family. They wanted the opportunity to hand-pick a donor’s genes rather than gamble on a birth mother’s and father’s. And they wanted to be able to see at least their husbands, if not themselves, reflected in their children’s faces.<br /><br />Still, many questioned the morality of egg donation. “Taking into your home a baby who needs one is inherently more ethical than pursuing a very intensive route to have a biological child,” one potential donor recipient told me. Perhaps that’s why public support for and approval of parents who use donor gametes is lower than for those who adopt — the former is presumably perceived by some as a rather selfish act and the latter a selfless one. Yet adoption has often come with its own ethical quandaries, whether it was the girls “in trouble” who were pressured to give up their children in the 1950s or the current State Department caution against adopting from Guatemala in the wake of reports of child smuggling. What’s more, the idea of healthy infants who “need” homes, particularly white infants, is a myth: domestically, demand has always far outstripped supply.<br /><br />Which is not to say that egg donation is without complexity — for either donors or recipients. Looking at the screen, Becky paused at a donor who identified herself as Jewish. I recalled waking up in a middle-of-the-night panic shortly before our cycle was to begin wondering, since my donor friend was gentile, whether our baby would be a Jew. My husband is not, and at any rate, Judaism is traditionally passed down matrilineally. How could the Talmudic scholars of yore have anticipated this conundrum? I called a Conservative rabbi who explained that, while there’s no general consensus across denominations, his movement’s official stance was that the gestational mother determines a child’s religion. That mollified me. Sort of.<br /><br />A gentile donor was a deal-breaker for some Jewish couples I met. “I didn’t want to add to any identity conflict the child might already be experiencing,” said one potential mother in the Midwest who had found a New York agency that recruits young Israelis. “Certainly not about religion. It’s too delicate.”<br /><br />Jewish donors, along with Asians, Ivy Leaguers and those with proven fertility, are considered “exceptional donors” and can command a hefty premium. A recruitment ad on New York’s Craigslist offered up to $10,000 for Asian donors. On some sites I visited, agencies were asking $15,000 for donors with proven fertility. There have been reports of agencies charging more than double that for other highly desirable women.<br /><br />Yet there is often no way to know whether the information the donor gives, including her medical history and educational background, is accurate. A 2006 study conducted by researchers at New York University found that donors routinely lowballed their weight, and the heavier they were the more they fudged. Agencies, too, which are unregulated and unlicensed, can easily manipulate the truth. Many advertise I.Q. and psychological testing as part of their services, though there is no independent verification of either the results or the protocols used. Even if there were, jacking up fees for smarts is a dubious prospect. “Fees for donors are based on time and trouble, so I don’t see how someone who goes to Brown has more time or trouble doing this than someone who didn’t go to college at all,” Feingold, the psychologist, told me.“Parents are vulnerable. People would be willing to do a lot to take charge so that they didn’t need to feel so sad, bad, fearful and out of control. They’ll pay more money, do testing. But it’s impossible to do intelligence testing on an egg.”<br /><br />To discourage both fraud and undue inducement, the ethics committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (A.S.R.M.) issued a position paper in 2006 on donor compensation: $5,000, they determined, was a reasonable but not coercive fee. Anything beyond that needed “justification,” and sums over $10,000 went “beyond what is appropriate.” What’s more, the committee denounced paying more for “personal attributes,” saying that the practice commodifies human gametes.<br /><br />Those guidelines, however, are unenforceable among both A.S.R.M. physician members and the donor agencies listed on the group’s Web site as pledging compliance. A survey published in May of medical clinics with egg-donor programs (which are presumably under greater pressure to act ethically than unlicensed agencies) found that although donors received an average of $4,217 nationally, at least one clinic brokered a $10,000 fee and another $15,000; a recent Craigslist post directing new recruits to Columbia University Medical Center offered $8,000 to new recruits. One in five clinics considered the donor’s fertility history or ethnicity in establishing rates.<br /><br />The word donor, then, may actually be a misnomer — at least in this country, where the free market prevails. Internationally, when governments say it, they mean it. Canada and France ban payments to egg donors. Britain reimburses expenses up to about $500 after submission of receipts; before deciding to forbid donation, Italy experimented with a partial “mirror” system, a kind of genetic tit-for-tat in which a husband donates sperm to shorten his wife’s waiting time for donor eggs. No nation has a pool of donors anywhere near the size of that in the United States.<br /><br />The agency Becky eventually used charged her a flat $6,500 donor fee (there would’ve been a comparatively reasonable $500 premium if she had requested a Jewish or Asian donor) along with a $3,800 agency fee. Additionally, there were the costs of the donor’s medical screening and health insurance; legal fees; reimbursement for the donor’s and possibly a companion’s travel expenses if the donor was from out of the area (Becky’s wasn’t); and reimbursement for lost wages and child care. There were also the costs associated with any I.V.F. cycle: not only the fertility drugs but also physician, clinic and lab fees. And fees for freezing any unused embryos, in case the transfer failed or the couple wanted to have another child. Becky estimated that she and Russell would eventually be out about $35,000....<br /><br />When I met Deborah this spring, she had finally committed to going ahead with a donor egg after several years of flirting with the idea — the donor was chosen, the fees paid, the contracts signed, the appointments planned, the drugs delivered. Yet, days before the process was to begin, she found herself lying awake nights, frantic over whether she was doing the right thing. “What gets to me is that the three of them would be genetically related,” she said, “and I would be the one. . . . It’s not about passing on my genes. It’s that I don’t want to be an outsider in my own family. I don’t want to feel less legitimate in my child’s eyes. I’d feel I’d have to prove my status as a mother by not making any mistakes and by being the perfect mother to this child. Otherwise, he or she could. . . . ” She trailed off, staring out the window again.<br /><br />“I just don’t understand,” she went on to say after a moment. “How can one parent tell a child that the genetic connection is irrelevant to their bond — when it clearly means something to the father, or why would they have gone to such lengths to maintain it? How can I tell my son that the special sense of connection he shares with me and with his cousins is irrelevant, even forbidden to mention in front of his sibling, who wouldn’t have access to his own genealogy? That’s one of the reasons why I preferred adoption. At least it allows the family to maintain a coherent logic.”<br /><br />Most parents expect that clarity, those bright lines in their genetic, biological and social relationships to their children. Becoming the parent of a donor-conceived offspring means reconciling, even embracing, something murkier. Before starting our donor cycle, my husband and I met once with a social worker, a standard requirement for couples using donor eggs — though, again, not for those using donor sperm. Her job wasn’t to screen us (she did, after all, work for the clinic and had little incentive to reject anyone) but to help us imagine how the genetic asymmetry might play out. What would it feel like to see my husband’s caterpillar eyebrows or artistic talent in my child but no heritable trait of my own? What about our extended families? My parents had assured me they’d love their grandchild no matter whose genes she carried. I knew they meant it, theoretically, but I wasn’t sure they could pull off the particulars. My dad loved to brag, “It’s in the genes!” when one of his grandkids excelled in school, sports or music. I worried over how hearing those comments would affect our child. Or maybe I worried over how they would affect me.<br /><br />I wasn’t alone in my concern. According to a paper published in the March 2005 issue of the journal Social Science and Medicine, parents of donor-conceived kids found “resemblance talk” — something most of us consider innocuous — to be “ubiquitous, unavoidable and uncontrollable” and they feared the constant chitchat would stigmatize their child and throw the family’s legitimacy into question. This was true irrespective of whether parents had told their children how they had been conceived, and it exacerbated uncertainties about these decisions among both groups. It also made them apprehensive about whether their children could be fully accepted by their extended families.<br /><br />“People see a child in a supermarket checkout line and almost reflexively make some comment about who he looks like or doesn’t look like,” said Robert Nachtigall, an adjunct clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-author of the paper. “We interpret it as a kind of shorthand by which people validate the child’s position in the family, in society, by basically making comments that refer to the blood relationship that must exist between the child and his or her parents. The problem for people who have conceived with donor gametes is that they know it’s not true. And the dilemma for them is how to respond, if at all.”<br /><br />Resemblance talk did something else, too: although emphatic that it didn’t change their love for their child, mothers said it was a constant reminder of their own infertility. “Your infertility is always kind of there when you do donor conception,” said Marie, the mother of 14-year-old Catherine. “It’s always there through adoption too.” The difference is that there’s widespread cultural support for adoption in a way there isn’t for donor conception. Families can access a longstanding network of social workers, psychologists, other parents. Marie knew this from personal experience: she was herself adopted at birth. “Adoptive families are not as isolated,” she said. “People have been educated. Although I still think in general the culture is adoption-negative, it’s certainly different than 30 years ago.”<br /><br />For years there has been speculation about how high-profile, late-in-life moms got pregnant: Geena Davis had twins at 48; Holly Hunter had hers at 47; Jane Seymour’s were born when she was 44. Joan Lunden has had two sets of twins, one at 52 and one at 54; although she appeared on the cover of People with a gestational surrogate, when asked flat-out by reporters if she also used an egg donor she declined to comment. Elizabeth Edwards, who gave birth to a daughter at 48 and son at 50, has ducked the question as well, demurring that it’s not “ladylike” to discuss infertility. Marcia Cross, the actress, is one of the few celebrities to acknowledge, last year in a USA Today article, that older women may use donor eggs, “which doesn’t make the baby any less beautiful or perfect. One’s own eggs only last so long, and sometimes at 43 or 44 you can have your own baby, but statistically it’s very difficult and expensive. You don’t want to wait that long.” In a People cover story published after her twin girls were born, Cross was described as having “beat the odds” of conceiving via I.V.F. at age 44 using her own eggs.<br /><br />Even those in the limelight have a right to privacy, especially where their children are concerned. At the same time, drawing that line at egg donation is troubling. For one thing, the author Liza Mundy says, it perpetuates the fantasy of women’s endless fertility, as much a Hollywood illusion as unfurrowed brows, full lips and perky breasts in middle age. In reality, according to C.D.C. statistics, in 2004, only 5.2 percent of 44-year-old women who transferred embryos created through I.V.F. using their own eggs gave birth. Among 47-year-old women, none did. With donor eggs, the odds for both sets of women jump to 51 percent and often far higher. It’s also hard to imagine that these same women would be equally circumspect had they adopted. Consider the proudly public stance of the adoptive mothers Angelina Jolie, Sharon Stone, Jamie Lee Curtis, Madonna. By trying to protect their children from stigma, famous egg-donor recipients may inadvertently be creating it.<br /><br />Most parents of donor-conceived children won’t be expected to take a stand in the national press, but they do struggle over who to tell and when to tell, the difference between “secret” and “private” information and how much of the story is their child’s as opposed to their own. “The hardest part about not being willing to disclose until my daughter is old enough to understand is that I feel this responsibility to women my age,” said Anne, the mother of a 2 1/2-year-old girl conceived using a donor egg, who asked me to use only the middle names of her and her husband. “I want them to know they could do this, too — they could carry their baby, give birth to it, and it’s wonderful. This girl at work got pregnant. She was 43, a year older than I was when I got pregnant. She found out it was a Down baby and terminated.”<br /><br />Anne’s eyes welled up, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I was so devastated for her. She came to my office and said, ‘You beat the odds.’ And I felt so guilty because I didn’t beat the odds. And I couldn’t say anything about it.”<br /><br />...By the time the couple married, Anne was 40. “I used to say, ‘I’m willing to adopt but I want the experience of pushing out my own,’ ” she told me. An enthusiastic advocate of egg donation, she felt truly blessed that technology had so beautifully fulfilled her dreams...<br /><br />According to several studies, most donor recipients haven’t told their children about their origins, though some researchers argue that this trend is reversing. The women I spoke with, all open enough about their choices to talk with me, said they did expect to tell their children. They talked about integrity and a child’s right to know his history. They mentioned the danger and difficulty of keeping family secrets. “If I keep it a secret, then why is it a secret?” Anne said. “Then I create the stigma even if no one else ever does. And I don’t want to be responsible for that. I want my daughter to understand that, you know, you were the best egg for the job.” Anne laughed. “And she’ll learn about perseverance. And that some things are nature: your genetic makeup makes you behave certain ways, or like certain things. That’s the way that it is. But I’ve been nurturing her. I carried her in my body. I pushed her out. She’s my child.”<br /><br />The idea that disclosure could be a viable, even preferable, option is relatively new. Taking a cue from donor insemination, which was historically (and often still is) kept secret, fertility doctors initially counseled couples that disclosing to their children would only cause unnecessary confusion. I recall our first appointment to discuss egg donation at the clinic where we had undergone two I.V.F. cycles; a nurse led us to an office in a different part of the building and offered to close the blinds to ensure our privacy. Until then, I hadn’t realized we were supposed to feel furtive.<br /><br />Deborah told me that she heard a clinic counselor speaking on a panel at an infertility conference promoting secrecy as a perk of egg donation. “She said, ‘The women who use donors tell me they just forget about it when they’re pregnant.’ She repeated that. Twice. Isn’t that awful?”<br /><br />In truth, it isn’t clear that secrecy is necessarily damaging. In the most extensive longitudinal study to date, Susan Golombok, the director of the Center for Family Research at Cambridge University in England, has compared families who have sperm-donor children with those who have egg-donor children, as well as with those who used conventional I.V.F. and those who conceived naturally. In 2006, when her team last checked in with the donor-conceived children, they were 12, and most had not been told the nature of their conception. The kids in all of the groups were equally well adjusted. What’s more, parents of donor-conceived kids (and those who used conventional I.V.F.) were more involved with their kids’ lives than those who had conceived naturally.<br /><br />Apparently, secrecy has not affected their relationships. But, Golombok wonders, what if those children someday discover the truth? Close to 75 percent of her subjects who were not planning to tell their children had told someone else that they had used a donor. What if the information came out accidentally or was blabbed during the course of a bitter divorce? What if the nongenetic parent contracted a fatal, genetically linked disease? That one hit home: I’d been through treatment for breast cancer five years before our donor cycle; I couldn’t imagine allowing a daughter to believe that she, too, would be at risk.<br /><br />There have been no large-scale studies on how disclosure affects the psychological development of donor-egg-conceived kids or their relationships with their parents. But among teenagers who were told as young children that they had been conceived using donor sperm, there have been no negative repercussions, according to research by Joanna Scheib, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. In 2004, the A.S.R.M. switched its official position to support disclosure, though not unequivocally.<br /><br />According to Robert Nachtigall, who has looked at disclosure decisions as well as “resemblance talk,” both those parents who disclose and those who don’t have the same motivation: acting in the best interests of their children. “We were struck by how people could use the same argument and come to a different conclusion,” he said. “Disclosing parents perceived the danger would come from an internal disruption of the family dynamic: they felt that if the child found out from another person it would destroy the trust and their relationship. Nondisclosing parents were more concerned with threats from outside of the family, with stigma. They didn’t want to subject the child or themselves to public scrutiny, to be thought of as different or other. They’d made the decision that that was the greater threat, so they weren’t going to disclose. Both types realize that this information is powerful and important; they just have different strategies about how it is to be managed.”<br /><br />Parents who take the leap, though, say they don’t regret it. In a study published this March of disclosure strategies among parents who had used donor eggs or sperm, Nachtigall and his co-authors found that many expressed relief at having told their children, as if a weight had been lifted, while most children’s responses ranged from neutral to positive. “That’s the big take-home message,” Nachtigall said. “Nobody regretted telling. Nobody.”<br /><br />Once a child knows she was donor-conceived, what then? How far do her rights extend? Should she be able to meet her donor, and who gets to decide? It was clear to Marie, the donor recipient who is also an adoptee, that knowing one’s genetic lineage should not just be an option, it should be an entitlement. “There’s no way I would have a child of mine go through what I went through in terms of the not knowing and the questioning and the search.” she said. Not only did she and her husband, a 65-year-old lawyer, plan from the get-go to be open with Catherine about her conception, they also wanted to ensure that their daughter would, whenever she was ready, have access to the donor...<br /><br />They have been in phone and e-mail contact with the donor, who at the time of the donation was a college student interning for an acquaintance of Marie’s, ever since. Catherine has known about the woman since preschool. “The comments she’d make about it at 5 were different than at 10,” Marie said.“At 5, we’d be driving to Safeway, and this little voice in the back of the car would say, ‘Now, what’s an egg donor again?’ At 10 there were a lot of questions about who she looked like and ‘Why don’t I look like you?’ ”<br /><br />Then, when Catherine was 12, came the moment that all of the donor recipients I spoke to told me they dreaded. “She turned to me in this relaxed, ‘Hey, Mom, isn’t this interesting’ kind of voice and said, ‘You know, technically speaking, you’re not actually my mother.’ ”<br /><br />This, Marie said, is where it helped to be a trained therapist — and perhaps an adoptee as well, someone who has understood from experience both the salience and limits of genetic relationships, that DNA doesn’t make the mom, but children need to figure out what, if anything, it signifies. “It was her way of acknowledging that this means something to her that’s completely independent of her relationship to me. And that’s inevitable: no amount of being wanted, planned for or loved eliminates that piece of the experience.”<br /><br />...When it comes to the question of whether to reveal a donor’s identity to a child, at least for now, we leave the decisions to parents. Other nations say that prerogative is trumped by a person’s right to know his heritage: Britain, for example, recently banned anonymous donation; any children conceived after 2005 will have access once they turn 18 to identifying details about their sperm or egg donors. Since 2000, when the debate over this issue began, the number of registered egg donors in Britain has dropped almost 25 percent.<br /><br />Yet egg donors and recipients may have less to fear from open donations than they imagine, at least if the experience is comparable to sperm donation. According to Joanna Scheib’s research, teens who were conceived with “open-identity” sperm — who when they turn 18 can have access to their donor’s name — said that, while more than 80 percent were interested in meeting their donors, fewer than 7 percent wanted to establish a father-child relationship with them.<br /><br />A few days after my conversation with Marie, I talked to Becky. She had just found out she was pregnant with twins. “Twins!” she crowed. She had always hoped to have two children: both she and Russell are close to their siblings. Now she was jubilant, if jittery. “When I found out, I walked around in a haze for a week thinking, What have I done?” she said, laughing. “As for the donor piece, I imagine this could make it easier. They won’t be alone in their situation. They’ll be in the same boat. I’m glad that they’ll be together and genetically related to each other.”<br /><br />She paused a moment, thinking about her future. “I’m just happy,” she said. Finally, Becky would be a mother, her husband a father, the two of them building a family with all the conflict, joy and unpredictability that entails — regardless of whose genes are involved.<br /><br />Peggy Orenstein is a contributing writer for the magazine and author of the memoir, “Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother.”"</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-13864961448106056832007-07-02T07:23:00.000-05:002007-11-13T15:04:50.899-05:00USE A SPERM BANK, LADIESWhen we were in the process of conceiving our first child through IVF we were interviewed by a PhD candidate. She was comparing the experiences of lesbians who had kids by adopting, using alternative insemination or putting the eggs of one woman in the womb of the second.<br /><br />One thing she told us is that every couple she interviewed who didn't use a sperm bank regretted it or had problems. Using a "friend" as a sperm donor sets lesbians up for big problems later on. This is different with egg donors because courts see two mothers and don't think a third mom is needed. But women without a man in charge of their lives are dangerous and deficient. Sperm donors are frequently awarded custody of the children of lesbians. If you don't want the hassles of divorce without the rights of marriage, use a sperm bank ladies.<br /><br /><blockquote>"Sperm donor wins Irish custody battle<br /><br />Thu Jul 19, 9:34 PM ET<br /><br />SUMMARY: A lesbian couple wed in a U.K. civil union cannot take their 14-month-old boy to one mom's native Australia for long periods, the judge rules.<br /><br />A man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple won a legal fight Thursday to keep his biological son in Ireland.<br /><br />The Supreme Court judgment was a first in Ireland, a predominantly Roman Catholic country where the rights of same-sex couples and sperm donors have not been spelled out. Now the couple, wed in a civil-union ceremony in England, cannot spend long periods in Australia with their 14-month-old boy as planned, but can only vacation there for up to six weeks.<br /><br />Another courtroom battle between the man and the couple looms over joint custody of the boy.<br /><br />Two judges, Justices Susan Denham and Joseph Finnegan, ruled that the toddler's best interests required him to stay in Ireland near his biological father. The third judge, Justice Nial Fennelly, disagreed, arguing no evidence was offered that the boy would be harmed by leaving Ireland.<br /><br />"The case is utterly unique and unprecedented," Fennelly wrote in his dissent, noting that neither the parental rights of sperm donors nor lesbian couples are defined in Irish law.<br /><br />Neither side has been publicly identified, following Ireland's policy of granting anonymity to family law litigants.<br /><br />The lesbian couple -- an Irishwoman and an Australian -- exchanged vows in January 2006, just after same-sex civil unions were legalized in the United Kingdom. The Irishwoman was pregnant by the Irish sperm donor, who signed a contract giving him visitation rights.<br /><br />The boy, born in May 2006, has his biological father's name as his middle name, and the couple initially granted the man regular visits. But tensions quickly grew, both sides' lawyers agreed.<br /><br />The couple restricted the man's access to the boy, then announced they planned to go to Australia for up to a year. The man filed two lawsuits -- one to restrict the trip and another seeking joint custody. The custody case is to be heard this fall.<br /><br />Thursday's verdict upheld a judgment by High Court Justice Henry Abbott, who ruled the couple could take the boy to Australia for six weeks. The Supreme Court held that until the custody claim is considered, the boy should travel outside Ireland for only a limited period. (Shawn Pogatchnik, AP) "</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-69490084257269033072007-06-12T21:48:00.000-05:002007-06-12T22:14:25.225-05:00BALLING HYSTERICALLYThere have been several stories I've read about lesbians who get pregnant at the same time to complete their family all at once. Having been through two pregnancies together, my wife and I think this is nuts. Who runs out for the pickles and ice cream at 2am if both women are pregnant? Who carries the groceries?<br /><br />I was just reading about two women who each gave birth to sextuplets on the same day. When I told my wife about this, she said "Is that those two lesbians who both got pregnant at the same time? Bad planning on their part!". She was just joking, but I thought it was pretty funny, the idea that a female couple could end up with 12 babies at once.<br /><br />No, each woman who gave birth to sextuplets was married to a man. They have more in common than that. Both couples see the conception of the six babies as "an act of God", even though they both needed fertility treatment to get pregnant. Of course, each saw selective reduction as against God's plan.<br /><br />I'm fine with people not seeing an infertility diagnosis as "God's plan". But how is that not the plan and having to take powerful drugs that make you conceive too many children is? What God would plan that they carry six babies, give birth to six disabled children and, as with one of the women, experience heart failure upon giving birth?<br /><br />Let's either leave things up to God entirely or take responsibility for our own selfish, destructive decisions. Poor God. S/he is not to blame for every stupid thing done by us humans. But the couples who gave birth to the sextuplets put it all on God. Their websites are chock full with prayer requests and discussions of "miracles". A miracle is when someone gives birth to a healthy child, not whelps a litter of innocent, damaged children who will never be well, just because they can.<br /><br />At least one of the couples is fessing up to having used fertility drugs. Three rounds of increasingly strong drugs before the sextuplets were finally conceived. God's plan -- that the first two drugs didn't work but the third one did -- was not very efficient.<br /><br />The second couple will only say they became pregnant through "artificial insemination". What?!? Call the sperm bank and get that guy's sample. He's the world's biggest stud if he can make a woman ovulate six eggs instead of the usual one or two. Obviously that couple used fertility drugs as well and is lying about it. Why? Because it wasn't them dooming their children to disability and forcing tax-payers to foot millions of dollars in medical bills, it was God.<br /><br />I assumed that the news report I read on the "artificial insemination" couple was simply wrong, so I looked at the many press clippings on their website. Sure enough, the phrase "insemination" came up in each story, sometimes as a direct quote. This is a calculated effort on the part of the couple to deceive. They are completely open about every aspect of their story so it's not a privacy issue. It's a direct attempt to hide the truth.<br /><br />There is one other possible explanation. Perhaps they conceived six children another way. The mother is quoted below:<br /><br /><blockquote>"By azfamily.com<br /><br />...it was a shock to learn Jenny was carrying sextuplets. The ultrasound technician showed the young mother-to-be something she never expected to see.<br /><br />"So she counted and she was like, 'One, two, three, four,' and then she lost it and then I was like balling hysterically and I was like, 'Oh my God, I don't know.'" Then she's like five and I was like, 'Oh my gosh' and then she stopped,"</blockquote><br /><br />So that's how they conceived six: it wasn't "artificial insemination", it was "balling hysterically".<br /><br />However it happened, people who claim to be pro-child and doom their own children leave me BAWLing hysterically.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-4142715029375880172007-06-10T09:14:00.000-05:002007-07-11T09:23:48.472-05:00THE SECOND TRANSFERAfter the recipients transferred one embryo and it didn't take they decided to thaw the remaining two embryos and transfer both at once. We were fine with this, since we were mainly trying to avoid contributing to needless disability should they transfer three embryos at once and have all three take.<br /><br />When the recipients thawed the last two embryos, only one survived. It grew to a grade B, 4-celled embryo. That is the exact same size and grade of the embryos, from two different egg retrieval batches, which resulted in our son and daughter. Since all of my embryos to date had reached grade B, 4-cells (except the first embryo the recipients thawed), we had hope that this embryo would result in a baby for the recipients.<br /><br />Unfortunately, that hope was unfounded. The transfer did not work. The recipients did not get pregnant from the embryos we donated to them. We wish we had more embryos to offer them so they could try again, but we only had three left over.<br /><br />Erin, the recipient who tried to get pregnant for two years through insemination and then using my embryos, felt she had "let us down" by not getting pregnant with the embryos we gave her and her partner. But I told the recipients that the benefit of using a donor is you can blame any problems on him or her. <br /><br />In this case, the eggs with which the embryos were created were 37 years old, which isn't the freshest. I told the recipients that it was certainly my old, musty eggs that caused the problem, not Erin. <br /><br />We are sad we could not help these wonderful women become mothers. They are now pursuing other options. Of course, if you have some spare eggs or embryos lying around, let me know and I will pass the information along to them. You could not find warmer, more loving women. We hope their child will come to them soon.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-7630037251946862072007-06-09T09:38:00.000-05:002007-07-11T09:10:39.221-05:00WHEN EMBRYO TRANSFERS FAILWe were disappointed for our recipients that the first embryo transfer did not work. Originally they told us they wanted three children, all full genetic siblings. That was a long shot to begin with since we only had three embryos to offer them. With only a one in three change of success per embryo (assuming all the embryos thawed) it was likely that our recipients would end up with one, or possibly two children.<br /><br />On the other hand, there was also a possibility that they would have either zero or three children from the three embryos. But now that the first transfer had failed, it was almost impossible that their dream of having three genetic siblings would come true with our embryos (identical twins are much more common with IVF so there is a slight chance they could still have three genetic siblings).<br /><br />We knew these wonderful women wanted to be mothers with all their hearts. We wanted to help them. Since my eggs had been used to create the embryos, I felt like I was at fault for the failure of their first attempt.<br /><br />WHY IT DIDN'T TAKE<br /><br />It is impossible to know exactly why the embryo did not implant. We know that embryos of the size this one had achieved have at least a one in 3 chance of becoming a baby. But they have a two in 3 chance of failing to implant, just as they do when conceived the old fashioned way.<br /><br />There were several factors that probably contributed to the lack of a pregnancy:<br /><br />1) The embryo was only grade C. I had never before produced a grade C embryo, all my previous embryos being higher grades, but it's not surprising that this embryo was of lower quality. I was 37 when these embryos were created. That's not super-old for successful reproduction, but it's not considered young. Most clinics won't even accept egg donors in their mid to late 30's.<br /><br />2) This cycle had been rather stressful for the recipients. There was the mix-up with the prescription, first-time jitters, meeting us for the first time, traveling to a new area, and so on. Stress is known to have a significantly adverse affect on IVF outcomes.<br /><br />3) We later learned that both women had a common bacterial infection known to cause miscarriage and failure to implant. The clinic requires these infections to be treated before a cycle can begin. I am not sure how the infection was overlooked, but it could certainly have had an affect on their chances for success.<br /><br />Well, at least they had two embryos left. The recipients looked into ways to increase their odds of success for the next attempt. One thing they did was treat the infection. Another thing involved me, and shortly after the failed transfer they wrote to me to see what I thought about it.<br /><br />More on that next time.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-28670760268671563252007-06-08T08:15:00.000-05:002007-06-08T08:30:55.249-05:00TRANSFER RESULTSEach day my recipients did an early home pregnancy test and each day they wrote to us to say the result was negative. We appreciated them involving us in their pregnancy attempt but we did not expect it. The embryos were no longer ours. The recipients had a contractual obligation to notify us if they gave birth, but they were under no obligation to tell us anything else before the baby came.<br /><br />As each day passed with no indication of pregnancy it seemed likely that the recipients were not pregnant. Still, there was a reason the doctor schedules the test for two weeks after the transfer: that's when enough hormones should be present to truly indicate if a pregnancy had occurred. Until that date it was entirely possible that the negative results simply indicated it was too early to tell.<br /><br />The day before their final pregnancy test was scheduled at the doctor's office we did not get the daily update from our recipients. It seemed clear to us from this that the last home pregnancy test had been negative.<br /><br />Several days passed with no word. Had they rescheduled their doctor's visit? We gave the recipients their space and privacy. This was their family and their business, not ours. Several days after their last email, we received this message, sent to a dozen members of their immediate families:<br /><br /><blockquote>"We had our blood test completed today and received a call back confirming<br />that we are not pregnant but wanted to send a thank you to all those who were so supportive and thoughtful during this whole process. It would be much harder without the great support system we have. We are truly lucky to have such great family and friends.<br /><br />We are still not down for the count! We will be trying again hopefully late Spring early Summer! So until then we are counting our blessings and saving our quarters for next time."</blockquote><br /><br />We were disappointed for Jenny and Erin. They had been waiting so long to become moms. We had hoped to help them and we still might, but not yet.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-31155649535468695732007-06-06T14:52:00.000-05:002007-06-06T15:35:26.739-05:00WHY SHE DESTROYED HER FROZEN EMBRYOHere is another perspective on what to do with a frozen embryo from Sabrina Paradis. The article is entitled "Why I Had My Stored Embryo Destroyed". I understand her decision but it seems that she based it on incomplete information. For instance, she didn't know about the non-religious embryo donation site MiraclesWaiting.org. She only found the extremist sites run by people trying to outlaw all abortion.<br /><br />The writer imagines meeting her genetic child born to other parents. She thinks it would be uncomfortable to tell that person "I only wanted two children." My experience and expectations around adoption, embryo donation and egg donation are not hypothetical. My wife and I have been through it from all angles, and have spent many hours with the family her egg donation helped to create. Our experience is just the opposite of that imagined by the author. <br /><br />Children who are not genetically related to their parents (due to adoption or egg/embryo donation) don't look at their donors as their parents. If they know their parents had help to have children, that's how they look at the situation. A donor is an interesting footnote in the self-image of those children who know they were conceived with the gametes of someone other than their parents. A donor can be a family friend. Donors are not parents.<br /><br />If I meet the child(ren) of my recipients I will proudly say "I couldn't keep someone as wonderful as you to myself so I shared. I interviewed dozens of people before I picked the very best parents for you. I found two people who wanted more than anything to love you and I helped them to have you." I am completely pro-choice. Destroying an embryo is a perfectly valid thing to do if those who created it wish to do so. But I cannot imagine that a baby born from a donated embryo would be disappointed at being born, whether to the parents who created her or to equally loving parents they picked.<br /><br />With those thoughts, here is an excellent article by someone who made a different choice than I:<br /><br /><blockquote>"The bill came in the mail last month. It sat, unopened on our front table. Neither my husband nor I touched it or said a word to each other. But one day at work, I got an email from him that read, simply, "Should we pay it?"<br /><br />"No," I replied, "Let's not pay it." His second email was somber: "I am okay with that, so long as we are both willing to look at each other and our kids and say that it is okay."<br /><br />The bill was for Vial Number 2988 — our third child. Well, not actually our child — our embryo, in frozen storage at the in-vitro-fertilization clinic. Vial Number 2988 was the final result of $12,000 worth of IVF treatment: fifty hormone injections, twenty-seven blood draws, sixteen sick days from work and at least one day where the whole process made me feel suicidal. The result: two beautiful children, one boy and one girl, eighteen months apart and both still in diapers, and across town, a cluster of cells in limbo.<br /><br />I always wanted three children. To me, three seemed to be the magic number that made a family "big."I couldn't help but think of this third embryo (which was frozen at five days' development) as a child. A fortuneteller once told me that I'd have three children, two boys and a girl. Like a child's birthday wish, I never told anyone her prediction, fearing it might not come true. The image of those three babies stuck in my head.<br /><br />Growing up liberal, I always believed in a woman's right to choose and that an embryo (the term used until week eight of a pregnancy, when the embryo becomes a fetus) wasn't actually a child. Yet, I couldn't help but think of this third embryo (which was frozen at five days' development) as a child, especially because both the other embryos I had created eventually became children.<br /><br />The day after our email decision, I called the number on the invoice. "Um, I don't want to pay my bill for embryo storage." I said.<br /><br />"What do you mean you just don't want to pay it?" the woman at the billing office said. She sounded confused.<br /><br />"I, uh, don't want to have my embryo stored anymore." I said, feeling horrible.<br /><br />"Oh! Well, in that case, we just send you out a form to tell us what you want done with the embryos and you send it back to us and that's it!" she said brightly, "Oh! And it has to be notarized!"<br /><br />I hung up without requesting the form. I wasn't ready to have my office secretary notarize a form that said I didn't want more children.<br /><br />And yet, I really didn't and neither did my husband. Our family felt complete. And I felt I couldn't face a third difficult pregnancy. My two pregnancies were rough and high-risk. My doctor even forbade me from taking the subway. I had placenta previa and a weakened cervix — two disorders that might have caused problems, but luckily didn't. My daughter and son came into the world full-term, fat, pink and amazing. I couldn't believe my luck. <br /><br />And I didn't want to press it. During my initial treatment, my doctor warned against carrying multiple babies with my medical conditions, so he implanted only one. It worked. Success using only one embryo is very rare (some say 20%), even in the most advanced of New York clinics. But success using only one frozen embryo is more so; typically, only about half of embryos even survive thawing. When I went back to the clinic to start trying for baby number two, in went one frozen embryo from that same, first, IVF cycle. It also worked. I won the IVF lottery — twice. Once you have two big wins like that, you have to acknowledge that on your next play, you're more likely to lose. Better, I thought, to let the storage facility dispose of that embryo than to go through the grueling IVF process only to have the procedure fail or to miscarry.<br /><br />I never considered giving the embryo up for "adoption" or donating it for stem-cell research. I know that sounds selfish. Here I had a perfectly good embryo and I didn't want it. I knew how awful it felt to be infertile. Why not give it to an infertile couple longing for a child? Or donate it to science? Well, stem-cell research blogs and the paltry explanation of "donating to science" in my IVF pamphlet conjured up images of human cloning. And I cringed when I looked at resources like the National Embryo Donation Center website, on which such embryos are referred to as "snowflake kids." All I could think of was the eighteen-year-old child on my doorstep. What would I say? "Uh, well, we had your brother and your sister and we pretty much had our hands full after that." They say you can donate anonymously, but who hasn't turned on a talk show to see an adoptee reunited with his mother after a lifelong search? I can't help but feel it's only a matter of time before those anonymous frozen embryos find their way back home.<br /><br />The cliché is true, having kids changes everything — including the decision to have more kids. And the dream of easily, happily having three children ran up against reality. And that reality is: I have two kids who are far closer in age than I ever would have planned because I was getting older and had struggled for years to have kids at all. I went into the IVF clinic frightened and hopeless and left it $12,000 poorer and thirty-five pounds heavier, extolling the virtues of modern medicine. I went from daybreak trips to get my hormone levels tested to daybreak coffee runs covered in baby vomit. Sometimes I feel I don't have the right to complain, because I worked so hard to become a mother, in all its horror and glory. But the truth is: having two young children is harder than I ever imagined.<br /><br />The billing office started leaving vaguely threatening messages on my machine regarding the unpaid bill, which was for several hundred dollars. I had another birthday and was officially in my late thirties. The kids got the croup and I spent Memorial Day weekend convinced the four of us wouldn't make it out of the steamy bathroom alive. My daughter learned to sing her ABC's and my son started to crawl. We decided to move and found a wonderful three-bedroom house. And just like that, I decided my family wouldn't be bound by the outcome of that $25 palm reading. I called the billing department back and asked them to send me the form, on which our names were printed and there were highlighted lines for our signatures stating that we wished for the contents of Vial Number 2988 to be thawed. We signed the form, got it notarized and sent it the same day. And every day I count my blessings. One. Two. "</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-56206159708186839652007-06-04T07:27:00.001-05:002007-06-04T07:39:54.544-05:00THE RESULTSA few days after Jenny and Erin's fertility doctor transferred one of my spare frozen embryos into Erin's womb they tried an early home pregnancy test. It was too early for a valid test but they thought they'd give it a try. It was possible they they might have a hint if the embryo had attached.<br /><br />As expected, the test was negative. That was to be expected. Jenny and Erin thoughtfully let us know that they had tested. It is hard to wait the two weeks to find out if the IVF procedure was successful. Doctors ask their patients to wait the full two weeks before testing at the doctor's office to avoid false negatives which can be disappointing.<br /><br />There was still a week and a half to go before the final test by the doctor. Jenny and Erin decided not to stress out. Another test might have a better result. There was always tomorrow.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-44053565633985804112007-06-03T14:10:00.000-05:002007-06-03T08:28:37.940-05:00EGG DONOR RIP-OFFHere is a report that tries to defuse some of the hysteria surrounding egg donation. Finally, an explanation of why egg donors are paid such a piddling amount for risking their lives to help someone else have a family: only the hours spent at the doctor's office are counted. That is utterly ridiculous. What about the hours spent taking painful injections? Or the hours of discomfort from these extremely strong medications and the huge number of egg sacs inside your body?<br /><br />I have never donated eggs for money and never will but the amount women are paid for this is piddling. You can die while taking the egg meds, or on the operating table, or you can die later due to the meds increasing your risk of future ovarian cancer.<br /><br />Donating sperm is NOTHING compared to donating eggs. This is another example of women earning less than men for doing more work.<br /><br /><blockquote>"Survey belies tales of donor egg market gone awry<br /><br />By Anne Harding<br /><br />NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Media reports of an out-of-control market for human eggs fueled by desperate couples willing to pay large sums are exaggerated, results of a survey suggest.<br /><br />The average donor compensation for 191 fertility clinics surveyed nationwide was $4,217, well within the $5,000 limit established by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) in 2000, Sharon N. Covington of the Shady Grove Fertility Reproductive Science Center in Rockville, Maryland and Dr. William E. Gibbons of the Women's Center for Reproductive Medicine in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, found.<br /><br />"I think that's what gets headlines is to look at an industry that's kind of out of control and gone awry, and we don't believe that that's the case," Covington, who conducted the survey for the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART), told Reuters Health.<br /><br />"One of the purposes of a study like this is to give consumers information to empower them so that they can make choices," she added in an interview.<br /><br />The ASRM had established $5,000 as the upper limit for standard egg compensation, with payments above $10,000 "beyond what is appropriate." But there remains no objective way to put a price on human ova, the researchers note in a report in the journal Fertility and Sterility.<br /><br />The ASRM had suggested a formula based on multiplying the average number of hours an egg donor spends in a medical setting -- 56 -- with the standard payment for a sperm donation. Based on a sperm donor payment of $65 to $70 in 2000 dollars, the ASRM came up with a "justifiable" price of $3,360 to $4,200 per egg.<br /><br />In the current study, the researchers contacted 394 SART member clinics, and 191 responded. Eighty percent said they paid the same fee to all donors. There was some regional variation in compensation, ranging from roughly $5,000, on average, for the northeastern and western US to $2,900 in the northwestern part of the country.<br /><br />Covington and Gibbons admit their analysis does not cover the entire field of donor egg payment; one western agency had told SART it couldn't comply with the society's guidelines and compete in the marketplace. And the researchers did not survey donor egg agencies, they note, which represent a "burgeoning, consumer-driven industry." Such agencies must agree to comply with ASRM and SART standards in order to be listed on their Web sites, the researchers add, but "it is unclear whether they are in fact doing so."<br /><br />Nevertheless, Covington and Gibbons conclude, their "reassuring" findings indicate that the "vast majority" of fertility clinics are complying with ASRM guidelines on donor egg compensation.<br /><br />SOURCE: Fertility and Sterility, May 2007."</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-70659087025838650592007-06-01T09:11:00.000-05:002007-06-01T11:55:04.629-05:00PROTECTING MY KIDSThere is an agency called RainbowLaw.com that creates legal packets specific to couples' needs in each US state. The goal of these forms is to protect families whose marriages are not recognized in the USA, or who do not wish to marry.<br /><br />RainbowLaw has a packet aimed at the needs of Seniors, and one for unmarried heterosexual couples. The main goal of their work, however, is to help gay couples, whose marriages are ignored by the Bush Administration, overcome some of the many barriers to keeping each other safe. Because they specialize in this work, and do it out of community concern, the packets cost less than $300, a pittance compared to what a typical lawyer charges to make such forms from scratch.<br /><br />We completed a RainbowLaw packet before our first child was born. We needed it at the hospital so I could make medical decisions for my wife and my genetic child. I would remain a legal stranger to the baby created from my egg until the birth certificate and Petition to Establish Maternity were filed the following week. For that reason, I needed a sheaf of forms with me at all times in case something happened.<br /><br />And something did happen. After two days of unsuccessful attempts to give birth naturally to our 9-pound breech baby, he was born by emergency cesarean section. If I had not had those forms in place, my mother-in-law, who was 1,000 miles away and who did not support our relationship, would have had all the decision-making power for my wife and my genetic child.<br /><br />It was recently time to redo these forms, due to the birth of my second child. Rainbow law charged less than $100 for the updates. No couple can afford to be without these forms. With the prices RainbowLaw charges, and the scholarships they provide, everyone can afford to have them. Do you?ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-14109587191500258802007-05-30T07:10:00.001-05:002007-05-30T07:10:37.490-05:00SPERM DONORS vs. EGG DONORSHere is an article that says sperm donors don't get as much money or respect as egg donors, even though the men have more "work" and inconvenience. This report could only have been written by someone who never did an egg retrieval cycle. Here's why it's wrong:<br /><br />1) Donating eggs even once triples your risk of cervical cancer. You have to sign a form to that effect before the cycle begins.<br /><br />2) You can die during the egg cycle from ovarian hyperstimulation or from clots from the meds.<br /><br />3) You can die on the operating table when the eggs are retrieved.<br /><br />4) Sperm donation is completely non-invasive and risk-free. It also ends in orgasm.<br /><br />5) Donating sperm takes about five minutes per donation.<br /><br />6) The six weeks the egg donor works are 24-hours a day of discomfort.<br /><br />7) During egg donation you have painful shots several times per day and you have to take the shots at precise times.<br /><br />I think the argument stops at "you can die". Sperm donation is NOTHING compared to egg donation. Sperm donation is fairly compensated: after the intake process they get $75 for five minutes work. Egg donors have an even more arduous intake process, then they get $5000 for six weeks of hell and risking their lives. Which seems more fair?<br /><br />There is no way I would ever donate eggs for money. I did it only to have my own children. My wife donated eggs to an infertile friend out of kindness. The friend introduced her to a woman who needed an egg donor. That woman offered my wife $10,000 -- twice the going rate -- to donate again. My wife said "forget it". It might be worth it for about ten times my yearly salary, but no less.<br /><br />With this in mind, here is the most ignorant, biased article I ever read:<br /><br /><blockquote>"Double-standard exists in the way that men and women donors are valued by the fertility industry<br />Medical Studies/Trials<br />Published: Sunday, 27-May-2007 <br /><br />When Sociologist Rene Almeling decided to look into the operations of U.S. sperm banks and egg agencies, the UCLA Ph.D. candidate in sociology thought she knew what she would find.<br /><br />She figured that any discrepancies in compensation rates for the building blocks of assisted reproduction could be explained by either market forces or the biological differences between female egg donors, who must undergo hormone therapy and outpatient surgery, and their male counterparts, who, as one recruitment ad put it, "get paid to do what you already do."<br /><br />Instead, Almeling, whose findings appear in the June issue of the American Sociological Review, uncovered a topsy-turvy market that often defies not just conventional wisdom but also the basic law of supply and demand.<br /><br />"Men donors are paid less for a much longer time commitment and a great deal of personal inconvenience," she said. "They also are much less prepared for the emotional consequences of serving as a donor of reproductive material. Women, meanwhile, are not only paid more for a much shorter time commitment, they are repeatedly thanked for 'giving the gift of life.'<br /><br />"From compensation rates to the smallest details of donor relations, sperm donors are less valued than egg donors," Almeling said. "Egg donors are treated like gold, while sperm donors are perceived as a dime a dozen."<br /><br />The inequities persist despite the fact that profiles of hundreds of potential egg donors languish on agency Web sites, far outstripping recipient demand, while suitable sperm donors are quite rare, Almeling found. In fact, only a tiny fraction of the male population possesses a sperm count consistently high enough to be considered donation-worthy, and more than 90 percent of sperm bank applicants are rejected for this and other reasons. As a result, sperm banks routinely resort to finder's fees to meet the need.<br /><br />"A pronounced double-standard exists in the way that men and women donors are valued by the fertility industry, and it can't be explained medically or by market forces," Almeling said. "Based on the availability of donors alone, you would expect the abundance of potential egg donors to drive down compensation fees and the scarcity of potential sperm donors to drive up their fees. But I found just the opposite.<br /><br />Almeling's findings are part of a growing body of research on the sociology of markets in life-saving and life-giving material, including blood and organ donations and life insurance payouts. But Almeling's study, which is based on interviews with 25 staff members at two sperm banks and two egg agencies, is believed to be the first detailed comparison of gender-based differences in U.S. compensation rates for reproductive material. Almeling has been gathering data on the medical market in genetic material for the past five years.<br /><br />Almeling found that it is not unusual for egg donors in large cities to make upwards of $5,000 per donation - no matter the outcome. Agencies also encourage recipient couples to provide female donors with thank-you notes, small tokens of appreciation and even cash bonuses.<br /><br />In contrast, sperm banks do not pay as well or encourage such displays of gratitude. Male donors make between $50 and $75 per donation, and they are paid only when their samples meet the high fertility standards required for freezing. Over the length of their contracts - generally, an entire year - sperm donors may make as much as their female counterparts do over the course of a single six-week cycle, but only if they donate more than the required one sample per week. Invariably, however, earnings of sperm donors fell short, either because donors missed weekly sessions or their samples failed to meet fertility standards. Women also may donate as many as three times in a year, and their fees increase with each completed cycle.<br /><br />So an egg donor actually stands to make far more during the same period of time than even the most diligent and fertile sperm donor.<br /><br />Moreover, men work much longer for their pay than women, and their activities are much more restricted as a result. In addition to requiring weekly donations for a year, sperm banks instruct men to refrain from sex for two days prior to donation or risk the possibility that their samples will fail to meet fertility standards. Being sick or stressed also has a negative effect on sperm count.<br /><br />"Even the doctors who were working with infertile couples were surprised when they learned just how demanding the process is for men," Almeling said. "Sperm donors basically have to schedule their sex lives for a year."<br /><br />Meanwhile, their female counterparts also have to refrain from sex, but their activities are restricted only for six weeks. However, the women have to commit to a degree of bodily invasiveness not experienced by men: a six-week regime of hormone therapy, which leads to serious complications in 1 to 2 percent of cases, and a single egg-extraction procedure that causes some discomfort and leads to serious complications in less than 1 out of 1,000 cases, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.<br /><br />Men and women weren't just compensated dramatically differently. They also experienced dramatically different "working" conditions. Almeling found that women were repeatedly reminded of their generosity, whereas men tended to be reminded that sperm donation was to be viewed like any other job.<br /><br />"Staff at egg agencies constantly thank women and encourage them to think about what a wonderful difference they're making in the lives of recipients," Almeling said. "The sperm bank staff is appreciative, but men aren't told how amazing they are and what a great gift they're giving. They're treated more like reproductive service workers. They come in. They clock in and out. Their sample is checked for quality. And they're only paid when they produce an acceptable sample."<br /><br />The medical community has justified compensation rates for egg donors by pointing out that egg extraction is more difficult and risky than extracting sperm and that the female body has a limited supply of eggs, while the male body replenishes sperm. But Almeling does not believe these biological differences fully explain this market. While an individual woman has fewer eggs than an individual man has sperm, women never run the risk of "running out" of eggs due to donating. Moreover, the huge oversupply of women willing to be donors means that eggs are not actually scarce for couples seeing to acquire them.<br /><br />Cultural norms of parenthood, which are perpetuated though marketing efforts, interact with these biological understandings to produce the differences in market prices, Almeling believes.<br /><br />"Both eggs and egg donors are more highly valued than sperm and sperm donors, where it is not just reproductive material but visions of middle-class, American femininity and masculinity and motherhood and fatherhood that are marketed and purchased," she said.<br /><br />Donor recruitment at the egg agencies and sperm banks appeared to reinforce these stereotypes, Almeling found. Egg agency advertisements tend to appeal to women's altruism, while men are informed of a job opportunity. The application process for donors also favors what Almeling called "gendered stereotypes of selfless motherhood and distant fatherhood." Although egg donors stood to be handsomely compensated, women who indicated there was a financial motive behind their participation were routinely rejected in favor of applicants who expressed more altruistic motives, such as the desire to "help" infertile couples. Sperm banks, meanwhile, were much less explicit about the need to appear altruistic.<br /><br />"While most egg donors will never meet their genetic children, women are expected to reproduce well-worn patters of 'naturally' caring, helpful femininity, guiltily hiding any interest that they might have in the promise of thousands of dollars," Almeling said. "This ruse is not demanded of sperm donors. Men, who are more likely to be contacted through the banks' identity release programs, often do not even consider that children will result from regular deposits at the sperm bank."<br /><br />In fact, one sperm donor was dumbstruck when he was informed that one of his contributions had resulted in conception.<br /><br />"I hadn't really thought about the fact there were going to be pregnancies," he said.<br /><br />The American Sociological Association, founded in 1905, is a non-profit membership association dedicated to serving sociologists in their work, advancing sociology as a science and profession, and promoting the contributions and use of sociology to society."</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-29412573126494932182007-05-28T08:43:00.000-05:002007-05-28T09:09:43.504-05:00THEIR CHILDOnce I met someone who told me her mother went to school with Elvis and they had a flirtation. The family story was that if things had gone a bit differently, "Elvis would have been my dad!" There are stories like these in most families. The other day, my father said to me, "If your mother hadn't had that miscarriage you would have an older brother."<br /><br />What we all know is that if there were different circumstances, we would not be here at all. If my parents had a child before me they might have decided not to have any more children. The timing would not have been exactly the same regardless, and a different egg and different sperm would have united to make a different person. I would simply not exist.<br /><br />But it's certainly true that in slightly different circumstances our families would all be configured differently. Jenny and Erin, my embryo recipients, found MiraclesWaiting.org by chance. They decided to look for donors despite their concerns that no one would be looking for a lesbian couple like them. Finding us and having the faith in themselves to be open and honest with us led to our donation of three embryos to them. With a 1 in 3 chance of success per embryo, we hope and believe that our donation will result in at least one baby for them to love.<br /><br />As we waited to discover if their dream would come true in the weeks after their transfer of one of those embryos, I had a sudden realization that took me aback.<br /><br />Their child could have been one of our children. Not in the sense that we wanted another child. Two was the right number for us, and we had achieved our goal. We do not want any more children, which is why we donated the embryos to this lesbian couple who, we knew, would face nothing but discrimination if they tried to adopt a child.<br /><br />What I mean by "their child could have been one of ours" is this: the reason we have our daughter is that the embryologist randomly selected two fertilized eggs AT CONCEPTION and froze the remaining three. There was no attempt to pick the "best" embryos because they were all just two-celled fertile eggs at that point, too small to grade for quality.<br /><br />When the embryologist met with us to confirm that we wanted two embryos fresh and three frozen, I told her "pick a girl". We already had a boy and wanted our last child to be of a different gender for the sake of variety. Of course I was joking -- the embryologist who can look at a two-celled pre-embryo and successfully "pick a girl" would be a very wealthy embryologist. But she had. She could just as easily have selected any of the other embryos, and that might be our child instead.<br /><br />Why did the embryologist choose the egg that became our daughter, and that second embryo which didn't implant? Maybe the embryo that stood out was the one in the middle. Perhaps she is left handed and that embryo was closest to her dominant hand. However she decided to use the two embryos she chose and not one of the other three, this was truly random luck.<br /><br />This is not a case of "Elvis could have been my father". There were five existing embryos, each a potential child. We got two of them and the recipients got three.<br /><br />If our recipients get one of those embryos to implant and grow into a baby, that child could just as easily have been picked for us by the embryologist. S/he could even have been our daughter's twin, if both embryos had implanted instead of just one. This was not an outcome we desired, since we only wanted two children and already had one. But it is an outcome which could have happened just as easily as what did happen.<br /><br />The recipients may not even get a child from our embryos. The odds are in their favor, but the interplay between embryo and womb that leads to pregnancy is the least-understood and hardest to control part of the entire IVF process.<br /><br />But while we waited to find out if our embryos' intended parents would become actual moms, what could have been was as interesting as what might be.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-2820605321448234612007-05-24T14:32:00.000-05:002007-05-24T14:44:04.514-05:00THE FIRST CYCLEAfter their embryo transfer, our recipients, Jenny and Erin, stayed in a hotel near the clinic. To give themselves the best chance of the procedure working, Erin was on bed rest for a couple of days until it was time to fly home.<br /><br />Now began the two week wait. Until the pregnancy test two weeks after the transfer, there is no indication whether or not a woman who has completed an embryo transfer is actually pregnant. This is a nail-bitingly stressful time. The intended mothers would be cataloguing each twinge, wondering if a bit of spotting was a sign that the embryo was implanting in the womb, or being rejected, and generally on pins and needles.<br /><br />Many women can't wait the full two weeks and use early home pregnancy tests to try and get an indication of whether or not the transfer worked. Jenny and Erin were no exception.<br /><br />The problem with these tests is they are not certain. It is hard to tell exactly when the developing early pregnancy might produce enough hormones to register on the test. In other cases, a "chemical pregnancy" produced by the drugs one takes to do the IVF cycle could indicate a pregnancy where none exists.<br /><br />With all of this in mind, I waited to hear what Jenny and Erin's early tests were revealing.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-76769027737688905852007-05-09T09:45:00.000-05:002007-05-09T09:55:04.362-05:00PROOF THAT GAYS PARENT BETTERLogic dictates that lesbian or gay male couples are better parents, on average, than straights. After all, gay couples are almost always parents by choice, not by accident. And they have to jump through so many legal, practical and societal hoops to have children that the process selects for those most dedicated to having kids.<br /><br />The Canadian government did a "study of studies". It reviewed all the research out there on gay families. It found that almost all the studies show that kids of gays do as well or better than children in straight families/<br /><br />Surprise: the new Conservative Canadian government tried to surpress the study. It's bad news, after all: gays are better parents than straights. Why must gay families continue to suffer at the hands of biased bigots? There is no reason to deny gay parents the rights we need to care for our children. There is every reason to give us equal rights. It's not just the morally right thing to do, it's scientifically proven!<br /><br /><blockquote>"SUMMARY: The study for Canada's Justice Department finds that kids raised by lesbian parents are just as socially competent as kids raised by straights.<br /><br />A Canadian study has found that same-sex parents are just as good, if not better, than opposite-sex parents.<br /><br />The study, released by the Canadian Justice Department, was commissioned in 2003 by its then-Liberal government. The study primarily focused on lesbian couples.<br /><br />The study, authored by Professor Paul Hastings at Concordia University, asserts that children raised by lesbian parents are equally as socially competent as children raised by heterosexual parents.<br /><br />"A few studies suggest that children with two lesbian mothers may have marginally better social competence than children in traditional nuclear families, even fewer studies show the opposite, and most studies fail to find any differences," says the 74-page study.<br /><br />Hastings, who only just gained permission to release the study, suggested that publication was restricted by the Conservative government that regained power in 2006, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.<br /><br />In December, the Conservatives tried to challenge the constitutional definition of marriage, but the efforts were defeated in the House of Commons.<br /><br />Same-sex marriage has been legal in Canada since 2005. "</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-63615050693621603252007-05-08T11:24:00.000-05:002007-05-08T14:35:04.802-05:00WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDRENWhen women gain the right to control their reproduction or sexuality, repressive societies get scared. The response may be that of Islamic theocracies, where the government sanctions killing or gang-raping women as punishment for their, or their family members' infidelity.<br /><br />In the United States, Christian theocrats seem to admire the Ayatollahs who dictate law and policy in countries like Iran. They are frightened to death of the fact that lesbians are creating healthy families without the participation of male parents.<br /><br />In Kansas, a male friend agreed to donate sperm to a woman who wanted to have children as a single parent. They signed no contract giving him any rights whatsoever. His donation was made in a medical clinic. After the woman's twins were born, the man decided he wanted joint custody!<br /><br />Below is my response to the article, entitled "What About the Children?"<br /><br /><blockquote>"What about the children? The children have the right to an intact family of the parent(s) who chose to have them, NOT the confusion and chaos of shared custody with someone who happens to share their genes but is not a member of their family. With your logic, all parents who give their kids up for adoption should share custody with the adoptive parents. That is utterly wrong.<br /><br />Infertile couples and their children created with the help of anonymous sperm donors have the legal right not to have a stranger interfere with their families.<br /><br />You are suggesting that a family with an infertile husband who chose a sperm donor be forced to endure 18 years of interference by the "real" father.<br /><br />Likewise, women who choose to have children without a male partner don't sign up for decades of "marriage" to a sperm donor either.<br /><br />Oh, you only care if the parents are women. If you hate lesbians that much, don't pretend your concern is that the children have a "dad". The children's parents are the couple who is raising them, not a stranger who signed away his legal rights.<br /><br />I donated my embryos left over from IVF to an infertile couple. My family does not expect the right to make decisions for those children or have legal visitation rights just because we helped another family have children. No donor has, or should have, that expectation. If the real parents who are raising the children wish to allow the donor and child to meet -- and most do -- that is their choice, not our right.<br /><br />Children know their families are "real" whether or not their parents had help cretaing them. Why don't you know that?"</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-58769995276241975032007-04-29T17:38:00.000-05:002007-04-29T17:48:30.015-05:00THE EMBRYO TRANSFERAfter our visit with our embryo recipients, Jenny and Erin, they headed back to their hotel. The embryo transfer was scheduled to occur within 24 hours. I'm sure they were nervous and excited.<br /><br />We didn't expect to hear from our recipients for a while after the transfer and we had no intention of bothering them, but after the procedure Jenny and Erin thoughtfully contacted us to let us know everything had gone well.<br /><br />They had chosen to stay in the hotel for another day after the embryo transfer. There is no hard evidence that this improves embryo transfer success rates, but it couldn't hurt.<br /><br />Jenny and Erin went home two days after their transfer. They would have blood work three days later, but not to find out if they were pregnant. That information would not be available until after the dreaded "Two Week Wait". More on that later.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-52479832626248861962007-04-22T03:56:00.000-05:002007-04-22T08:29:23.345-05:00WHAT ARE THE RECIPIENTS LIKE IN PERSON?Before we met our embryo recipients, we "knew" them from extensive emails, phone calls and some photos of them and their families. We thought we had a good idea of who they were.<br /><br />It was obvious that they were child-centered, caring women. They both have professional jobs. Their relationships with their families sounded strong. Jenny seemed to have a fun sense of humor. She wrote interesting emails. Erin sounded like the practical grounding force for the relationship. She looked glamorous in the photos they sent.<br /><br />In person, we gained a clearer sense of who these women truly were that we were trying to help to become parents. Jenny was much more motherly than she had seemed via email. She was obviously the planner, taking care of everyone and making sure everything was alright. Her personality was bubbly and warm.<br /><br />Erin had grown her hair much longer. She looked nice with long hair, but not as glamorous as with a trendy, short haircut. She seemed sportier than in her photos, but still very practical.<br /><br />As Southern women, both were very polite, especially when one of my relatives strongly suggested activities for them for the rest of their (brief) stay in our town. By "suggest" I mean "dictate".<br /><br />Our children took to Jenny and Erin immediately, even the little one, who was going through stranger anxiety at that time. Our older child tried to impress them with all sorts of gymnastics.<br /><br />It was obvious that we had made the right choice in selecting these women for the embryos. We all headed out for brunch.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-46136080659113428272007-04-20T11:28:00.000-05:002007-04-22T08:27:51.756-05:00MEETING THE RECIPIENTSWhen the recipients came to our town for their embryo transfer we were scared but excited that they had decided to meet us. We thought they might not want to add to their stress with a visit to our town. We left the decision up to them and they said yes. It seemed like a good idea for them to meet our children before their transfer. If the kids were bouncing off the walls the recipients might think twice before using our embryos!<br /><br />We had sent Jenny and Erin the train schedule and map instructions to find the train station. It is always hard to navigate in a new place and the recipients just missed the scheduled train. No matter. They called to say they were on their way.<br /><br />Soon the intercom from downstairs rang. Jenny and Erin were on their way up! We were going to meet our recipients after all...ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-8126212066125543582007-04-19T21:49:00.000-05:002007-04-19T21:58:25.368-05:00WHEN EGG DONATION IS A BAD IDEASometimes egg donation is an ill-thought-out concept. Can you spot the problems with the article below from Reuters Health?<br /><br /><blockquote>"Canada mom freezes eggs so daughter can have child<br /><br />Thu Apr 19, 2:35 PM ET<br /><br />TORONTO (Reuters) - A Montreal woman has frozen her eggs so they can be used by her seven-year-old daughter, who cannot have children because of a genetic condition.<br /><br />Doctors at McGill University Reproductive Centre in Montreal, which has pioneered a freezing program for cancer patients and those who want to delay childbearing, say the decision by 36-year-old Melanie Boivin is unprecedented in North America and raises ethical questions.<br /><br />If the girl chooses to become pregnant using her mother's eggs, she will be giving birth to her biological half-sister. Boivin will then become a mother and a grandmother.<br /><br />"She is donating her eggs to help her daughter to have children. It's mother's love," Seang Lin Tan, director of the McGill Reproductive Centre and a prominent expert on infertility treatments, said in an interview on Wednesday night.<br /><br />"It's like donating a kidney to your own child, nobody will have problem with that," he said.<br /><br />While there are about 60 cases of women freezing their eggs in North America, mother-to-daughter donation is the first, Tan said. The case has been reviewed and endorsed by the ethical committee of the McGill University Health Centre, he said.<br /><br />Tan said Boivin decided to donate her eggs after finding out that her daughter is sterile because she has Turner's syndrome, in which one of the two X chromosomes normally found in females is missing or incomplete.<br /><br />The most common characteristics of Turner's syndrome, which occurs in one out of 2,500 female births, include short stature and lack of ovarian development.<br /><br />"Parents are there to help (their) children, and if she would have needed anything else, an organ, a kidney, I would give it to her without hesitation," Boivin told the Globe and Mail newspaper.<br /><br />She has since declined to be interviewed, saying the discussion has caused some problems for her daughter.<br /><br />Boivin's eggs will be frozen for 20 to 25 years, using a freezing method called vitrification that was developed by Tan's team, and which has drastically increased the egg survival rate.<br /><br />The frozen eggs are stored in a protective device until they are ready for use. Pregnancy rates with vitrification eggs are almost the same as with fresh eggs, Tan said.<br /><br />It will be up to Boivin's daughter to decide whether she wants to use the frozen eggs, he said.<br /><br />"It takes time for people to get used to the idea," Tan said, adding that many people disapproved of test-tube baby technology 30 years ago."</blockquote><br /><br />This sounds like a very loving mother. The problem is, her daughter is sterile due to a GENETIC disease. Since it's on the X chromosome they may not know if it's a glitch on the mother's DNA or the father's.<br /><br />It doesn't make sense to me to pass along a serious genetic defect, then set up your disabled daughter to do the same thing.<br /><br />Egg donors should be screened as thoroughly as sperm donors. Are they?ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-58072637143979145322007-04-15T15:27:00.000-05:002007-04-15T15:34:30.218-05:00ADOPTING ACROSS CULTURESAs I have mentioned before, some adopted children appear to be a different race from their parents. Sensitive parents react to this by helping the child to embrace both her culture of origin and her family's ethnicity.<br /><br />Since my children are very fair-skinned and German-looking, I assume their genetic sibling(s) will appear to be the natural child(ren) of my embryo recipients. That's why I worry they will not understand that they come from a 6,000-year unbroken line of Jewish ancestors. I think my recipients are wonderful but the only way I could avoid this problem is if my recipients were of Asian or African descent! <br /><br /><blockquote>" A Chinese Orphan's Journey To a Jewish Rite of Passage<br /><br />By ANDY NEWMAN; MICHAEL LUO CONTRIBUTED REPORTING.<br />Published: March 8, 2007<br /><br />Of the 613 laws in the Torah, the one that appears most often is the directive to welcome strangers. The girl once known as Fu Qian has been thinking about that a lot lately.<br /><br />Three weeks ago, she stood at the altar of her synagogue on the Upper West Side and gave a speech about it.<br /><br />Fu Qian, renamed Cecelia Nealon-Shapiro at 3 months, was one of the first Chinese children -- most of them girls -- taken in by American families after China opened its doors to international adoption in the early 1990s. Now, at 13, she is one of the first to complete the rite of passage into Jewish womanhood known as bat mitzvah.<br /><br />She will not be the last. Across the country, many Jewish girls like her will be studying their Torah portions, struggling to master the plaintive singsong of Hebrew liturgy and trying to decide whether to wear Ann Taylor or a traditional Chinese outfit to the after-party.<br /><br />There are plenty of American Jews, of course, who do not ''look Jewish.'' And grappling with identity is something all adopted children do, not just Chinese Jews.<br /><br />But seldom is the juxtaposition of homeland and new home, of faith and background, so stark. And nothing brings out the contrasts like a bat mitzvah, as formal a declaration of identity as any 13-year-old can be called upon to make. The contradictions show up in ways both playful -- yin-and-yang yarmulkes, kiddush cups disguised as papier-mâché dragons, kosher lo mein and veal ribs at the buffet -- and profound.<br /><br />Yet for Cece, as everyone calls Cecelia, and for many of the girls like her, the odd thing about the whole experience is that it's not much odder than it is for any 13-year-old.<br /><br />''I knew that when I came to this age I was going to have to do it, so it was sort of natural,'' she said a few days before the ceremony at Congregation Rodeph Sholom, a Reform synagogue on West 83rd Street where she has been a familiar face since her days in the Little Twos program. Besides, she said with a shrug, ''Most of my Chinese friends are Jewish.''<br /><br />As Zoe Kress, an adoptee in Mt. Laurel, N.J., said about her approaching bat mitzvah: ''Being Chinese and Jewish is normal for me. Thinking about being Chinese and Jewish is a little strange.''<br /><br />Olivia Rauss, a girl in Massachusetts who celebrated her bat mitzvah last fall on a day when the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot coincided with the Chinese autumn moon festival, said she saw no tension between the two facets of her identity either.<br /><br />''Judaism is a religion, Chinese is my heritage and somewhat my culture, and I'm looking at them in a different way,'' she said. ''I don't feel like they conflict with each other at all.''<br /><br />Cece was born on Jan. 29, 1994, in Jiangxi Province in southeastern China. She was abandoned to an orphanage because of China's one-child rule, and adopted by a lesbian couple, Mary Nealon and Vivian Shapiro. (The couple later adopted another Chinese girl, Gabie, now 5.) Cece has been drawing double-takes for a while, like when she used to ride on Ms. Shapiro's lap on a packed crosstown bus and would burst into the Passover standard ''Dayenu.''<br /><br />Ms. Shapiro, an advertising buyer, was brought up by atheistic Jews; Ms. Nealon, a school nurse, was raised a Roman Catholic. But after they met, they were drawn to Judaism and decided to give Cece a relatively traditional upbringing.<br /><br />''That was my hope when I started her in day school,'' Ms. Nealon said, ''that when she got up on the bimah'' -- the lectern where the bat mitzvah girl reads from the Torah -- ''she would feel like she had the right to be there.''<br /><br />The countdown to the big day was the typical blur of lessons and studying, sit-downs with cantors and tutors, caterers and party planners. There was a thick dossier of Jewish history to master -- history that Cece confessed did not feel like hers. ''I just really try to learn it,'' she said. ''I don't try to think of whose history it is.''<br /><br />And, of course, there was shopping to be done.<br /><br />''In my fantasy,'' Ms. Nealon said, ''we'd take her to Chinatown and have this incredibly beautiful Westernized Chinese dress made.''<br /><br />But Ms. Shapiro said: ''She wanted no part of it. For her, this has nothing to do with being Chinese.'' "</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-54056732081330276712007-04-13T20:10:00.000-05:002007-04-13T20:23:20.042-05:00EGGS GET FREEZER BURNOne mis-conception (ha ha) that I have noticed about egg retrieval during IVF is the idea that what is frozen afterwards are eggs. Typically, unfertilized eggs are never frozen unless the woman giving the eggs believes she will have a male partner in the future.<br /><br />The reason that eggs are rarely frozen unless fertilized is that they do not thaw well. The successful thaw rate for fertilized eggs (pre-embryos) is up to 95%, depending on the skill of the embryologist who originally freezes it. Unfertilized eggs which have been frozen rarely become babies when later thawed and fertilized.<br /><br />It is so rare that a frozen, unfertilized egg can become a baby that the total number of children born from this method worldwide is 200. Compare this to the three MILLION babies born through IVF in the 25 years since the method was first used.<br /><br />Now a baby has been born from an egg which was frozen, then thawed and fertilized by sperm which had also been frozen. The patient who had her baby this way is Adrienne Domasin. She received free IVF treatment in exchange for being part of the study attempting to achieve a pregnancy from frozen eggs and frozen sperm.<br /><br /><blockquote>"Egg freezing traditionally has been reserved for women who suffered from illnesses that might leave them infertile and has a low success rate. But there has been recent demand for the procedure by women in their 30s who want to have children in the future but are afraid they will be too old to conceive the traditional way, said Dr. Jane Frederick, who oversaw Domasin's fertility treatment.<br /><br />The low viability of frozen eggs is due, in part, to ice crystals that can damage the egg's structure, though freezing sperm has been done for decades, said Richard Paulson, a professor of reproductive medicine at USC.<br /><br />There have been about 200 documented births from frozen eggs worldwide, Paulson said. But he had not heard of other cases of frozen egg/frozen sperm conceptions. The Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics reported one case last year in Australia."</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-38870419504443898532007-04-09T08:20:00.000-05:002007-04-09T08:40:27.557-05:00MEETING THE RECIPIENTSWith the embryo growing rapidly and the tests showing Erin's body was ready to receive it, everything was a "go" for Jenny and Erin's embryo transfer. They had planned to fly to our fertility clinic two days before the transfer and to stay in the area two days after. That way, Erin could be on bed rest for 48 hours after the transfer. Some doctors feel this increases the chances for a pregnancy.<br /><br />The day before the procedure, Jenny and Erin planned to visit us. Driving in a new city can be scary. Instead of trying to navigate with their rental car I sent Jenny and Erin a route via suburban commuter train. They would take an express train from the clinic area to our city, which is about 90 miles away.<br /><br />My wife Sonia, based on her experiences as an adoptee and a known egg donor, was pushing for more openness with the recipients than my instincts dictated. We agreed to have lunch with Jenny and Erin. Sonia suggested we meet them at our home.<br /><br />We made a date and provided instructions to our address. Within a few days we would meet our recipients.ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-28231678796115612282007-04-04T08:27:00.000-05:002007-04-04T07:42:19.883-05:00THE EMBRYO GROWSThe embryologist had good news for Jenny and Erin every day. The embryo continued to grow strongly, dividing rapidly until, just before the transfer it reached seven cells in size.<br /><br />Seven cells is huge for a three-day embryo. We were surprised Jenny and Erin's embryo had grown so large. All of our past embryos but one had only reached the four cell size. The only one which had grown larger was only five cells at day three.<br /><br />Large embryos are much more likely to create a successful pregnancy. With four-celled embryos we only had a one in six chance of having a baby. Yet both of our children resulted from four-cell embryos and pregnancy occurred on our first try during both of our embryo transfer cycles.<br /><br />Things were looking good for Jenny and Erin, but there was a problem...ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625607845739845917.post-22556718387927591702007-03-30T11:47:00.000-05:002007-03-30T11:50:11.733-05:00RESEARCH SHOW PARENTS SHOULD TELL KIDS ABOUT DONORS<blockquote>"NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Parents of children conceived with donor eggs or sperm don't regret disclosing this fact to their child, and almost all of the parents surveyed believed it was important that the child be told, California researchers report.<br /><br />But parents do wish they had more support with the process, Dr. Robert D. Nachtigall of the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues found. "If there is indeed a shift toward greater openness in parents using third-party reproduction techniques, there will be an increasing need for support services to assist parents in this process not only initially, but also continuing long after the children are born," Nachtigall and his team write in the journal Fertility and Sterility.<br /><br />The researchers interviewed 141 couples, 62 of whom had conceived using donor sperm and 79 of whom had used donor eggs. Twenty percent of couples who used donor insemination had disclosed this fact to their children, 45 percent planned to disclose, 16 percent didn't plan to disclose, and 7 percent were undecided.<br /><br />Among those who conceived with donor eggs, 23 percent had disclosed this to their child, 58 percent planned to do so, 10 percent didn't plan to disclose, and 9 percent had not decided.<br /><br />Overall, 32 percent of parents using donor egg or sperm had disclosed to their children, while 45 percent planned to do so.<br /><br />Parents who disclosed or planned to do so typically subscribed to one of two strategies for revealing this information, Nachtigall and his colleagues found: the "seed-planting strategy," in which they began talking to the child about being conceived with donor egg or sperm very early on, and the "right-time" approach, in which they waited until they felt the child would fully understand the process.<br /><br />On average, "seed planters" started talking to their children about their conception when they were 3 to 4 years old. The "right time" group had planned to begin the discussion with their children when they were 10 to 12 years old, but typically told their children when they were 6 or 7.<br /><br />Parents using the "seed-planting" strategy tended to be more at ease with their decision and less apprehensive, the researchers found. They believed this approach would give children the sense of "always knowing" that they were conceived with donor egg or sperm, making it "no big deal."<br /><br />Parents using the "right-time" approach typically felt they could build a strong relationship with their children before having to disclose the information, when the child would be mature enough to handle and understand it.<br /><br />"Most parents expressed frustration with the perceived lack of comfortable language and 'scripts' available to discuss donor conception with their children, especially as they struggled to find unambiguous terminology with which to refer to the donor," the researchers note.<br /><br />Nevertheless, among parents who had disclosed to their children, none reported regret and many reported relief, the researchers found. Responses from children were, in most cases, positive or neutral.<br /><br />SOURCE: Fertility and Sterility, March 2007."</blockquote>ivf2womenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10889476079330811643noreply@blogger.com0