When embarking on the path of surrogacy we had to make some decisions right off the start, one of these major decisions was selecting who we wanted as our egg donor.
There are a few different ways a person can chose to do this, and ultimately any way you chose has to be the right reason for you.
Some people do ask people they know, or close friends or family. Daniel and I did think about this for a quick minute, but for us it wasn’t an easy topic to ask people. Although many people did offer to help, I don’t think people fully understood what that meant. This is a huge commitment for people, and we just didn’t feel comfortable in asking anyone we knew. For us the decision for an anonymous donor worked best for our needs.
The next step most people choose would be to go online and look at donor profiles. There are several agencies available online depending on what you are looking for in a donor. You can pick skin color, eye color, nationality and IQ. Anything really that is of any importance to someone looking for their ultimate choice in what their child could look like. For us most of these agencies were out of the United States and most egg donations come at a large cost to purchase and then the costs of having the egg donor fly out to Panama to do a fresh harvest and coordinate each step with us being down there at the same time.
There was another option for us that seemed to fit best with us. The hospital we are using in Panama had women who were on an egg donor list that they use for just these purposes. Our doctor Sindy send up some profiles to look at and we were amazed on how beautiful these women were and for us the choice was easy. We weren’t really sure what to expect before seeing the profiles but once we saw it was easy for us to feel comfortable with choosing one of these women from Panama and that is how this process started for us. Another good reason for choosing the local egg donors was that if we needed to have one of them come back in for a second round of harvesting they were already close by.
We never met any of the egg donors, this process is completely anonymous. The only thing we have is a profile with a picture, along with a questionnaire that the donor fills out on why she is donating, and some medical information with test results making sure she is healthy and fit to donate.
Each step has been complicated, and each step completed just adds more steps in the entire process. What to us seemed like an unimaginable goal we set for ourselves has become all too normal and familiar but in the end it will be well worth it to bring our baby home and everything we went through initially will be nothing but a distant memory.
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