Recipient FAQ's

An egg donor is a healthy young woman between the ages of 19-32 who donates her eggs to a recipient who can’t have a child without donor eggs. Following the removal of the eggs from the egg donor the eggs are fertilised with the recipient’s male partners sperm or with donor sperm. The resulting embryo’s are placed in the recipients womb. This process gives her the opportunity to become pregnant and have the family she has been dreaming about.

Many of us at Grace Donors have had personal experience in egg donation, some as donors, some as recipients, or even both!
We would like to make the process of choosing an egg donor as easy and enjoyable as possible by offering you the highest quality of service and the best resources. We are extremely proud of the level of service we provide and can guarantee that you will receive the support and care that you so rightly deserve.

Grace Egg Donors works with some of the top clinics, and we are happy to guide you with our experience of the clinics we use.

Your chosen clinic will ask you to complete a full medical questionnaire with all your most recent test results. Please refer to our Grace Egg Donors Welcome Pack which provides you with a list of the tests required.

That is one of the best things about our donor program – there is no waiting list. The wait is only as long as it takes for you to find a donor who meets all your requirements.

Please note that with all our donations no identifying information of either recipient or donor will be made known. Our donor profiles are quite extensive ensuring you get enough information to help you make the choice that is right for you. To assist you with making the right choice, you are welcome to send us recent photos of yourself and we will guide you in making a choice that is right for you.

That is impossible to predict as each donor will respond individually to the stimulation medication and the same donor might respond differently each time she donates. We can tell you that the clinics follow best practices to ensure that an optimum number of excellent quality eggs are retrieved (the aim is quality not quantity) and more importantly, so that the health and wellbeing of the donor is never compromised. The average number of eggs retrieved is 12.

One or Two (depending on what your clinic has advised).

They belong to you. They will be frozen using the latest / best freezing technique. The clinics get excellent success rates with their FETs.

Three months. We don’t hold donors for longer than three months unless there are exceptional circumstances.

Egg donation is done for altruistic reasons – no one is allowed to ‘sell’ their eggs. The donor compensation amount paid to donors on completion of their donation, is included in Appendix A (Cost structure for Donor IVF) in the Grace Egg Donors Welcome Pack.

The donors do not donate for the financial reward. They donate for a variety of reasons, but mostly it is about them wanting to do something kind and selfless for someone else, to make a difference.

Donors are thoroughly pre-screened by the Grace Donors Team ensuring that they have met the age and BMI criteria and that they do not have any pre-existing conditions that would disqualify them including medication they are taking as well as ensuring that there are no disqualifying family history conditions that fall outside of the guidelines. Once selected, the donor will undergo both counselling and medical assessments at your chosen clinic. The counselling has three main purposes: (1) that the donor is fully aware of what is involved in donating her eggs and that she understands all the implications and risks involved, (2) that she is mentally healthy to donate, and (3) that there are no psychological disorders that would disqualify her from donating.  The medical assessment, which involves blood tests and an ultrasound, must be repeated each time the donor donates to ensure that the results are current.

While some of the information can be verified, we rely on the donor’s integrity, to be honest. Because there is no financial incentive to donate, the donors also have no incentive to lie about any of their information.

We provide the donor’s details and your details to your chosen fertility clinic. The doctors will specifically check that the donor who is matched to you is the same donor you have chosen.

Short answer: Up to 70% of the time it does work, the first time. But it doesn’t work the first time every time. You might need to go back to your clinic and do a FET or try again. If you do try again with a different donor, we will give you a further discount on our rate. We hope you are one of the lucky 70% for whom it works the first time.