How Does Gender Selection Work?
Not all parents find joy in the surprise of finding out a baby’s gender at an ultrasound, a gender reveal party, or the time of delivery. It’s possible to select the gender of your baby. Here’s how it works.
About 15% of couples in the United States experience infertility when trying to start or grow their family. The good news is that with all the assisted reproductive technology options available, the chances are good that you’ll be able to go on to have a healthy baby.
Some of those assisted reproductive technologies include:
If those procedures don’t work, or you have a condition that makes it unlikely that they are viable options, you may consider using egg donation.
Our fertility specialists at California Center for Reproductive Health are happy to offer egg donation to couples who have infertility issues that are not resolved by other fertility procedures and services.
A woman who is having trouble conceiving a baby, usually because of her age or diminished egg quantity or quality, may consider using another woman’s eggs to help get pregnant.
The egg donor, usually a young, healthy woman, undergoes a treatment similar to IVF, but instead of using the eggs retrieved during the process for herself, she donates them to a couple struggling with infertility.
Those eggs are fertilized with the male partner’s sperm, and the resulting embryos are implanted into the intended mom's uterus.
As more and more women put off having families until later in life because of their careers and other reasons, more couples are turning to egg donation as a way to have children. One study found that the number of women using donated eggs increased from close to 11,000 in 2000 to over 18,000 in 2010.
Women usually turn to using donor eggs for the following reasons:
For starters, if you go the egg donation route, you can expect a high success rate. In fact, egg donation has the highest success rate of all assisted reproductive technologies.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, egg donation in 2012 had a success rate of over 55%. And the most recent success rates for California Center for Reproductive Health far exceed the national average at 65%. Compare that with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technologies’ 2015 annual summary, which reported a 3.9% IVF success rate for women over 42 and a 12.6% one for women ages 41-42.
The process of egg donation has multiple steps. To begin, you must decide to undergo the journey of egg donation and then find a suitable egg donor. Once the donor is chosen, she goes through extensive physical, psychological, and genetic testing to ensure that she is a good and suitable match both physically and mentally to serve as an egg donor.
At California Center for Reproductive Health, our egg donation coordinator helps you with the next steps in the process, which include:
The egg donation journey may be a difficult and complex one, but it’s also a rewarding one.
