Who might need donor eggs for Surrogacy treatment?

For patients using fresh donor eggs in their treatment, the cycles of you (or your surrogate) and your donor are synchronised using medication. This ensures that the womb lining of the woman receiving the eggs is prepared to receive an embryo at the same time as a donor’s mature eggs are collected and fertilised. After the donor’s eggs have been collected, our embryologists will fertilise the mature eggs using IVF or ICSI treatment with a specially-prepared sample of sperm that has either been provided on the day or which has been frozen in advance if your partner is unable to attend or if you are using donor sperm.

As frozen eggs have already been collected, we would simply need to gently warm the eggs at your convenience and fertilise them using ICSI, ready for embryo transfer. This embryo transfer can even be done with your natural cycle. For this reason, fertility treatment with frozen donor eggs can offer patients more flexibility, reassurance, and certainty in their treatment, as there is no risk of complications with your donor, such as their stimulation not going to plan.

Once your embryos have been created, your treatment will follow the usual IVF pathway. You (or your surrogate) will prepare your womb lining for embryo transfer by taking medications, and we’ll check that everything is ready for transfer through ultrasound monitoring.

Our embryologists will keep a close eye on your embryos as they are developing in our specialist laboratory, and then will select the best embryo for transfer using their extensive experience and, if you choose, our unique time-lapse imaging embryo selection model, CareMaps-AI.

If the lining responds to medication as expected, your Care clinical team will carefully replace this embryo back into the womb through embryo transfer. We’ll then ask you or your surrogate to take the hormone progesterone during the ‘two week wait’ before your first pregnancy test, as this helps to support embryo implantation.

Between 14 and 15 days after your embryo transfer, we will ask you to take a pregnancy test, and will later confirm the result of the pregnancy test with an ultrasound scan. If your pregnancy test is negative, we will encourage you to take as much time as you need and can support you with counselling. When you feel ready, we will organise a follow up appointment with your Care consultant to discuss the next steps. If we confirm a foetal heartbeat, we will discharge you into the care of your GP

We understand that there is a lot to consider when thinking of fertility treatment with donor eggs, and we are here to support you with all the information, advice and empathy that you need to feel confident in your treatment. Your local Donation Team will always be there to answer your questions, but there are also many other people to talk to at Care. You can also read about or speak to other people going through Surrogacy treatment our forum.