Egg Donation - Not an easy decision
There Is No Me Without You
The day before, a catheter was guided by ultrasound through Carly's cervix, and eggs, 16 of them, were extracted from her follicles, made artificially mature by fertility hormones. These eggs were meant for me — I had purchased them. She was going to be the genetic mother of my child.
I was 43 when I reached the painful but inescapable conclusion that I wasn't going to be able to give birth to another child. My husband and I had a six-year-old son and had been trying for several years to add to our family, despite the fact that I'd had a terrifying emergency cesarean the first time around and several doctors had urged us to use a surrogate rather than risk my health or a future baby's. By the time we agreed to try IVF, the likelihood of success (referred to in the fertility world as the "take home baby rate") for a woman my age using her own eggs was less than 5 percent.
We're not going to do anything crazy, my husband and I kept reminding each other. We're not desperate, we already have a wonderful kid. We thought about people we knew who had spent tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in an unsuccessful quest for a child. We knew couples whose marriages had been wrecked by the physical, emotional, and financial strain of multiple IVF cycles. But each insemination, each near-miss made us feel as if there was an empty chair at our table. We had considered adoption, but ultimately our desire for our son to have a biological connection to his sibling was simply too great. And so, we tentatively began to explore egg donation and surrogacy.
In recent years, gestational surrogacy with an egg donor — in which an egg is taken from a donor, fertilized, then implanted as an embryo in the uterus of another woman, who serves as the surrogate for the woman who can't conceive — has virtually replaced traditional surrogacy, in which the surrogate uses her own eggs and is simply artificially inseminated. The beginnings of this shift can be dated to 1986, when a New Jersey couple, William and Elizabeth Stern, paid Mary Beth Whitehead $10,000 (plus $5,000 in expenses) to bear a child for them. Whitehead had a change of heart after giving birth to Baby M, and though the court eventually awarded custody to the Sterns, it decreed that a relationship with Whitehead was "in the best interests of the child," and she was granted visitation rights. Splitting up the reproductive work — such that one woman contributes the egg, another the womb — is the best way to avoid this nightmare.
Full article: http://www.elle.com/featurefullstory/10235/there-is-no-me-without-you.html
TODAY'S BOOK SUGGESTION:
My Baby Chase: Our Roller Coaster Ride from Infertility to Parenthoodby Gilda Dangot Simpkin
-- This is the heart-wrenching tale of our convoluted 10-year quest to have a family, from the serious, and sometimes hilarious side of fertility treatments, through two harrowing international adoptions. Our journey is filled with so many cliff hangers it reads more like a suspense tale than reality.
As you come along for our wild ride you will be clutching this book praying we don't get derailed again.
Our story of determination and tenacity will give hope to anyone facing a difficult life journey.
Let my story motivate you to attain your dreams!
Paperback: 188 pagesClick to order/for more info: My Baby Chase
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