Most Egg Donors Feel Good About Donation, Open to Meeting Kids, Survey Shows

DENVER — Most oocyte donors reported feeling positive about donation, and most are open to future contact with those children, according to a retrospective survey study.

Among 234 donors, 88.3% said they continued to feel “happy/proud/good” about their donation, reported Sarah Holley, PhD, of the University of California San Francisco, during a poster presentation at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting.

“A lot of the work in this area has been aimed at understanding and supporting the experiences of the intended parents or donor-conceived children,” Holley noted, adding that far less is known about the experiences of donors themselves. Oocyte donation is used in 10.4% of in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles in the U.S.

Nearly three-quarters (73.6%) of donors said they were curious about children born from their donation, but only 10.3% thought about it often. Close to half (46.8%) expressed a desire to meet with children born from their donation; 62.2% said they would allow the clinic to release their identity upon request to the child once he or she reached adulthood, 21.7% said they were uncertain about sharing their identity, and 16.1% said they wouldn’t be willing to disclose their identity.

Meanwhile, 76% of donors said they’d be willing to communicate via phone or email, and 68% said they’d be willing to meet the child. Only 11.5% of donors said they were not open to the various forms of future contact.

Notably, though most donors did not report concerns about whether being a donor harmed their health or future fertility, a notable 23.6% said they did have concerns.

Holley said that a common question she gets from potential donors is how it might affect them in the future, which indicates “a clear need to better understand long-term psychosocial impacts of oocyte donation, so that potential donors can really understand what they might sign up for and so that we can identify ways to best support donors — [and] not just at the time of donation.”

Thus, she and her team sought to characterize oocyte donors’ thoughts and feelings about being a donor and potential contact with donor children, as well as any concerns they had about the health impacts of donating.

Holley said that these findings are important because “donors historically donated with presumption of anonymity” and the donation landscape is changing. Some donors who say they’re open to future contact at the time of their donation are legally bound to that commitment.

Rachel Weinerman, MD, an ob/gyn and reproductive endocrinologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who was not involved in the research, told MedPage Today that donor anonymity is an outdated concept.

“We’ve known for a few years already that there is no such thing as an anonymous egg donor,” she said, noting that in her practice, for example, they now use the term “de-identified donor.”

Weinerman said she tells potential egg donors and intended parents that “there’s really no such thing as anonymity in 2024 let alone in 2044, which is when this child hopefully will come of age and be a legal adult” and that “we are only counseling you based on 2024 knowledge, and given the pace of genetic research and technological advances, I really cannot predict what things are going to look like 20 years from now.”

She added that “donors who are not willing to be contacted should reconsider being donors, because it’s not really possible to be totally anonymous,” especially in the age of easily accessible DNA testing.

For this study, Holley and colleagues surveyed non-directed oocyte donors who had already completed at least one donation cycle for the in-house egg donor program of two participating San Francisco area clinics from 2009 through 2021. After a literature review and soliciting qualitative interviews with donors, the team drafted a survey, which was then reviewed by an expert panel of reproductive endocrinologists and mental health specialists.

The revised finalized survey involved 12 items that assessed donors’ thoughts and feelings about their donation and their interest and willingness for future contact. Mean age of participants was 34.5, mean number of donation cycles was 2.8, and mean number of years since last donation was 7.4.

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