How to Establish Your Criteria for Finding an Egg Donor
You’ve made the transition to egg donation and are aware that you will need to select a donor to move forward on the journey to parenthood. In all cases in which a donor is needed (infertility, LGBTQ families, and single parents), you’ll need to establish the criteria for finding an egg donor.
Each growing family’s idea of the perfect egg donor will be different, and it’s understandable that you may have priorities before the search process even starts. This being said, we do kindly recommend that prospective parents consider the following during their search:
- The stricter your criteria, the smaller the selection of egg donors. If you have seven to 10 qualities that absolutely must be present in an egg donor before you’ve even begun searching a donor database, you may find that the pool of donors to choose from is rather small. This is especially true if those qualities relate strictly to race, heritage, and/or education. Some prospective parents may initially seek a donor with a specific hair color, eye color, race, height, heritage – and who also attended an Ivy League school. You can understand why these criteria may be challenging to match, even from a broad donor database like The Donor Source.
- To combat this, we ask that you consider fewer high-priority criteria when kicking off the donor search process. By no means do you need to ignore qualities you believe to be important, but if it’s possible to remove a few things that you originally believed were 100% necessary, the search process will yield more results for your consideration. You may even end up preferring a donor you wouldn’t have found with more selective criteria.
- Your donor can look like you, but she doesn’t have to. For a long time, the physical appearance of an egg donor was the only factor that mattered to many prospective parents. Of course, this desire is easy to understand, and many growing families still prefer donors with similar physical qualities to their own. However, because donor profiles have expanded so much in recent years as modern family building has evolved, more parents are considering other factors with equal weight to a donor’s hair and eye color. Now donors’ education, hobbies, career, etc., are often taken into account. This has the added benefit of opening up overall criteria (as noted above).
The decision is yours, and we’re always happy to help.
Ultimately, the qualities that make up your ideal egg donor are up to you and your partner. We are confident that our agency can assist with matching you with the right donor for your family-building needs. Learn more about choosing an egg donor here.
