Medically reviewed by Norbert Gleicher, MD, FACOG, FACS - Written by CHR Staff - Updated on Dec 12, 2020
Interested in Donating Your Eggs? Work with Our Fertility Center
The Center of Human Reproduction is a world-renowned fertility center providing fertility care and advanced infertility treatment for women and couples who are unable to conceive.
Egg donation is one of the fertility services that we offer our patients. CHR is one of the last-remaining IVF centers in the United States that maintain our own pool of egg donors, in order to offer the highest quality of care to both our patients and donors. In our egg donor program, we work with young women (donors) and fertility patients (recipients) to realize their dreams of having a baby through egg donor IVF (in vitro fertilization) and sometimes through surrogacy (gestational carrier).
When you donate your eggs at CHR, you will be matched with a recipient couple or individual who have been struggling with infertility for a long time. Our patients are unable to conceive with their own eggs due to menopause, low ovarian reserve or another infertility condition, and in most cases, they have tried other fertility treatments many times. This is where you can help.
Aside from the psychological reward of helping others, egg donation in New York City has a distinct advantage for donors: A higher compensation. CHR’s program offers up to $14,000 to donors, depending on their qualification and the number of eggs produced in a cycle. Other fertility institutes and donor agencies in the city can come close, while donating in other parts of the United States earns you around $8,000 per cycle, on average.
How to Become an Egg Donor in NYC
The first step to becoming an egg donor in our egg donation program is to fill out our application. Our application process is selective, but in general favors New York City egg donors. Women from other parts of New York State and beyond will be considered if they have special talents or unique traits and can come to NYC easily for egg retrieval.
The next step in the screening process is an interview with one of our clinical coordinators, where you’ll go over your personal medical history, as well as your family’s background. donors who pass that stage will be invited to an interview with one of our physicians, who will ultimately determine your eligibility based on the interview, a physical exam, blood tests, medical and family history, genetic testing, and psychological evaluation. Only 4-5% of egg donor applicants pass the steps and eventually become eligible for the donor process. Your profile will be posted to our egg donor database, where a recipient will be able to select you as their egg donor of choice.
We prefer to work with donors who are 21 years of age or older, so we often work with seniors at NYU, Columbia University, Hunter College (which is just a block away from CHR) and other universities in New York City, as well as university graduates, graduate students, and other New York women who are 21 to 29 years old.
Egg Donation Couldn’t Be Easier for Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, the Bronx, and Metro Area Women
The Center for Human Reproduction accepts egg donors from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx, as well as Long Island, Westchester and other areas in the NYC Metropolitan Area. While women from other parts of the United States may be considered because of unique talents or traits, NYC donors have an advantage in the application process, and donation logistics are much easier for women within an hour or so from CHR.
When you donate your eggs at the Center for Human Reproduction, you will be receiving all your donation cycle care in one place, with the dedicated team at our world-class fertility center. (Long-distance donors will have their monitoring visits at a local IVF center under our clinical team’s guidance and travel to NYC for egg retrieval.) Our clinical team treats donors just like our other patients, with respect and utmost level of clinical care. We are located at 69th Street and Madison Avenue, easily accessible via public transportation from anywhere in the NYC area.
Egg Donation Process for New York-Based Donors
Working with our fertility center is different from donating your eggs at an egg bank. Instead of donating for egg freezing where your frozen eggs are stored in a freezer at the egg bank, you are directly matched with a recipient couple or individual to donate donor eggs “fresh.” In a fresh egg donation cycle, you will take fertility medications to help your ovaries produce multiple mature eggs for your egg retrieval. Your donation cycle will be aligned to that of the recipient’s, so that the recipient who will receive the fertilized embryo can have an embryo transfer just a few days after the eggs are retrieved from your ovaries.
CHR also has a frozen donor egg program (called EcoDEP), designed to be more affordable to recipients. If you donate to this program, your donation cycle will be more or less the same as a fresh cycle, except that your eggs will be immediately frozen, instead of being fertilized to form embryos for a specific recipient for a fresh transfer.
In either case, the egg donation cycle is typically three to four weeks long. During this time, you will need to self-administer the fertility medications and come to our fertility institute for several appointments per week so our clinical team can monitor your progress via blood tests and ultrasound. The donor cycle concludes with your egg retrieval appointment and a follow-up visit afterward to make sure you are on track for normal recovery. Fertility medications may cause some side effects, such as bloating and rarely, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS). This is why we monitor you closely and see you for a final, post-retrieval follow-up appointment.
In accordance with American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) guidelines, we allow women to donate eggs with us no more than six times.1
Read more about each step of the egg donation process on our process page.
Sources
- American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Repetitive oocyte donation: a committee opinion. Fertil Steril. 2020. June; 113(6). Link. Accessed November 13, 2020.
Apply for Our Egg Donation Program
Norbert Gleicher, MD, FACOG, FACS
Norbert Gleicher, MD, leads CHR’s clinical and research efforts as Medical Director and Chief Scientist. A world-renowned specialist in reproductive endocrinology, Dr. Gleicher has published hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and lectured globally while keeping an active clinical career focused on ovarian aging, immunological issues and other difficult cases of infertility.