The Egg Donation Process

You complete our donor application — health history, family history, lifestyle, photos, and a bit about who you are. Profiles matter to intended parents: the essay questions where your personality shows through are often what makes a family choose you.

A coordinator reviews your application against the core requirements and calls you, usually within a business day.

Your profile becomes visible to intended parents (within your chosen anonymity level). When a family selects you, you confirm the match — it is always mutual — and legal agreements are completed. Your compensation terms are locked in writing before any medication touches your body.

Timing here varies: some donors match within days, most within weeks.

Your cycle is synchronized with the recipient’s (or with a freezing schedule), then stimulation begins: 

• Daily self-injections for roughly 10–14 days — small, shallow needles into the abdomen. The clinic nurses teach you in person, and yes, needle-phobic women do this every day. By day three, most donors report it’s a non-event. 

• Monitoring visits — about 5–8 quick morning appointments (ultrasound + blood draw) so the physician can watch your follicles grow and tune your doses. 

• How you’ll feel — most donors feel normal, then bloated and “full” in the final days as follicles mature. Strenuous exercise pauses for a couple of weeks. Work and school continue for nearly everyone. 

• Trigger shot — when your follicles are ready, one final injection precisely timed about 36 hours before retrieval. 

You arrive at the clinic, receive light IV sedation, and sleep through the entire procedure — no incisions, no scalpels, no stitches. The physician retrieves the eggs with an ultrasound-guided needle, and you wake up in recovery about half an hour later.

Someone drives you home. You rest that day — couch, snacks, someone else’s problems on Netflix — and most donors resume normal life within a day or two, with a short list of temporary precautions the clinic reviews with you. Mild cramping and bloating for a few days is normal; your care team remains a phone call away, and cycle-related complication insurance has been arranged for you throughout.

Your full compensation is released after retrieval per your agreement — regardless of what happens in the laboratory afterward. Your part is complete and fully honored. 

Then, three doors: 

1. Donate again. Proven donors are in high demand and typically earn more per cycle (ASRM guidance caps lifetime donations at six cycles). 

1. Rest and reflect. Donation is complete in itself — many donors do one cycle and carry the meaning of it forever. 

1. A bigger journey, later. If and when you’ve had children of your own, the surrogacy program opens to you — ages 21–39, base compensation $50,000–$65,000, and a very different kind of journey. Many of our surrogates began exactly where you are now. See the side-by-side comparison.