In most countries other than the US and UK, the law requires such donors to remain anonymous. US donors are often recruited by agencies who act as intermediaries, typical with promises of money and altruistic rewards. Designated donors, e.g. a friend or relative brought by the patients to serve as a donor specifically to help them. In Sweden and France, couples who can bring such a donor still get another person as a donor, but instead get advanced on the waiting list for the procedure, and that donor rather becomes a "cross donor". In other words, the couple brings a designated donor, she donates anonymously to another couple, and the couple that brought her receives eggs from another anonymous donor much more quickly than they would have if they had not been able to provide a designated donor. Patients taking part in shared oocyte programmes. Women who go through in vitro fertilization may be willing to donate unused eggs to such a program, where the egg recipients together help paying the cost of the In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) procedure. It is very cost-effective compared to other alternatives. The pregnancy rate with use of shared oocytes is similar to that with altruistic donors. Procedure
Egg donors are first recruited, screened, and give consent before participating in the IVF process. Once the egg donor is recruited, she undergoes IVF stimulation therapy, followed by the egg retrieval procedure.
Donor oocytes thus give women a mechanism to become pregnant and give birth to a child that will be their biological child (assuming that the recipient woman carries the baby), but not their genetic child. In cases where the recipients womb is absent or unable to carry a pregnancy, or in cases involving gay male couples, a gestational surrogate is used and the embryos are implanted into her per an agreement with the recipients. The combination of egg donation and surrogacy has enabled gay men, including singer Elton John and his partner, to have biological children. Oocyte and embryo donation now account for approximately 18% of in vitro fertilization recorded births in the US.This work established the technical foundation and legal-ethical framework surrounding the clinical use of human oocyte and embryo donation, a mainstream clinical practice, which has evolved over the past 25 years. Building upon this groundbreaking research and since the initial birth announcement in 1984, well over 47,000 live births resulting from donor oocyte embryo transfer have been and continue to be recorded by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States to infertile women, who otherwise would not have had children by any other existing method. The legal status and cost/compensation models of egg donation vary significantly by country.