Donated Eggs: Your Ticket to Motherhood
You’ve tried conceiving the “fun” way, using IUI and then moved up to IVF, all with no success. After all the testing and attempts at impregnation using your own eggs, it’s now clear that your eggs are the issue. While that’s a hard thing to accept, at least there’s an alternative that will allow you to experience pregnancy, birth and motherhood just like you had planned.
Donated eggs are the only option available if you want to experience the pregnancy and birth and want the child to be genetically related to one parent. It just won’t be you and that can be a depressing thought.
With the theme “California egg donation” firmly in your mind, you are now receiving donated eggs from a young woman in California who looks a lot like your family. On one hand, you spend time thinking about how lucky you are to live in a time where the cost of egg donation is reasonable and donated eggs will help solve your fertility problems.
On the other hand, you are mourning the loss of a biological link to you child. You will never see your mother’s smile on your baby’s face or hear your father’s laugh come out of his mouth. This sounds silly when you’ve been waiting so long to have a child and now you have the chance.
However, it’s real, the reality that you are now using donated eggs put an end to all your dreams of having children that look like you and share family’s characteristics. Your whole life you dreamed about the family you would have with the partner of your dreams. Now the dream, and partner, are still there but that perfect blend of you and your partner is not going to be part of the picture.
After all the disappointment of infertility treatments that didn’t work, for the cost of egg donation you are going to become a mother. For someone still fighting the infertility battle, this situation probably seems like a dream come true and they can’t understand why you aren’t over the moon with happiness.
Of course you’re happy, the egg donor cost is less than a surrogate or private adoption and you’re going to carry and deliver your child, just like any other mother. But now that this is really happening there’s a little voice in your head that is bugging you and causing you to become depressed. It’s bringing up your most primal fears and laying them out for you to obsess over. One of the primary fears is, of course, will you be able to bond with this baby, a baby you may not see yourself in?
This is a very real fear for a lot of women but hardly ever happens. When it does happen it’s usually because the mother has severe postpartum depression, not because the baby is the product of a donated egg. After all, you’re carrying the baby, it’s your voice and the sounds of your life that he hears, your body is the one he will be looking for at birth. When he’s born, it will be your voice and touch that he will feel comforted by. Adoptive parents bond with their children all the time, it takes a little more time but the families end up as well bonded to each other as any other family.
The depression you’re fighting while receiving donated eggs is real, it’s your way of working through your expectations about how your family is going to be formed and your attachment to the idea of sharing biology with your child. However, when you look into your child’s face for the first time, and see your partner smiling back at you, your doubts will fade and the bonding will commence.
