Egg donation

This book was made for IVF families, fertility clinics, waiting rooms, and anybody who believes these stories deserve to be told.

Again, you can find yours at infertileafgroup.com. All right, so today I'm talking with Katie Encalade, the president and CEO of Egg Donor and Surrogate Solutions, who spent nearly 20 years helping people build their families through egg donation and surrogacy.

The coolest part is that before she even had children of her own, Katie became an egg donor, a decision that she says completely changed the trajectory of her life.

She would go on to become a surrogate and become a mom of three and ultimately build a career around helping other people become parents.

So we're going to talk about Katie's own experience as both a donor and a surrogate, why she said she would have been a surrogate five more times if she could have, how her perspective has evolved over nearly two decades in this industry, why ethical family building requires us to keep asking hard questions.

know you have helped guide more than 2000 intended parents, right.

Through egg donation, surrogacy.

And again, as I said in the intro, you know, Katie is the president and CEO of egg donor and surrogate solutions and a really respected voice in our world.

And that says a lot because her journey has been anything but easy.

We're talking nine IVF cycles, 11 embryo transfers, five fertility clinics, surgeries, canceled transfers, immune testing, microbiome testing, donor eggs, adhesions, lining issues, and somehow in the middle of that, she ended up finding out that she had a brain tumor.

There have been so many moments in Melissa's journey where the answer was basically, it's your eggs, it's your age, or we'll try again and keep going.

And she kept asking, I think there might be something wrong with me.

For sure.

Let's jump in.

You had donor eggs.

And now you at the beginning, you had just told us, Melissa, you had a really good AMH and you were getting quite a few eggs with their cookie cutter protocols, no matter which clinic you were at.

... future contact, and that being anonymous is not really a thing anymore.

Becoming an egg donor can feel like a decision you're making for one chapter of your life, but the decision itself doesn't end there because years from now there will be someone else whose story began in part with yours.

So what should you understand before you say yes?

They need to know if they're...

And again, I would say 95%-

Yeah

... of our egg donors come in and man, they are so loud and proud, man.

They are so prideful.

Part of my job is to start off by every consultation by saying, "Give me a little bit of a story of your journey that brings you in today." Not, "Okay, I know you need an egg donor.

I know you need a gestation carrier.

All right, let's get going." No, it's, "Tell me about yourself." I wanna know about them.

Mm-hmm

...

IVF and egg donors and surrogates, things like that.

But for the average couple or patient who's been trying to get pregnant, I just say to them, "Wait a minute.

Let's see what we need to do.

It's to help determine should that match happen.

Today, I'm joined by Katie Incalade, President and CEO of Egg Donor and Surrogate Solutions, and Crystal Cheng, Vice President of Surrogacy Program and Client Content Development.

But before either of them held those titles, Katie was a surrogate herself, and Crystal built her family as an intended parent through surrogacy.

Together, we explore what ethical surrogacy actually looks like in practice, and why the protections built before a journey begins matter even more when things don't go according to plan.

Boy, was that nicely done.

And Eve, why don't we go ahead and jump to yours, just sticking on the theme of PGT and donor egg recipients.

Yeah, thanks.

So the title of this paper was Preimplantation Genetic Testing for Aneuploidy in Donor Egg Recipients Does Not Decrease the Number of Embryo Transfers Needed to Achieve a Live Birth with Michelle Bajewski as the first author, and it was out of RMA New York.

So I think, you know, as we all know, PGTA use is rising in the U.S. as well as globally.

And patients want this information prior to embryo transfer.

And I think, as we all know, in patients who are older, there are some data that have shown higher live birth rates per transfer.

and lower rates of miscarriage, but the cumulative likelihood of live birth is unchanged as it just is a selection tool.