Celebrating Our LGBTQ+ Donor Egg Families

COVID-19

Donor egg parents are prepared for almost anything. When faced with another delay in starting a family, it can be comforting to have some control. Intended parents can reserve a donor now and ensure that egg cohorts are securely stored and will be ready for shipment when you are ready to build your family.  Our quality assurance measures extend to our business protocols during the varied stay-at-home requirements across the United States and around the world. Fairfax EggBank has adapted all of our processes and communications to support recipients and clinics, and we will continue to adapt as the situation evolves. Our dedicated and caring Client Relations Team is fully prepared to help you through every stage of the process.

Fairfax EggBank celebrates our LGBTQ+ donor egg families. We are strong supporters of the LGBTQ+ community and are proud to play a role in building families for all.

This upcoming June marks the 49^th celebration of Pride, an international celebration that unites people with the common goal of advancing the rights and support for the LGBTQ+ community. For years we have participated in D.C. Pride, and we will be at the festival, Sunday, June 9^th to share information on how we help build donor egg families. Our sister company Fairfax Cryobank helps couples who need a sperm donor, as well as helping trans men and trans women preserve their fertility.

Our proudest moments are when we hear from happy Fairfax EggBank donor egg parents.

Testimonials from Recent Dads at Fairfax EggBank

Below are a couple of testimonials we’ve received from proud dads.

DG

“I cannot thank Fairfax EggBank enough for helping me throughout a very emotional and difficult process with an eventual success despite multiple setbacks. As a single gay man trying to become a father, I had a lot of inhibitions when I was trying to choose the right egg donor. Fairfax EggBank had a coordinator with whom I have had direct conversations and she made the process work as best as it can. She first understood what I was looking for and then made it her personal mission to find me the right donor. There were challenges and setbacks as a natural part of the process. She was there at every step of the way lockstep with me – responsive, personal, swift. She was the single point of contact with all the different departments at the bank and that made a huge difference. Eventually, I became a father with donor eggs from Fairfax EggBank. I am writing this as I sit next to my 10-day-old daughter and I cannot thank them enough for being there for me.”

MR

“Our journey to parenthood has been long. I knew I wanted to be a dad for decades, but it took me a while to find the right partner who also wanted a family. But then it took us another few years to be in a financial position to be able to try to build one. There are a lot of expenses, from surrogate fees, IVF and medication costs, legal fees, and donor egg costs. Last year, we were finally ready.

After searching a few different egg banks, we settled on Fairfax because they had a wide variety of ethnic donors. We ended up finding a donor who was perfect for us – an unusual ethnic mix that matched my partner and my preference, had great looks and a strong education, bio, the whole nine. Our surrogate got pregnant with the donor eggs on the first try and we’re expecting a baby in the spring.

We were obviously very happy with the outcome of working with Fairfax. We just purchased more eggs from the same donor so that our children will be genetic half-siblings with each of us as genetic fathers.”

MR also wrote a blog providing tips to other gay males on how to choose an egg donor. Read his blog here.

How Fairfax EggBank Builds LGBT Families

For the most part, Fairfax EggBank works with gay male clients who wish to use frozen donor eggs to implant into their surrogate. (Though, we occasionally have gay female clients who require the use of donor eggs due to female-factor infertility or genetic risks to the unborn child).

We understand that gay male clients must invest considerable effort into building their family. There is the lawyer they need to represent them, a surrogate they need to find to carry their baby, an IVF clinic they need to perform the fertilization and implantation, and of course, the egg donor they need to use. These components can cost an average of $120,000 and take an average of 16-21 months to come together. Expenses can quickly escalate and time can drag on for a variety of reasons. It may take time to save the money to pay for the surrogacy journey. A surrogate or egg donor may be hard to find. The IVF cycle may not work the first time around (or the second, or third).

We at Fairfax EggBank help to reduce major pain points gay male individuals and couples would typically experience if they went the traditional fresh egg donor route:

• Wide, premium donor selection. We have a rigorous screening process and only admit the most healthy and desirable egg donors into our program. Currently, we screen new donors for over xyz genetic conditions, giving clients more confidence in choosing the right donor. In addition, we recruit from across the nation, giving clients access to a large pool of diverse donors. Finding a donor can take a considerable amount of time, but we aim to help a client find the perfect one immediately.
• Frozen donor eggs available immediately. All of the donors on our website have eggs frozen and ready to be shipped immediately. This helps to drastically reduce the time it takes to secure a donor’s eggs, allowing the client to focus on other priorities of securing a surrogate and arranging the embryo transfer procedure.
• Experienced and compassionate support from a dedicated coordinator. Our experience in working with countless LGBT clients equips us with the sensitivity and compassion to understand their needs. A dedicated coordinator will be assigned to a client and support him/her through every step of the donor egg procurement process.
• Embryo development guarantee. We stand by the quality of our eggs. Should the eggs not meet the standards of our Embryo Development Guarantee, we’ll send a replacement set of eggs for free. The surrogate will quickly be able to undergo another transfer once fertilization succeeds.

The process to procure donor eggs is simple for clients. As long as the client’s IVF clinic is a partner of Fairfax EggBank and the IVF clinic consents to the donor egg purchase, all the client needs to do is to process simple paperwork and the payment for the donor egg cohort. Fairfax EggBank’s donor coordinator and her team will handle the rest of the logistics with the client’s IVF clinic. If your clinic isn’t a partner, there are a couple of options. If your clinic is willing to partner with us, we will proceed with onboarding them. If you are open to working with a clinic that we already partner with, we can put you in touch with one of hundreds of trusted clinics across the U.S.

LGBTQ+ Advocacy

Fairfax EggBank is committed to helping everyone who chooses to build a family. We work closely with RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association. Their 2019 Advocacy Day on May 16^th was held in Washington, D.C. with advocates from across the United States. In additional to requests for Federal funding for insurance coverage for fertility for Federal employees and Veterans, we also asked for support for Every Child Deserves A Family Act, sponsored by Representative John Lewis (D-GA). This act would ban discrimination against foster and adoptive parents, families or origin and foster youth based on sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status and religion; It will improve services to the 20% of foster youth who identify as LGBTQ+; and will overturn 9 state laws allowing discrimination for adoptions.

History of LGBT Families

Only recent developments have helped to advance the goal of LGBTQ+ community members who wished to become parents. Until recently, laws against same-sex marriage precluded couples from adopting, since many state adoption requirements warranted the couple to be married). For those LGBTQ+ individuals who were lucky enough to use fertility services to build a family, rampant discrimination made them greatly secretive about their family or even their own sexual orientation.

Several states starting in 2013 allowed same-sex marriage, but it wasn’t until 2015 when the Supreme Court deemed same-sex marriage was constitutional and therefore legal in all 50 states. In addition, in 2016, a federal judge deemed unconstitutional a state-specific law in Mississippi which outlawed adoption by same-sex couples.

These landmark federal decisions open the landscape for more LGBTQ+ couples and individuals to build a family. They are also encouraged by the growing support from people across the country. In a Gallup poll in 2018, 67% of Americans indicated they support same-sex marriage, in contrast to 27% when Americans were polled in 1996. Scientific research also consistently shows that “gay and lesbian parents are as fit and capable as heterosexual parents, and their children are as psychologically healthy and well-adjusted as those reared by heterosexual parents.”

The future looks increasingly more promising. However, conservative state-level laws that override federal mandates continue to threaten the rights of the LGBTQ+ community and its children. We encourage our readers, particularly those in conservative states that threaten LGBT rights, to reach out to local and national advocacy groups to see how to help protect the rights of the community.

To learn more about the dedicated support we provide to the LGBTQ+ community, message us or call 888.352.5577.