One of the reason of couple’s inability to successfully conceive the baby is a male infertility – male factor that results from absent or somehow significantly abnormal sperm. In this situation it is necessary to get a material for insemination from a donor. The recommendation to use donor sperm can be not easily received by couples. Although it might be difficult for a couple to acknowledge and make decision about proceeding with IVF treatment with donor sperm it mostly presents itself as an opportunity to achieve pregnancy. The thing that might reduce the doubts is being well informed about all the aspects of benefiting from this option in order to make a conscious decision whether or not to agree to that.
Donated sperm is defined as sperm not from a partner but from a third party – from someone who a couple knows, or from someone who has conducted a de-identified donation directly to a clinic. If the couple decides to choose ‘unknown’ donors it is possible to select one from recruited donors. The process is de-identified but the family can get to know the details (other than personal data) about a person whose genetic material they would like to use.
INVICTA clinics perform treatment with use of donor sperm. In order to do that they use their own source of possible donors which is the INVICTA European Genetic Semen Bank. It includes the database of available donors. All of them are meticulously tested and qualified, get full medical (also genetic) examination and psychological characterization which can highly secure the recipients’ and donors’ safety and anonymousness. The proceedings are accordant to international standards of organizations concerned with methods of medically assisted reproduction and embryology. Additionally the donors need to meet several criteria such as healthy body built, certain age (donors under age of 35 increase success rates) and be generally fit.
It is almost entirely risk-free option to use a registered donor because all the licensed clinics make sure throughout all the testing and evaluation that the donor is suitable, check and rule out inherited medical conditions in donors’ family history and ensure the number of families created from one donor’s genetic material.
After a donation the sperm is washed and prepared in order for the active semen to be separated from the poorer-quality sperm. If the semen has been stored, it needs to be removed from frozen storage, defrosted and analogically prepared for the use. Afterwards the clinic proceeds with a regular in vitro fertilization routine in which donor sperm is mixed with an egg cell of the patient or donor egg, then cultured. After proper amount of time the embryo is transferred into a woman’s uterus.
