First off, congratulations for your decision to have a family! We are sure there have been a lot of ups and downs for you to decide this is your path to parenthood. We are very excited for you! Heather Brooks, RN, our Director of Client Care, became a mother with the help of IVF and has spent over 25 years since working to help families via Donor conception. We feel very privileged to do the work we do. There is nothing more incredibly than a literal village of people – your Donor, your Surrogate, your fertility doctor, nurses, lawyers, your agency, counsellor and more – coming together to make your family a reality.
Approximately half of the clients Fertility Match works with are men looking to have a family with the help of an Egg Donor and Surrogate – either because they are in a same-sex relationship or they are a single person seeking to become a parent.
Regardless of their parent’s gender or martial status, some children will simply have a natural desire to meet their Egg Donor while others may not. We simply won’t know until they tell us. So, designing a program where the door is open for he/she/they to walk through if desired was our fundamental priority. And the only way we figured we could do that was to only accept Donors who would be willing to fulfill this request if desired by a child. So that’s what we did from the start. The Donors you see on our database are all open to meeting a child one day, and the majority of them are open to having a known relationship as defined by a legal contract with the recipient(s) and the child if desired.
Fertility Match deals exclusively with fresh egg donations, working with only the very best professional partners across the country. Since our inception in 2017, we have focused on developing a program with the best interests of the children and families we are helping to create always at the forefront of what. One of things we are most proud of is that we have never facilitated an anonymous egg donation! All Egg Donors who join our program are at minimum required to be willing to meet a child or children born from their donation after he/she/they turn 18 years of age. We also facilitate Known donation, meaning Intended Parents and Donors can meet anytime after the donation has occurred if both parties wish to do so.
The same-sex male couples and single men in our program report feeling a sense of reassurance that the Donor they are selecting is open to meeting their child or children one day. They feel relieved knowing that their Egg Donor welcomed this from the start, that their child or children won’t be left trying to track down their background information through a social genetic testing company one day, which may not even get them the information or peace they want or need. They feel safe, knowing they can one day tell their children they worked with an agency that put their child’s right to know where they biologically came from and access health care information first.
The Egg Donors in our program are educated, healthy, committed and altruistically motivated young woman who want to donate to people who will make great parents (you!). The Donors we accept into our program come to us interested in donating eggs for different reasons; they saw the pain a loved one experienced from infertility while they were growing up, they don’t plan on using their eggs anytime soon or even at all, they realize a sacrifice from them come change someone else’s entire universe. Regardless of their reasoning, it all boils down the same thing in the end: they want to do something good for someone in need. Outside of our Canada-wide based clinical criteria this is the spirit of what we look for in every one of our Donors, genuinely wanting to help others.
If you’d like to learn more, please connect with us by visiting our booth or emailing us at info@fertilitymatch.ca. We would love to meet you and hear if you think we could be a part of the village that will make your family a reality.
