New Year, New You: Health Changes for Egg Donation & Egg Sharing

Could your health be stopping you from being an egg donor?

Now’s the time for New Year health kicks and diets, and at Manchester Donors we often start to receive a lot of new egg donor applications from women who can now donate eggs, because they’ve improved their health and lifestyle.

If egg donation – or IVF and egg-sharing - is your goal in 2018, these are some of the positive changes you can make to help it happen:  

• Lose weight: Having a BMI that’s too high can affect your own fertility and mean you don’t respond as well to fertility medications. To donate eggs you need to have a BMI of 29 or under. 

• Put on weight: If your BMI is too low, your fertility and response may also be negatively affected. Your BMI needs to be 19 and above for egg donation. 

• Stop smoking: Smoking affects your body in all kinds of ways, including your fertility. We can’t accept women as egg donors who smoke because of the effects of nicotine on egg quality, but you can donate if you’ve quit smoking at least three months prior. 

• Your lifestyle: If you’re planning egg donation in the coming months don’t get a new tattoo or piercing. You can’t be an egg donor if you’ve had either of these things in the past six months, because of the risk of infection. 

If you apply to donate eggs, one of the first things we’ll do is check that you’re actually healthy and well enough to be an egg donor. We’ll only accept you into our programme if donating eggs won’t compromise your own health or wellbeing.

At Manchester Donors we spend a lot of time on preparing you for egg donation. This doesn’t just include a thorough medical assessment and fertility check but also psychological preparation in the form of counselling, to discuss the long-term implications of egg donation and how you feel about it.

Our focused approach to your care is one of the reasons why we were the first fertility clinic in the whole of the UK to be named a National Gamete Donation Trust Donor Centre of Excellence.

If you want to be an egg donor in 2018, apply to Manchester Donors. You need to be aged 18-35 and fulfil other criteria relating to health and medical history.

Read through our egg donor FAQs and learn more about the process. If you’d like to apply, complete our no obligation short online application form and we’ll contact you, or call our friendly team on 0161 300 2734.