How We Chose an Egg Donor for Two Future Fathers

We thought we had already chosen

We reviewed many donor profiles before we believed we had found the right one.

At first the process felt manageable. Profiles arrived. We read them. We compared notes. We selected a donor and moved forward with the sense that a major decision was behind us.

Then the retrieval did not proceed as expected. The donor was removed from the program. The journey returned to the starting point.

That reset was harder than the initial search. We had already invested emotionally in a choice that was no longer available. We had told ourselves the decision was made. We had begun to imagine the next steps.

The lesson, for us, was blunt: surrogacy contains setbacks even after a decision feels final. Donor selection is not always a straight line from profile to retrieval. Something that looked settled can reopen. That is not a failure of judgment. It is part of the process.

Liking a profile was not the same as being compatible

A later donor looked promising on paper. We felt comfortable with the profile. Screening moved forward.

Then genetic compatibility testing showed we were not a match. Another reset.

BioArray and similar carrier screening exist for a reason. We learned that the hard way, twice over: feeling good about a profile does not mean the medical path can proceed. Compatibility is not something you can infer from hobbies, education, or a photograph. It has to be tested.

That was frustrating and also clarifying. It removed a kind of false confidence. We stopped assuming that the next promising profile would automatically become the one.

Seventeen profiles later

In the end we reviewed seventeen donor profiles before selecting the donor who would provide the shared genetic link between our future children.

Seventeen is not a magic number. It is simply our number. Someone else may review five, or thirty, or feel stuck after the first round. What mattered to us was not the count itself but what the count did to our heads.

More profiles did not make the decision easier. At some point additional options stopped feeling like helpful information and started feeling like noise. Decision fatigue is real. The profiles began to blur. Criteria we had cared about early on became harder to weigh. We had to ask ourselves whether we were still learning anything new, or just postponing the discomfort of choosing.

After each reset, that discomfort changed shape. It was no longer only about finding someone good enough. It was about whether we could still trust our own judgment after weeks of searching - or whether exhaustion was quietly making the decision for us.

The strange reality of anonymous donor selection

Our route involved anonymous egg donation in Colombia. That meant no direct contact, no meetings, no conversations. We could not ask the donor questions. We could not hear her voice or read her body language. We could not thank her in person for a decision that would shape our family.

Instead we chose from profile information: age, education, hobbies, physical characteristics, medical history, genetic screening results, and sometimes a photograph.

On paper that sounds straightforward. In practice it felt deeply strange.

We were making one of the biggest decisions of our future family based on documents and images, without the ordinary human context that usually helps people trust a choice. We tried to hold two truths at once: this is a person, not a product - and we still had to decide using the limited information the process allowed.

We do not have a clean answer for how to make that feel comfortable. We only know that acknowledging the discomfort helped. Pretending it was a simple administrative checkbox would have been dishonest.

The photo dilemma

After enough profiles, many donors started to look remarkably similar. Healthy. Educated. Active. Attractive. Motivated. On paper, they were almost always good donors.

That was partly the problem. The challenge was rarely finding someone acceptable. It was choosing between many profiles that all appeared good - and trying to find a reason to prefer one over another when the written sections kept repeating the same shape. The words started to feel interchangeable long before we ran out of options.

The photograph became important for a specific reason - not because appearance was everything, but because it was one of the few things that made a profile feel like a real human being instead of another polished document.

That mattered to us. It also made us uncomfortable.

We noticed ourselves reacting to faces in ways we did not fully trust. Was a photo helping us imagine a person, or was it pushing us toward criteria we did not want to dominate the decision? Why did one image feel reassuring and another feel wrong, when the medical sections were broadly similar?

We tried to stay honest about that tension. Photos were information the process gave us. They were also emotionally loaded in ways that felt nothing like choosing a clinic or comparing agency contracts. Selecting from profiles can feel emotionally strange even when every step is legitimate. Naming that strangeness did not remove it. It kept us from pretending we were only doing spreadsheet analysis.

The risk of projecting too much

One thing we would be careful about now is over-projecting. Long before a donor is medically confirmed, it is tempting to imagine the future too early - to picture what a child might look like, merge photos in your head, or turn a profile into a story about a family that does not exist yet. Some people use face-merging tools or AI-generated images for this. Others do it without any technology at all. We understand the impulse. We also think it can be dangerous emotionally.

Genetics does not work like a preview. Children do not arrive as visual averages of two adults. In our case, a donor we had chosen later fell through - and over-investing at that stage would have made the reset even harder. Do not project too much, too early. It is possible to feel hopeful about a profile without building a whole future on it too soon. Staying cautious until the medical process confirms the path saved us some pain later.

The pressure to move forward

At one point we wondered whether we were being too selective. After the first donor fell through, and again after compatibility screening blocked another promising profile, a harder question kept surfacing:

Do we genuinely like this donor profile, or are we simply tired of waiting and wanting to move forward?

The process had already taken longer than we hoped. Each reset added weeks. We could feel the pull to choose someone - anyone reasonable - and stop living in the limbo of open tabs and comparison notes. Decision fatigue and emotional exhaustion were not abstract ideas by then. They were part of the room whenever we opened another file.

That pressure forced a question we had to answer honestly: were we saying yes because we truly felt comfortable, or because we were tired of waiting?

Progress and confidence are not the same thing. Moving forward can feel like relief even when doubt is still sitting in the room. We tried to pause when the urge to decide came mostly from exhaustion. That was not always easy. Waiting has its own cost. But signing up for a donor we did not feel settled about felt like a different kind of cost - one we had already paid once, emotionally, when an earlier choice fell through.

A decision we had to make together

The donor was never one person’s choice. It was ours.

That sounds obvious. It was not always simple. We disagreed sometimes. One of us would feel drawn to a profile the other found unsettling. One of us would want to keep looking while the other wanted to stop searching and commit.

We learned to treat those conversations as part of the work, not as signs that something was wrong with us as a couple. Uncertainty was allowed. Alignment did not always arrive on the first conversation.

What helped was keeping the discussion going rather than letting silence accumulate. Couples should keep talking throughout the selection process - not only at the moment of the final yes. The donor decision belongs to the relationship, not to whichever partner opened the email first.

Criteria that mattered to us

Every intended parent weighs profiles differently. These were some of the factors we actually used - not as a template, but as examples of how abstract criteria become concrete when you are staring at file after file.

Age mattered within the range our clinic offered. Height and blood type came up in practical conversations about logistics and future medical records. Education and hobbies helped us imagine a person beyond the medical grid, even when we knew those details said little about a child’s future. Family medical history and genetic carrier screening were non-negotiable filters. Physical resemblance came up quietly, in the way many intended parents wonder whether a donor might share some visible traits with one partner or the other.

None of those criteria, alone, told us what kind of parent we would become or what kind of person our children would grow into. We tried not to treat any single line on a profile as a prediction. Profiles organize information. They do not guarantee outcomes.

Experienced donor or first-time donor?

We asked ourselves questions we could not fully answer from the outside.

Is prior donation experience reassuring? Does it mean the retrieval is more likely to go smoothly? Or does it matter less than the clinic’s screening and the donor’s current health profile? Are there tradeoffs we are not seeing because the profile does not spell them out?

We noticed our instincts pull in different directions at different moments. Experience felt comforting when we were nervous about another setback. It also raised questions we could not ask the donor directly under anonymity.

We do not have a definitive answer. These remain questions intended parents may ask themselves. Your clinic and your route may frame them differently. The useful part, for us, was naming the question instead of pretending it had an obvious yes or no.

Trust when you cannot verify the person

Anonymous donation creates an unavoidable trust problem.

At some point we said the quiet part out loud: if the donor is anonymous, how do we know the clinic actually uses the donor we selected?

We cannot answer that with certainty from the outside. No profile review gives you a live view into an embryology lab. No photograph confirms chain-of-custody on its own.

What we could evaluate was trust in the clinic and trust in the agency coordinating the process. Had they been transparent when things went wrong before? Did they explain setbacks plainly? Did they treat our questions as normal rather than suspicious?

Intended parents naturally ask these questions. They are not paranoia. They are the emotional cost of anonymity. We found it healthier to voice them early than to carry them unspoken through every subsequent step.

Why we did not try to find our donor online

The thought crosses many intended parents’ minds: what if we could identify the donor outside the official process?

We understood the impulse. We also chose not to cross that line.

Searching can violate privacy, contracts, and the spirit of anonymous donation - and it probably does not solve the emotional uncertainty anyway. Even if you somehow found a person online, what would actually change? You still would not have the conversation anonymity removes. You might create legal and emotional complications without gaining the clarity you hoped for.

We are not judging anyone who feels that pull. For us, the honest answer was that searching would not solve the trust problem. It would move it to a different place.

Anonymity should be a decision made early

Some countries require anonymous donation. Others allow more openness, or different contact models over time. Some families want the possibility of future contact. Others want a clean legal and emotional boundary from the start.

We did not treat anonymity as a detail we would figure out later. It shaped how donor selection felt every day we opened a profile. It can influence country selection from the beginning. If future contact matters deeply to you, the route matters. If anonymity is non-negotiable for different reasons, that also narrows the map.

Knowing our model was anonymous did not make the process comfortable. It at least stopped us from fantasizing about a conversation that the process would not allow.

Egg numbers and expectations

After we finally selected a donor, the medical path had its own lesson in humility.

Retrieval numbers that sound large at the start can shrink through fertilization, embryo development, and PGT-A screening. Attrition happens at stages we had read about abstractly and then watched affect our own timeline.

We share that only as our experience - not as a typical outcome, and not as a prediction for anyone else. Clinics, donors, and lab results vary too much for our numbers to mean much on your spreadsheet.

The takeaway that did generalize for us: the number of retrieved eggs is not the same thing as the number of transferable embryos. Donor selection is one gate. The laboratory path is another. Emotionally, we had to reset expectations twice - first when donors fell through, then again when biology did not match the headline numbers in our heads.

What we carry forward

Choosing an egg donor was less about genetics than we expected. It was about living with uncertainty, trusting a process we could not fully see, and making a shared decision under constraints that sometimes felt impossible.

We reviewed seventeen profiles. We restarted more than once. We argued, paused, and kept talking. We chose without meeting the person whose genetic contribution would link both children to each other - and each to one of us.

If you are earlier in the journey, our article on our first trip to Colombia may help with the moment surrogacy became real on the ground. Our piece on how we chose our surrogacy agency covers the months of provider research that came before donor selection. And if the organizational side is already scattering across inboxes, what we wish we had tracked from day one is where we started.

Disclaimer

MySurrogacy does not provide medical, legal, tax, immigration, or financial advice. This article reflects intended-parent experience and is meant for general planning support only. Routes, clinics, and legal frameworks vary; qualified professionals who know your situation should review your plan.