Crystal’s Story – Egg Donation

For Crystal Irving the choice to donate her eggs was not a difficult one. Crystal chose to selflessly donate her eggs to a childless couple she didn’t know so that they too could experience the joys of parenthood. Crystal felt compelled to ensure those yearning for a child have the chance to experience it too.

Crystal, a 33 year old mother-of-two from Southampton, first donated her eggs altruistically last year after realising her decision to have her tubes tied 12 months earlier had been a mistake. In an article with the Daily Echo, Crystal stated, “My circumstances changed and I realised I had made a massive mistake. I couldn’t afford to have the operation reversed so rather than waste my eggs I thought I could give them to other people instead. When I watched the story on television I just thought that it would be a really nice thing to do for someone. I heard my children playing in my bedroom and just thought that I couldn’t imagine my life without them and wanted other people to have that experience if they wanted.”

It is this amazing gift, that women give to those they don’t know, that means dreams can be fulfilled. Crystal came to Wessex Fertility to donate her eggs last year. Like all our egg donors, Crystal first attended an Initial Consultation appointment with one of our consultants and was offered the opportunity to speak to our excellent clinic counsellor should she wish to. Egg donors undergo an AMH test and infection screening tests to ensure they meet the criteria to become a donor.

To ensure she had enough eggs for donation, Crystal, had to inject herself with hormones twice a day for two weeks. Despite not being very good with needles, Crystal surprised herself at how easily she got to grips with the process.
The egg collection procedure takes less than 30 minutes, and patients are always sedated. The eggs are then extracted from the ovaries and passed to our skilled laboratory team for culturing and insemination.

Egg donors have no financial or legal obligation for any children born from their donated eggs. However, donor conceived children can request identifiable information about their genetic parents when they reach 18 years of age. For full information see our Egg Donation page.

However, this doesn’t worry Crystal, who is in the process of donating for a second time.

“I don’t have any concerns about children turning up on my doorstep once they reach 16”, she said.

“There is plenty of room and plenty of time for them, but for me I don’t think it’s likely to happen.  Before I did it, I did speak to my daughter Hannah about it and at first she thought that would mean more brothers and sisters but once I explained that wasn’t the case and that these would be someone else’s children, she understood and thought it was a lovely thing to do. I like to think it’s something she can do in the future, if she wanted to, because she knows it is not a taboo subject, but a wonderful thing to do.”