For 20 years CT Fertility has been achieving success rates that are among the highest in the world. Besides resulting on the births of over 4,000 babies, these years of experience have also allowed us to listen to thousands of clients about their needs and concerns, and to develop unique options and protocols to meet those needs. Medical talent, training and technology are not always enough to build the family of your dreams. At CT Fertility we guarantee that every family receives the most personal attention possible, a customized treatment plan to suit their goals and circumstances, and direct access to our top talent at all times.
We at CT Fertility realize that you have a choice when it comes to selecting the medical clinic or donor agency that will best assist you during the family creation process. We hope that the following list of questions will allow you to make a more informed decision.
12 Questions To Ask a Potential Fertility Clinic / Donor Matching Agency:
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How long have you been in business, and how many families have you helped create, including families like ours?
CT Fertility was founded in 1991, which makes it one of the oldest and most established fertility clinics in the US. The CT Fertility staff has over 4,000 families, including many LGBT families and international families from over 25 countries. We have worked with hundreds of highly screened egg donors and gestational carriers who regularly return to the clinic for repeat family building journeys.
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How many staff members do you have and who will be primarily and consistently in touch with us during the process?
CT Fertility’s staff consists of over thirty highly trained professionals led by Drs. Michael Doyle and Shaun Williams, both fellowship-trained Reproductive Endocrinologists and leaders in their field. At CT Fertility you will never be seen by other doctors, including medical students or residents in training. Dr. Doyle will also personally oversee and manage every medical decision and choice that you make from the beginning to the end of your experience, and is committed to remaining available to you on a daily basis for consultation, e-mail and Skype.
Other members of the CT Fertility team include a Ph.D. Laboratory Director and other embryologists with extensive experience in advanced IVF/ICSI, embryo culture and freezing, egg freezing, embryo biopsy for PGD; five nurses and nurse practitioners; a genetic counselor; four financial support people; a surrogacy coordinator; an egg donor coordinator; a social worker and psychologist; an acupuncturist; and numerous other patient care advocates who will support you through the process.
While you may interface with each of these people at some time, you will also be assigned a primary nurse or IVF coordinator who will personally handle your process and guide you through every step of your journey.
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Are you open year-round and do you guarantee egg retrievals and transfers 7 days a week (including Sundays!) to maximize success rates?
Because CT Fertility knows that ideal fertility treatments are critically dependent on optimal timing, the clinic never closes its doors. Services are provided 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Other clinics that routinely close for the weekend (or even just on Sunday) or who regularly shut down their lab may be putting staffing restraints or their own personal convenience ahead of their commitment to your success, and your care may suffer.
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Do you guarantee a minimum number of eggs for each donation, or have back-up plans like an egg donor egg bank and an embryo donation program to avoid cycle cancellations?
Given the tremendous investment of time, emotional energy, and finances that we know you must make, one of the hardest scenarios to encounter is the unexpected cancellation of any aspect of your treatment, including an unexpectedly low response to medications on the part of you, your egg donor or your gestational carrier.
You will completely avoid such pitfalls with CT Fertility since we guarantee the number of viable eggs you receive in each of our egg donation and IVF programs. We are able to provide this guarantee because of our experience, the high quality of our carefully screened egg donors, and our advanced vitrification technology and protocols that allow us to use the Donor Egg Bank to supplement any shortfall in the number of eggs you receive from your designated egg donor at no additional cost. Even if you are using a family member or friend as a donor, or have chosen a donor through another approved donor agency, our Egg Bank provides a flexible back-up option that you can access for a fee on the day of the retrieval. An additional backup option we offer is our embryo adoption program which provides access to embryos that other people have chosen to donate after their own family building journeys have been completed successfully.
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Is every aspect of your egg donor’s screening, matching and monitoring done personally by the clinic team, in their offices, or are any of these services ever outsourced?
CT Fertility works hard to avoid the “disconnects” that often arise when surrogates or donors are recruited online and/or matched by outside agencies, then screened in outside clinics, receive their medications from other doctors who may or may not then perform their monitoring, and finally arrive at their fertility clinic near the end of the process.
For this reason, CT Fertility does everything, on-site in their offices, from the beginning to the end. Nothing at all is outsourced. We believe that this enables us to really get to know your donor; we can devote the utmost attention to quality control; identify potential issues (big and small) and solve them before they become problems; help you make informed decisions about the process; and provide you the peace of mind that goes along with all of the above.
In addition, clinics that outsource some or all of these services will often claim much “cheaper” costs because they are not performing or billing for so many of these essential elements, but the total costs from all of these outside vendors may be quite shocking. CT Fertility has worked hard to develop transparent, full-disclosure cost sheets that enable you to plan accurately for all that lies ahead.
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What percentage of egg donor applicants do you accept, and are all of the donor’s screening tests (medical, genetic, and psychological) completed prior to their inclusion in the donor database or offering them for a match?
CT Fertility receives over 50 applications per week from potential egg donors and gestational carriers and accepts roughly 1 in 25. Applicants will never be proposed to you unless they have already successfully completed the rigorous screening of our medical, psychosocial, genetic, and legal requirements.
Many clinics claim that they have many donors from which to choose, but often these are profiles of women who have applied but have not yet been screened, which means that if you pick one of them it is very possible that months later the match may need to be broken due to unforeseen issues. At CT Fertility we do everything we can to prevent this sort of disappointment and waste of time, money and emotional energy.
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What is the average wait time to match to an egg donor?
In almost every instance, donor matches at CT Fertility are immediate, with absolutely no waiting, often within a few days of starting the selection process. This is the result of extensive donor recruitment efforts that provide constant access to the top donors in the region, and the availability of our Frozen Donor Egg Bank.
If your needs or requirements for your egg donor are highly specific (such as a unique ancestry, Ivy League background, or particular “look” or skill) CT Fertility can easily accommodate that through focused recruiting, but this may add a few more weeks to the process.
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Do the costs you quote include all donor screening tests, genetic counseling, medications, and monitoring - even if the donor is not local? What costs are typically not quoted and end up “extra”?
CT Fertility quotes every cost up front, openly and honestly.
Many clinics fail to anticipate costs that are associated with other partnering clinics or agencies, medications, outside monitoring, travel/lodging or other associated laboratory fees; or if they do mention them they may not provide specific cost details. They may also not quote the added costs to you if the donor you identify does not pass her screening tests and other donors must be screened; or the additional costs associated with recruiting and matching to new donors if you run out of eggs from your first donor and wish to continue with a new one. The uncertainty that this creates can be as very stressful. CT Fertility realizes that planning for your family is essential and that a key part of this is enabling you to understand up-front how all the finances work and what you can expect to encounter, to minimize surprises or unnecessary stress.
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Are the donors in your database exclusive, current and local? How many of them are repeat and proven donors?
Every CT Fertility donor is an exclusive donor, available, and local. This means that, unlike in many other agencies or clinics, you will never choose a donor from CT Fertility who is committed elsewhere. Being local also means that donors are responsible for all their own travel arrangements and that you will not face additional travel, lodging or food expenses that always accompany donors chosen from outside agencies.
About 50% of CT Fertility donors have donated before. Whenever a donor is allowed to repeat a donation at CT Fertility, it is because her prior donation(s) resulted in a successful pregnancy and birth. CT Fertility never recycles unsuccessful donors and will always allow you to review the specific records of her previous donations, so that you can see how many eggs she has previously produced, how many fertilized, how many embryos resulted, whether a single or twin pregnancy resulted, and how many embryos were ultimately frozen for future use. Each of these factors can be essential for you to choose a donor who is most likely to achieve your immediate and long-term family-building goals. If an agency or clinic claims that a potential donor is proven or has a ”great” track record, you should insist that you want to see those records, and not accept that the details are unavailable for your review. CT Fertility will always be open with you regarding all of these vitally important details.
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Do you provide the option for us to meet our egg donor, or do you require donor matches to remain anonymous?
CT Fertility strongly believes in non-anonymous egg donation for anyone who wants it, but never requires it. Over 80% of CT Fertility donors are open to talking, Skyping or even meeting their potential matches. The majority of our intended parents choose this option and overwhelmingly feel that it makes the donation process more transparent, comfortable and rewarding.
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Are advanced IVF laboratory services like vitrification and embryo biopsy for PGD routinely performed on-site by the clinic’s embryologists, and does the clinic support the use of PGD for gender selection?
All eggs and embryos that are frozen at CT Fertility are always subjected to strict embryo freezing (vitrification) protocols and techniques, which are far superior methods of freezing that result in over 98% of embryo survival when thawed, compared to the traditional slower freeze techniques that are still used in many other clinics and have much lower success rates associated with them. How you freeze your embryos may not seem like an essential decision at the beginning of your journey, but it is because most of our intended parents return in the future to create siblings and in those instances, having high-grade viable embryos to use creates for a far more efficient and cost-effective process. Having to start over with new fresh embryos is associated with much greater expense, and usually the original egg donor that you used is no longer available.
Embryo biopsy for pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD) is another option available to you at CT Fertility and can be used to screen for genetic disease as well as to determine the sex of your embryos.
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Since acupuncture has shown to improve pregnancy rates, do you offer this option on-site immediately prior to and after the transfer?
CT Fertility offers on-site acupuncture services in its state-of the-art Wellness suite, and many women undergo acupuncture treatments at CT Fertility minutes before and after their embryo transfer. On-site services eliminate the stress and challenge of finding wellness providers, rushing to and from them, and needlessly disconnecting them from their fertility procedures.
