If you have frozen eggs at a clinic that you don’t want to use you can either discard those eggs, you can donate them to research or you can donate them to another patient, you can also donate them for staff at that clinic. The best thing to do is to contact your clinic to see the options that they can provide you.
If you don’t want to use your eggs you have a variety of options. That again depends on the country. Here in Spain legally you have the option of donating them for research purposes, you can also just destroy them if you don’t want to your eggs to be used in research and there is also the option of donating them to other patients or couples but this is something that is very limited because you need to fulfill certain criteria and this is something that it’s not like the first option that you will have in mind when you are freezing your eggs but it’s a legal possibility here but you will need to fulfill certain criteria so not all the patients will be able to do so.
In every country they have a different law. In Spain, the destination of the eggs that you do not want to use, you have few options: you can give them to another couple, you can give them for research or you can destroy them. If you decide to destroy them, we would need two medical autorisation so that you are not able to get pregnant anymore. Every decision has its bureaucracy and you need to take into account that.
Frozen eggs – what do you do with them if you decide not to use them? If you’ve gotten pregnant and you say “I don’t need these frozen eggs” or you decide, “I just don’t want them anymore”, they will always be your eggs until you make what’s called a Disposition. In other words, you will have to tell the clinic what you want to do with those eggs. Here in the US, the options are to discard them. The other option is if there’s a research project going on, you can sign up for a research project via what’s called IRB or Investigation Review Board research project. The other option that many women have to think about ahead of time is donating the eggs. If you decide to donate the eggs here in the US, there’s special testing that we have to do in advance called FDA screening prior to freezing the eggs. If you have eggs frozen prior to the FDA screening, you cannot donate them anonymously. However, if you have a friend that you know that you want to donate these eggs to individually, then yes, you can but if you don’t do the FDA testing in advance, you won’t be able to just donate them anonymously.
