Every lady produces 1 egg/oocyte every month during her reproductive age. The egg production starts after the lady achieves her 1st menstruation and continues till a few year before menopause. When a female child is in the womb of her mother, she has approximately 6-7 millions of eggs in her ovary which are reduced to 1-2 million by birth and only 3,00,000 remain at the time of puberty in her ovary. The process of oocyte depletion (loss of oocyte) starts even before the child is born and continues throughout her life (childhood, teenage, adulthood and till menopause).

Oocyte production is a complex process and is governed by hormones in the body of a lady. Developing oocyte (follicle) also produces its own hormone and there is a balance due to feed back between brain hormones and follicle hormones. Under the effect of these hormones the endometrium also develops and prepares to receive the embryo. If pregnancy does not occur the hormones regress and menstruation begins. The endometrium prepared to receive an embryo is washed off and the process of new egg development starts. Normally this cycle completes in 28-30 days which is called a menstrual cycle.

In fact in every menstrual cycle when the process of egg development starts, multiple egg starts developing. This is called Recruitment. Out of many recruited follicles only one develops as a dominant follicle rest of the follicles (eggs) do not develop- regress and die. In other words in the process of developing 1 follicle-egg a lady looses many eggs every month. In this way the available no. of eggs keep on reducing and go to a few thousand near menopause. In other words whether a lady uses or not all recruited follicles are destroyed every month.

When you do IVF treatment, we stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs. When we stimulate through an appropriate protocol, the process of follicle dominance does not occur and all the follicles develop to mature follicle. Hence we get more no. of eggs in a stimulated cycle. In spite of the fact that we get more no. of eggs in an stimulated IVF cycle, the lady does not lose more number of eggs during the course, as these eggs would otherwise regress-die in a natural cycle.

In IVF we do in vitro fertilization of egg with sperm outside the body. As we take out eggs from the body of a lady, the possibility is created that the egg can be used for another lady recipient. T he embryos developed from those eggs can be transferred to the uterus of the recipient/another lady.

In other words the lady who produced eggs gives her eggs to someone else for its use. This process is known as Egg Donation. The person who donates her egg is called Egg Donor. The lady who receives the donated egg is called Oocyte-Egg Recipient.

Oocyte donation compulsorily has to be done through an IVF process, because naturally oocyte never comes out of a female’s body. In other words oocyte donation is much more difficult compared to sperm-semen donation in male.