Episode 159: The World Egg and Sperm Bank – Diana Thomas

Diana Thomas is the Founder and CEO of The World Egg and Sperm Bank. After having to find her own egg donor in the early 1990s, and successfully becoming pregnant, fertility specialists began approaching Diana asking for her help in finding egg donors for their own patients, at a time when only one other egg donor agency existed in the U.S. She quickly discovered that there was a desperate need for a company that understood empowering recipients with information about egg donors, and the emotional sensitivity to navigate through the process of involving another person in their reproductive life. Through her own personal experience, she created a company that catered to the needs of intended parents as well as brought the best quality of care to egg donors. For over 25 years, Diana’s egg donor agency, that evolved into The World Egg and Sperm Bank, has matched thousands of donors and couples nationwide and internationally. In 2004, she was one of three partners to start the first “frozen” egg bank in the world. Since then, The World Egg and Sperm Bank has increased egg donor options by shipping vitrified (frozen) eggs and sperm to recipients’ doctors around the globe, and as such, removed many geographic and emotional barriers for those who hope to one day have a child of their own. The World Egg and Sperm Bank is the only egg bank worldwide that focuses solely on egg and sperm donors, and the only bank that has full operational control in its own state of the art facility to manage all donor cycles, retrievals and egg and sperm freezing from one lab, and one location. This is a unique powerful benefit in managing quality control, and the data outcomes reflect the focus and efforts to continually improve pregnancy outcomes. Listen as Diana discusses with Ellen and Jenn: • After over 20 years of fertility treatments, working to find an egg donor on her own before egg donation was fully available. • Finding a potential donor, meeting her family, creating her own contract, and being in the room during the retrieval! • Finding out she only had a 12% chance of the embryo taking; transferring two and experiencing a disappearing twin. • How her son was one of the first 100 children born via egg donation. • Having triplets take, losing one, then delivering twins at 29 weeks. • How her second donor had complications getting pregnant and Diana was able to help her! • Finding ways to improve the egg donation process. • Being 100% open to allowing visitors to walk through their facility and see the process firsthand.