Donor sperm IVF, is ICSI necessary?

Hi there! What’s up? Hope you are all fine… Let me introduce myself… My girlfriend and I are a lesbian couple, and we wish to have a lovely child 🙂 We’ve been doing some research and visiting some fertility clinics to get all the info we can about the treatments available and all that staff.

We’ve been surfing the internet as well, and that’s how we’ve come to this forum. Anyhow, we have to rule out every chance of doing a donor insemination because of our age, we are 41 and 43, so our chances to get pregnant are almost non-existent.

As for shared motherhood (reception of oocytes of the partner), firstly it was attractive for us, since it was a 50-50 chance to have a baby of our own, or at least half of my own, half of my partner’s… But we’ve dismissed it as well because we found out it is a long process and we are planning to get married and have our baby home ASAP.

So finally we think doing a donor-sperm IVF would be the best alternative for us, given our situation and our age. What we did not know was there are two types of IVF, in fact I’ve never heard of that before… There’s conventional IVF and IVF/ICSI, right? Okay, what’s the main difference between them? Is ICSI necessary even if we are going to use donor sperm?

Thanks a lot! Xxx

Dear HopefulAnticipation,

As you may already know, to perform an AI, the woman has to have a normal ovarian reserve as well as tubal patency; therefore, if you are 41 and 43, the success rate may diminish, provided that the ovarian reserve diminishes as a woman ages. That is the reason why you have to resort to IVF instead of donor insemination.

As for ICSI or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, it is used in cases of sever male factor such as low sperm concentration teratozoospermia, etc. To sum up, it is used when there is a severe sperm pathology in the man. Thus, given that you are using a sperm donor, whose semen sample is of optimal quality, there’s no need to perform an ICSI.

Best wishes