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Firm Offers Women Hope Through Egg Donors: Owner Puts Personal Touch on Contacts

Posted on: Saturday, 13 May 2006, 09:05 CDT

By Kat Bergeron, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

May 13--The heartbreak of three unsuccessful pregnancies led Lisa Thomas to found Gulf Coast Donors LLC, a new business in Mississippi and Southeast Louisiana that helps match potential egg donors with potential parents.

"Some women are unable to achieve pregnancy on their own, either because they are unable to produce eggs or their eggs are not viable," said Thomas, 47, a registered nurse with more than 20 years of experience in neonatal and pediatric intensive care.

"Egg donation gives women the hope of becoming a mother, the joy of bearing a baby, of feeling the baby kick and to be there when the baby is born and put on your stomach in those first minutes. My 3-year-old is adopted and even though I love him with all my heart and all my soul, I truly feel that I missed so much in not getting to carry him myself."

Thomas describes egg donation as a blessing to women unable to conceive on their own.

In addition to nursing, Thomas formerly owned and operated a Louisiana home health-care agency that specialized in pediatric patients. Although she currently lives in Lafayette with her two children and petroleum engineer husband, she had two houses in Pass Christian and was in the process of moving from one to the other when Hurricane Katrina claimed both.

She hopes to rebuild in Pass Christian but also maintains an apartment in Jackson, where she will be nearer Mississippi clients and the University of Mississippi's Reproductive Endocrinology, a fertility clinic that will work with Gulf Coast Donors clients.

Thomas' role is to find suitable donors who pass health and psychological screenings and to help match them with recipients. The recipients will use in vitro fertilization, a 25-year-old laboratory method that uses the husband's sperm to create an embryo that is implanted into the wife's uterus.

Egg donors, Thomas said, are usually women between ages 20 to 27 who are at the height of fertility and are mature, reliable and lead healthy lifestyles. The donor is paid $4,500 to $6,500 for "procurement procedures," which include pre-testing, medication to produce more eggs and a clinical procedure to harvest the eggs.

"The donor gets paid whether or not the eggs make a baby," Thomas said. "The recipient pays for everything, her and the donor's medical tests, doctors' fees, my fees, medicine, travel-related expenses. It can be well over $20,000 and there's no guarantee it will work, but the success rate is getting better and better.

"I'm not giving away my services, but I'm keeping my fees reasonable. I'm doing something that will put so much good in people's lives. All the potential donors that I have talked to say they want to do it, because 'they want to help.'

Since late April when Thomas began her donor search, 20 women have contacted her. From those she has six whom she will try to match with recipients, who in turn will make choices based on the donor's intelligence, eye and hair color or other familial features.

"The donor and the recipient will decide if they want to know each other," Thomas said. "I give them the choice of being totally anonymous, partially anonymous or full disclosures. There are legal forms everyone must sign."

Thomas meets with every potential donor and said she does not want to put their faces and profiles on the Internet, as some national donor agencies do.

"I'm driving all over Louisiana and Mississippi because I want to personally meet with them," Thomas said. "I could go on the Web and make a ton of money and a ton of clients but I don't want to do what so many are doing. This is a very private, personal decision for both parties."

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About Gulf Coast Donors

What: A new agency founded by Lisa Thomas to locate egg donors for couples wanting to achieve pregnancy through live-egg in vitro fertilization. The agency will use guidelines established by the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.

On the Web: www.gulfcoastdonors.com

Phone: (228) 424-8799

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: The Sun Herald (Biloxi, Miss.)

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