Why reporting is important

Why is pregnancy reporting important for every family?

We ask all recipients to report their pregnancies, embryos stored for future use, and pregnancy outcomes. Reporting pregnancies to TSBC has important benefits for families, donors and other recipients. We use this information to maintain our 10 family limit, provide families access to our ongoing family services and new health reports, and more!

Ten-family limit

We limit our donors to ten families. While ten families may seem like a lot, it is one of the lowest limits nationally. We believe a lower family limit provides the best outcomes for families and donors, especially for families with donors in our Identity-Release® Program. Prompt reporting of pregnancies and pregnancy outcomes allows us to maintain this limit while unreported pregnancies, delayed reporting, and vials or embryos stored at clinics without our knowledge, can lead to a donor having more than ten families.

Ongoing family services

TSBC’s ongoing family services, including our Identity-Release® Program and Family Contact List, are other reasons it is important to report all pregnancies. Families must report their births to be eligible for these programs so that we can confirm the donor number and match the correct individuals. Furthermore, we believe our low family limit contributes to the success of these programs. The prospect of contact with two, five or even nine families can be exciting while the possibility of contact with twenty, thirty or more families (as reported from families who used other donor programs) can be overwhelming. Similarly, we believe that the 10 family limit is reassuring to donors participating in our Identity-Release® Program.

Future health reports

Reporting conceptions and their outcomes is also critical to tracking and notifying recipients about health issues. Donor insemination is a human process and on occasion we receive reports from parents about potentially genetic health issues in their children. When we receive such a report, or if we receive a report from a donor about a new condition in their family, we evaluate whether this new information causes increased risk to other offspring from the donor. In some instances we conclude that sharing this information is in the best interests of other children conceived by the donor and we proactively notify families. If we are not aware that a family has a child from the donor then we are unable to provide them with this new health information.

Similarly it is very important for recipients to report miscarriages. The miscarriage rate for our recipients is 25% or greater depending on the age of the recipient. While we anticipate some miscarriages as a biological reality of the conception process, there have been cases where we stopped releasing vials from a donor with excessively high miscarriage rates.

Pregnancy rates

TSBC keeps statistics on pregnancy rates by recipient age, insemination method, number of inseminations, and whether medication or alternative treatments were used to enhance fertility. A summary of this information is available on our website. This information helps us assess the success of our program and enables us to provide accurate information about how long it takes to conceive and the likelihood of conception per cycle attempt.

For all of these reasons we ask our families to report pregnancies and (all) pregnancy outcomes to us within 60 days. Timely reporting benefits all of our families—especially those doing the reporting—as well as those trying to conceive.