First Try “Successes”: Don’t Believe The Hype, or the Donors

Originally posted June 26, 2023

Many (most?) donors make a big deal about publicly announcing every time a recipient gets a positive pregnancy test. I guess this is fine, if a little tacky, provided that they get proper consent from the recipient. It is good for the ladies in the donor groups to see that successes are indeed happening. But one aspect of the typical success post, saying how many tries it took to succeed, is both unfortunate and typically deceptive. Specifically, donors making a big deal about “first try” successes (which most probably will be), gives a grossly misleading impression of how easy (or really hard) it is to get pregnant. I believe this contributes to ladies giving up, on either TTC in general or their donor in specific, way too early. Donors who make a big deal about their first try successes should also disclose how often their first tries don’t succeed (Hint: that number will always be much larger than their successes so this suggestion will be ignored).

The typical post goes something like this “my trip to sassafrasacola was a success, so happy to share another first cycle success, my third straight!”. A casual reader of this might well think that the last three ladies who this donor worked with got pregnant immediately. Surely, her chances will be at least 50% next month if she works with him! But this is not what the donor is saying at all. Rather, he is saying the last three of his recipients who wound up with a positive pregnancy test, got that positive on their first cycle trying with him. But who knows how many other recipients tried and did not wind up pregnant.

In my experience (and that of more experienced donors), it is the very rare lady who will attempt more than two or three cycles with the same donor. Many stop after one. So “first tries” are the most common attempt for donors. I would guess that around half my donations are first tries, though I don’t keep track. And wouldn’t you know it, over half of my success came on the first try! Probably around 60-70%.

But saying that 60-70% of success were on the first try, is a very different thing than saying that 60% of first tries are successes. They are not. To see why, imagine if every lady tried once and then switched donors. In that case, 100% of successes would be “first try” regardless of whether 5% or 30% or 99% of women were getting pregnant each cycle.

So what are your chances of getting pregnant in any given month? I plan to post separately on this. But even highly fertile women have well under a 50% chance of getting pregnant per month, probably around 30% TOPS. And unfortunately most recipients do not have optimal fertility, due to age and other factors. While it is nice to hope for the best, if you want to succeed and have a baby its better to be realistic. It will likely take uncommon patience and multiple cycles to succeed.  And if a donor claims that he gets recipients pregnant very quickly, be wary, because in all likelihood he is either a liar or deliberately only working with the most fertile recipients.