How do you choose half of your child's genetic heritage?
You fall in love. The thought rises to your mind unbidden: "You will be such a good father". There are months spent wondering whether your baby will have his eyes. In the best case scenario you know and love your child's genetics.
Of course it's not always like that.
In my case, I procrastinated for three weeks and then, following an impatient email from the fertility clinic and a rushed Skype conversation, chose a donor from a catalogue online and ordered sperm during my lunch break.
We know a lot about him. We have his medical profile and that of his parents and siblings. We know his hobbies, that his favourite animal is a golden retriever, that he struggled with alcoholism in his youth. We have a photograph taken when our donor was roughly the same age as our twins are now and the resemblance is striking. We have a tape recording of his voice, a letter in which he commands his offspring's parents to "cherish them" and wishes the children the best.
Following our experience, I was surprised to read this week that the UK's national sperm bank was keen to "kick the foreign banks out of business". The case was made that the UK system would be 'kinder' to those conceived using donor sperm because it limited the number of families created by each donor. How altruistic of them.
I don't know anybody who went to Denmark in order to conceive a child. I, and the other families I know, bought the sperm from overseas but shipped it here for treatment.
Our children were conceived using sperm imported from the European Sperm Bank (ESB). Sperm met egg during IVF at a London clinic - the fact that we had fertility treatment in a UK-based clinic meaning that the sperm that we purchased from the Denmark-based ESB was of the more expensive 'UK-compliant' variety. UK-compliant sperm is subject to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Association's 10-family rule and from a non-anonymous donor. Our children will, if they desire, be given their genetic father's name, passport number and last known address if they request it once they are over 18. For our slot among the donor's ten families we paid €1000 Euros to the HFEA. To the clinic, we paid €100 for three months of access to their donor catalogue. We also paid €370 for our sample of sperm and €300 to have it shipped to our London clinic. We funded our IVF privately.
So how do you choose half of your child's genetic heritage? We made an account with every sperm bank our clinic recommended. Of the clinic that we used, only 68 donors were UK-compliant. Of those, 23 tested negative for Cytomegalovirus antibodies, like me. We stared at 23 infant photographs, read 23 medical profiles, considered 23 donor letters about their hopes for their offspring, and we made our choice.
Would it have made a difference to us if there were a functioning clinic in the UK? No. Like every parent we want the best for our children. The brightest future. The best genetics. When making a baby becomes analytical rather than emotive, you start to wonder whether it mightn't be kinder to choose somebody who might counteract your own height of five-foot-nothing. Whose 'science brain' might give your child a hope of passing maths. You shop around for 'the best'.
Ultimately we chose somebody older, with the maturity to commit to adult children potentially turning up on his doorstep in eighteen years' time. Somebody who wrote us a beautiful letter. Somebody who seemed kind.
Laura Witjens, chief of the UK National Sperm Bank, has said Danish banks are recruiting donors by appealing to male vanity. As a keen future surrogate I can attest to the fact that one can think that one is fantastic enough at baby-making for it to be a shame not to lend a helping hand, whilst still wishing the best for the potential parents and child. I don't believe narcissism is the driving force behind sperm donation - I think that, if anything, donation rates are higher in Denmark because students are supplementing their income by donating. Does it matter to us? No. My children may one day meet the man who helped to conceive them but he will never be their father. It would be naïve to expect his part in their conception to be driven by pure altruism.
For us, we would have considered sperm from a UK sperm clinic but it wouldn't have eliminated the other options; even the Danish sperm banks don't have enough subjects on their books to do that.
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Guest post: "We chose a donor online and ordered sperm in my lunch break"
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 02/09/2015 15:45
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