Aibu to ask how you chose your donor?

[Waiting4mumhood]

Interested in your stories, how did you make the choice? We have chosen a sperm donor through the clinic with very little forthought just our skin hair and eye colour, (we have same) but there are lots of donors in Europe or US and wondered if we should be considering it a bit more?

Hi
i know this is a bit late but when we chose our donor we didn't go too much on looks, we mostly went on personality and whether we felt like we'd 'get on' with the donor if we were to have met them IRL We used the European Sperm Bank so they do provide pictures of the donors as children. That was a back up for us. Once we'd narrowed down a few we then looked at pictures, but didn't choose based on whether they looked similar to either of us.

Hope this helps.

description of looks as in did he sound like someone i would fancied in real life. then those profiles narrowed down by reviewing family health history and his answers to questions to see if he sounded like someone with similar thoughts / interests / level of education as me.

We've used 3 different donors, two different ones from Cryos and one from the fertility clinic we were treated at.

Honestly, it wasn't worth buying from Cryos. We wasted so much money on bloody sperm as I didn't get pregnant (with viable babies) until we had gone through 6 cycles of IUI.

The one that succeeded, with twins even, was the sperm we got from the fertility clinic.

At the clinic you could only choose hair colour, eye colour and height and whether you wanted an anonymous donor (no contact ever) or an open contact donor (meaning the kids can contact donor when they turn 18)

We chose based on our looks mostly. My DP's hair colour, my eye colour and an average height of men in my country.

We discussed a very loose set of requirements - mainly about height (we are both tall) and potential eye colour. We went with a UK clinic where you don't get lots of info about a donor really. We left the clinic and they called an hour later to say that a planned match had been cancelled and did we want to proceed with that donor. Seemed like serendipity to us so we did and have two amazing children who look remarkably like each other and bits of their dad and noting whatsoever like me

I am going through this. I seem to be mainly going for looks!

My priorities are looks, health and fitness. But I have counselling today to discuss the donor search in more detail.

We had a choice of two donors who were a fair match at the time we had treatment which was probably just as well! We went for a 6'1" donor with non matching blood group rather than one 5'9" with matching because my husband is tall and we intended to tell (and have) any children about the donor. Went for saying husband has mid brown hair rather than the auburn gone mainly brown that he has. Funnily enough, both our daughter's were born with the same shade of coppery auburn hair that he had as a child anyway.

If don't know what else I'd have gone for and am quite glad I couldn't make too much of a "shopping list". Plenty of men who would tick every box are pretty awful!

Also, the person who's going to nurture that child is you, or you and your partner and so other things like qualifications etc can be a bit of a red herring.

My wife and I chose our sperm donor based on similar characteristics to us (we have the same hair and eye colour). All being well, I will be carrying the baby but it will be my wife’s egg and the donor sperm so we also wanted someone with a similar educational background and personality traits to me so even though genetically I wouldn’t be in the mix, maybe some similarities might make it in there.

We used an egg donor, and we only specified height (as I am very tall!) and dark features.

I wasn’t overly concerned as my husband and I have very different colouring - his family are all very fair and mine very dark, so it wouldn’t look ‘strange’ if our child has either.

The main thing I would hope my child inherits from their donor is their kindness, as being an egg donor is an incredibly kind act!