Where did you get your donor sperm from?

[BlueSlice]

And why did you choose that specific place/route?

DP and I (same sex relationship) have started looking for donors and it’s so overwhelming. I don’t know where to look!

I really want to try and look into all our options and work out what would be best for us. All experiences and opinions are very, very welcome!

Hello,

The clinic we originally were using (we've since changed) had a fairly tight list of sperm banks they would accept. All of them had such limited stock (we're both white and very fair so we had fairly narrow choices) but we seemed to find more matches with European Sperm Bank and bonus was they had baby photos of the donors. I kept my eye on the other banks but mostly pursued our search witH ESB, it took a few months for a donor we liked to come back into stock and as soon as he did he sold out almost immediately so we had to be ready to go!

Do you know what clinic you are going with? As they don't all accept sperm from everywhere.

I had no idea! Thank you so much for answering.

We have a preferred clinic in mind but haven’t approached them for an appointment yet. I wanted to have more of an idea of a donor before we did so that we’d be ready to go straight away and weren’t wasting any time, but perhaps I’ve got that the wrong way round and we should book an appointment first!

I think you could just call them and find out which banks they accept sperm from. You right as of everything the sperm donor search took the longest but definitely no harm in having an appointment! Good luck!

Thanks so much!

Like @SteffieIUI the clinic I used had a list of acceptable sperm banks. I used xytex as this was the one I found a profile I preferred.

Does anyone have any advice around looking for a sperm donor?

The clinic I used had their own bank plus they accepted the European sperm bank as they're preferred sperm bank. The clinics options were much cheaper but it was only available for IVF and ICSI so we ended up using the ESB

How did you go about picking a donor? What were the key factors for choosing?

@Shez35 Its a totally personal decision I guess. We picked someone who didn't have hereditary health problems in their immediate family excluding aunts, uncles ect.

I used Xytex too. My only hard criteria was race, but I found a donor whose written statement really resounded with me, he had such a similar family background, career history, skills and interests that I couldn’t pass him up. Fortunately his facial features and body type make it look like he could be in my family already (he’s definitely not!) and he’d also had the extended genetic testing which was negative for everything.
I got 30 days free full membership with Xytex so it was great to be able to see all the details of the profiles. I had originally found a donor I really liked on ESB but before I got to the point where I could order anything he was already sold out for UK patients. I’m quite glad now, feels like this one was meant to be. Fingers crossed the science works now...

This is all really helpful, thanks so much.

Thanks so much - I appreciate your responses. Time to narrow down my search and get my order in.