Hello!
Right, sorry, this will be a long one. I'm currently just pregnant and have done it with anonymous donor sperm (I'll be a single mum). But, immediately before that, I did an unsuccessful round of IVF with a friend who wanted to co-parent. Please excuse me if you already know some things I say!
First off: I didn't know, but using a known donor is a right faff. The clinic will have to quarantine his sperm for six months in case it's carrying traces of STDs not detectable in the blood. Some clinics do not have the facilities to do this, and will not treat you.
Secondly: I know it sounds obviously, but it is a legal and emotional minefield. I made choices that were absolutely risky (and I knew they were at the time), and plenty of people manage things far more carefully and sensibly, with lots of good legal advice. (Get the legal advice). A useful tool is the government's Cafcass plan (google it). It's designed for divorcing parents of an existing child, but can be helpful. However, things I would consider:
- if you have the baby, how will he support you financially (eg., for loss of earnings during maternity and if you become the child's main carer, for pension contributions, etc. etc.)? Not saying financial support is a deal breaker, but you don't want to end up feeling resentful later on.
- How will the child share time between you? Early on, will he (for example) stay over some nights? Will he be more of an 'uncle' early on? Will he end up having the baby on his own at weekends or 50/50? If so, how will that transition work?
- What does he know about pregnancy, labour and the postpartum period? Will he be your support system here, or will it be (say) your mother or sister?
- What will happen if the baby is born needing extra care - or if the baby needs extra care for life?
Talk to him a lot about how he understands parenting.
But also, talk to him about the immediate process. I am now getting into my own experience, and it is brutal, but maybe it's useful!
My friend is a gay man considerably older than me; he has a partner; I had known for a long time he regretted not having children. On the face of it, there were lots of positives. We live close by. We get on well. We have similar values. He adored my daughter and I could see he was in many ways an excellent parental figure with her. He was very prepared to think about how co-parenting would work, and I think in many respects it could have worked very well between us. However.
He couldn't understand how physically and emotionally hard IVF would be, let alone pregnancy or the postpartum period. I had a pretty clear perspective on this, as my daughter is my (female) ex-partner's biological child, so I had effective 'done' the dad role. And I knew how very hard it was for my ex-partner with a newborn. I knew that when she came home from hospital, on morphine, having had an emergency c-section, she simply couldn't have been left at home alone to get on with caring for a (quite fragile and sick) newborn.
I never manged to get him to understand any of this in the slightest. He was utterly bemused that IVF made me tired and emotional, and he was furious with me for suggesting I might need a doula to come and stay with me for a few days after a baby was born, because he honestly thought no one ought to need that kind of help.
I've been on MN for <mumble mumble> too many years, and I know lots of women's actual partners can be absolutely crap about this stuff. I have seen all the threads about men who whinge that their partners aren't whizzing around spring-cleaning the house and cooking gourmet meals 24 hours after traumatic births. But it really frightened and upset me. And it made me aware of how very, very, very unaware of childbirth men can be - even men who do a decent job of talking the talk.
Finally - please consider how it might feel if it doesn't work, and you lose the friendship. Our round of IVF ended with non-viable embryos, and it really upset me, because I had got so excited about that baby. In the end you are grieving not just for an imagined baby but for a whole family set-up, which is an odd and diffcult kind of grief. In my case, he was so furious that it didn't work - with me, with the world; just in general - that I felt totally blindsided. It really knocked me for six.
By contrast, doing a round with donor sperm was fine. I would have loved to have a hand to hold during the embryo transfer (it was a bit upsetting because the clinic had just told me they were destroying the other embryos that hadn't made it). But honestly, I could have just planned that better and taken a friend. In general it has felt very positive. FWIW my DD is donor-conceived too, and she's wonderful.
Apols for the essay!