Friday 9 August 2013

Choosing the Sperm Donor... Donor Number 1 Please Step Forward!

The most difficult part of this journey was choosing the sperm donor.  I know it sounds silly, but choosing the gene pool that is going to contribute to who your child will be in every way is somewhat different than picking a partner with whom you will make babies... you never get to meet the donor to find out if you would even like him, all you have to go on is what is in his profile.  

In Canada we don’t pay for sperm so as you can imagine we don’t have much of a ‘bank’.  Your options are the sperm banks in the states or Europe.  When I was looking I didn’t know about the sperm banks in Europe so I was looking at purchasing American sperm!  Nice... and it’s not cheap so you have to choose wisely!

It’s quite incredible how much information you have access to for each donor... the donor’s ethnicity, his medical history and that of his family, his interests, attributes such as height, eye colour etc.  What he does for living, why he is a donor, there are audio interviews and on and on.  What they don’t let you see right off the bat is pictures.  You can order photographs both of the donor in present day and baby photos, but you have to pay for them.  I started out having ordered a number of photos of donors and after the panic of choosing the other half of the DNA that would create my child in time to get the sperm shipped to catch the window of opportunity the first donor I chose had olive skin and green eyes. He was close to the look I was going for though I can’t say that I was all that clear about what that was...  Another donor that appealed to me wasn’t ‘Canadian compliant’ because we have more stringent testing protocols for sperm which limits our choice.  I used this first donor for a number of rounds of artificial insemination without success.  Next donor please... It’s good to change donors if success isn’t achieved in a few attempts because the sperm and egg might not be compatible for some reason.  The search continues...

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