This article was written several years ago, before my divorce and remarriage. I include it here since so many have told me that it was helpful to them.
There are some crossroads in life you never expect to see. When you find yourself there, you may spend as much time baffled by the location as you do making a decision about which road to choose. Choosing a sperm donor is like this. I know because I have spent the last two weeks trying to choose the biological father my child will likely never know.
My husband has muscular dystrophy and I have polycystic ovarian syndrome. I don’t ovulate and his genes are risky. With the form of muscular dystrophy he has there is a 50% chance that the baby would inherit the disease that is stealing my husband’s strength, his balance, and his dreams. We decided to use donor insemination to protect our child from this disease. Then we learned that he has zero sperm count anyway, so a donor is the only option if I am to have a biological child.
Many couples choose to use a donor because of male infertility. Some women choose a donor when there is no potential father in sight while their biological chance of having a baby becomes important because of age. Others, like us, choose a donor because of the possibility of passing along genes that could drastically affect their child’s future.
You buy sperm in one “unit” vials, prices range from $210-$500 and more per vial. The more expensive banks promote their samples as coming from more educated donors (doctorate DNA anyone?). Screening processes for health and family health history seem to be about the same among clinics. All of them are required to test a potential donor for a variety of sexually transmitted diseases. They then hold the frozen samples for 6 months and test the donor again to be sure nothing new has cropped up. If the donor tests clean both times, then the samples are released for potential purchase.
My doctor recommended three banks he works with regularly and I soon found myself surfing through what the sperm banks call “short profiles.” These are the scraps of information that they give you while you try to make one of the most important but uncertain choices you will make in treating infertility. Eye color, hair color, height, some family health history, a few hobbies, education level–these are the basics of making a decision. How can you decide on a biological father with these tiny bits of information?
Some clinics offer long profiles, “staff impressions,” personality tests, baby photos, the chance for your child to know who the donor is after they turn 18, and voice clips. A few even offer photos of some of their donors as adults. Of course, knowledge comes with a price. In general, the more you want to know the more you will pay. Each of these services are offered at a separate fee. Some clinics will also allow you to send in a photo and their staff will match the photo to a donor as much as possible. If you don’t plan to tell anyone you used a donor, this could be a useful. In our case, it seemed silly because our families already know about my husband’s disease.
The clinics that offer these services also tend to be the more expensive to start with. So, you ask yourself, “What is all this worth to my child? Can I put a price on being able to put a human face on an otherwise anonymous donor?” This can make you crazy very quickly when money is not something you have in abundance.
We ended up choosing the lowest priced of the three clinics my doctor recommended. I didn’t see much difference in the basics of the profiles, all were in college or had graduated. The clinic I chose offers a “long profile” and a genetic analysis for a pretty reasonable fee of $15. They don’t offer some of the fancier options like personality tests and voice clips. I find it annoying to have to pay extra for more information about the donor. I am dropping $1,000 on a few sperm samples. I think I should get all the information they have for free. It feels a lot like buying a car without seeing more than the classified ad “Red car, new tires, no major problems.”
When you are working with really basic information you have no choice but to choose what seems like pretty random characteristics. Details that would not even enter my mind if I were adopting suddenly take on huge importance. We had to narrow down our choices and we didn’t have much to go on.
Everyone in both of our families has blue or green eyes. So, we decided that blue eyes were important. Not because we care what color our child’s eyes are, but because I really don’t want to discuss the issue fo using a donor with every idot who asks how our kid got brown eyes when our eyes are both light.
My husband is very tall and many people in my family are very, well, vertically challenged. We didn’t want to risk having a son who got my family’s short genes in addition to those of a short donor. I had visions of our son doomed to a life of buying suits in the boys department. So we ruled out anyone less than 5′10″. Then we ruled out anyone with a family history of severe allergies, cancer, heart disease or diabetes. No sense in doubling the risks I am passing along since these disease are potentially in my genes. This left us with one donor.
I don’t know what this person is like. The profile say they like to read and spend time outdoors. This does start to feel like a bizarre dating service. I half expected to read that long walks on the beach and soft jazz music are his favorites too.
So, as I await our first intrauterine insemination I am left to ponder so many things. Does he have a bad temper? Is he an unbearably picky eater? Does his red hair come with freckles? Will my brown hair genes give us an auburn haired child or will my red highlights lead to red hair for our baby? When he says his hair is curly, does this mean my curly hair DNA and his will combine to an Orphan Annie look our daughter will hate when she is 13? Does he have an oddly shaped nose? Nowhere in the profile does it say what his nose looks like.
When you have little to go on you think weird things. Focusing on all of this keeps my mind off the more important question of whether the insemination will work before our money rusn out. In the end, we’ll be happy with a baby.
