Reply to Has anyone conceived through sperm donation from a known donor? Any advice?

Forum Index » Infertility Support and Discussion

Reply to "Has anyone conceived through sperm donation from a known donor? Any advice?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hi OP - we are also a married lesbian couple who, after literally years of discussion, decided to go with a known donor. He is a friend of both of ours, but really closer to my wife - they met in college. There were many reasons why we went this route: we didn't want a bunch of random half siblings out there (no chance of that with this donor - he's gay and will not be donating to anyone else or having kids of his own), we wanted our kids to actually know who their biological father is so there is no mysterious, life-giving being that they'll never meet, and we wanted full access to all of his family health history and medical information. They don't always catch everything even at a very thorough cryobank.

After he did an infectious disease test, we started doing AI at home (he gave us the sperm in a cup and I helped DW from there), and during that time he was also banking sperm at Fairfax Cryobank. There were many fees that we had to pay for testing, storage, etc. I want to say he had a window of time where he was able to come in and bank as much as he could. We also had a few more things we had to go through because he's gay - like his sperm had to sit in quarantine for six months and he had to be tested for infectious diseases again. By that time we  set ourselves up to start doing IUIs and working with Shady Grove. They did require that he meet with a social worker, take an extensive personality test, we had to meet with her as a couple, then all three of us met. This part felt the most invasive. After that he was pretty much out of the picture except needing to sign a few things when we switched clinics.

After our two kids were born we also went through a second parent adoption for me, but because the kids were born in DC, we adopted there, so the donor had nothing to do with any of that process and my name went directly on the birth certificate.

Feel free to respond back here if you have other questions! Our kids have a relationship with the donor, but not a weird one (he is NOT fatherly AT ALL). They also have a relationship with his parents, which is really sweet and unexpectedly uncomplicated. Our older son knows his origin story - we told him when he started K. No issues there either. [/quote]

Why did you have to do a second parent adoption if you are married?[/quote]

Because the other parent is not legally the parent and if something happens to the biological parent, legally the other parent is a step-parent, not parent.  Likewise, if there is a legal divorce or separation, legally the non-biological parent is a step-parent and may not be given equal rights.  Much better to do an adoption.  Its not very expensive.

We have an open option with birth mom's family.  The grandparents are heavily involved and its been wonderful for all of us, especially our child.  Child views it as three sets of grandparents and is very comfortable with it and a lot of those questions kids have later on never come up as its been addressed.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics