Reply to Those who used a donor egg and/or older mothers, are you happy with decision?

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[quote=Anonymous]I had twins at 44 from DE/DS (single mom by choice).  While it was a little weird at first to play matchmaker inside my uterus with gametes from two people I’ve never met, my twins are the light of my life and I don’t have one single regret.  (Oddly enough, people have said one of the twins resembles me).

A few things that helped reframe my thinking around donor eggs:

- We have 99.9% of our genes in common with other humans, 80% in common with cows, and 60% in common with bananas.  Any donor egg is going to be mostly genetically indistinguishable from yours.

- That last 0.1% is what you might consider “your” genetics - your hair, eye color, etc.  But is it really yours, and for how long?  As your kids marry and have kids of their own who marry, that small percentage will get recombined and overwritten until what was “yours” barely exists anymore. Parents and children only have 50% of their genes in common, grandchildren 25%, great-grandchildren 12%, and so on.  Genes get diluted over time with each new generation of descendants.

- Going back up the family tree, we’re all related if you go back far enough. Chances are good the donor will have some very distant genetic link to you.

- If you gestate the baby, it will be biologically yours.  Every cell in their body, every nutrient, every building block, will come from you.  Flesh of your flesh, etc.  You might not be the architect, but you’ll be the builder.

- I did struggle a bit with the ancestry piece.  My mom’s side of the family has a lot of family lore and history going back many generations, and it made me sad to think my kids wouldn’t share that link.  But I think of family history as the soil that nurtures the tree.  Sure, the seed may have blown in from some distant location, but the soil and the water and the microclimate of your family will shape the tree as it grows.

- Altruism may or may not have a genetic component, but it’s a wonderful thing to pass on. I don’t know if it’s because my kids are double donor offspring, but they are both kind and considerate.  They like knowing that their origins began with a gift.

- The high success rate. After several failed IUIs and IVF cycles and many, many tears, it was an amazing feeling to finally have strong, healthy embryos to choose from, and to have the IVF actually work. If someone came up to me now and offered me the chance to trade my DE twins for genetically related babies from my own aged, crappy eggs, I’d say HECK NO.

- They will be yours, in all the ways that are important. Parenthood isn’t encoded in DNA.[/quote]

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