Today I'm going to tell you the story about how I picked my children's sperm
donor - including how and why I ended up having to change donors. Plus I'm also
going to give you my top ten tips on how to pick a donor for yourself. The process
for choosing an egg or an embryo donor is probably very similar to how you
would choose a sperm donor, except for the fact that there's usually a lot less
choice available in egg and embryo donors. Hi I'm Amy and welcome to my cozy
little corner of the Internet, where I share motherly advice on building
diverse families and improving family relationships. If you're new here I'd
like to introduce you to my five children. I've got a 22 year old son plus
two sets of girl boy twins who were both conceived with donor sperm. So today's
subject was selected from the poll that we did on which topic you most wanted to
see next; and talking about tips on choosing donors was the one that showed
up most. And so I was living in Sydney at the time that I selected my first donor
and at that particular clinic I was given a book of donor profiles and they
included all of the donor profiles, but they would tell you up front as they
gave it to you, that they weren't going to allow you to use the dark-skinned
donors because everybody fights over those and so you had to actually provide
a justification. So either you had to be dark skinned yourself, or your partner had to
be, or you had to already have a child who was a dark skinned child, to be able
to pick a dark skinned donor. But from the rest of them - what I particularly liked about
this clinic was they had asked the more recent donors to write a little
paragraph about why they wanted to be donors. And so I gravitated immediately
to the newer ones who I could get a bit of a flavor of what their feelings were
about their donation and their reasoning behind it. And I developed a real
attachment to a particular donor who'd just written a lovely little story about
he was one of a gazillion children - I forget something like nine or ten
children. He was a twin. I was adamant I was going to have twins even in those
days. And there was redheads in the family - and I have no idea why it is, but
my brother and I have a real soft spot for redheads.
He just sounded lovely. He sounded like a nice everyday guy, and his reasoning for
wanting to be a donor was to do with having really, really, long lived family
- very healthy people, and he just wanted to share his good fortune. He was also
really openly receptive to future contact with any children who might be
conceived as a result of his donation. And those to me were just like marvellous
qualities. So I don't really think I went any further than that. I just went
straight with this donor. But several rounds of assisted fertility treatment
later and I had had a number of unsuccessful attempts and not gotten
pregnant and ended up moving to Queensland
while I still had frozen embryos in storage from this donor. I'd never gotten
a lot of frozen embryos. I tended to have lots of eggs but then not a lot of them
would fertilise well. But I still had some - maybe five or six - frozen embryos in
storage from previous cycles from this donor. But when I moved to Queensland the
first thing I learned was: obviously I had to go to a new clinic and a new doctor
I didn't want to travel back to Sydney and there is a quarantine period between
our states, so I had to wait six months from physically bringing up my embryos
which was a long costly difficult process anyway - and then there was a
quarantine period for six months after that before they could actually be used
in a frozen embryo transfer. So after much thinking and because I was already
at the stage of realizing that, you know, perhaps it just wasn't going to work
with this donor. Perhaps it was me. I had known - many known - fertility issues
already. But it's also the case that a clinic generally will recommend that you
try a different donor if you're not having success with a particular donor.
And so with that advice in mind I selected a new donor at my new clinic
and this was a completely different experience. And it was told to me that
partly the reason for the different experience was because I had a really
long established history of infertility. When they did additional testing I came
back with even worse results than I had previously.
I think they were basically concerned about their statistics. Like, they don't
want their statistics blown by a patient who won't get pregnant. And so they
set aside a couple of donors who had particularly high success rates, and said
to me: okay you literally, you have two donors to select from. You can have
donor A or donor B ... but we feel like you're more likely to be successful with
these two donors, based on these two donors past history of people tending to
get pregnant very easily. And so bearing in mind that I already had a child - so my
decision process might have been quite different if I didn't already have a
child - but I did already have a child and my child was a little curly, blonde, brown-
eyed boy with a medium skin tone ... and I wanted to make sure that he would feel
like he was part of his family. So he was kind of an average-to-short kind of
height, and so I guess that it made the decision-making really easy, between the
particular two donors I was offered. Because one was I think six foot five. He
was huge. He was really, really tall; black hair, olive skin, and and the other donor
that I was offered was medium small and very fair hair, fair skin, and blue eyes.
and and I thought overall the ... any resulting babies would be more likely to
look like my elder son if I used that donor. So that's the one that I chose and
that's pretty much the reason I chose to go for that one. I had very little
information. They wouldn't release any additional information about him at all.
I wasn't even allowed to read what they did have; and the reason was allegedly
that until you have success with a particular donor you don't have any real
rights to the information about that donor. I understand that the clinic's
changed their policies since then which is good, because that was pretty bad. So
I won't expand on this story too much because it's not directly relevant to
choosing a donor, but just to satisfy curiosity: they actually on the day
of egg retrieval said to me that they suggested that I switched to the other
donor because the last batch of this particular donor that I'd chosen's sperm
hadn't been particularly terrific. But with like seconds to go before surgery
I just was completely unable to wrap my brain around the idea of completely
changing donor so I'd said no I'll stick with the one that I'd already selected
so that's what we did and ultimately I did get pregnant with Jayse & Gypsy. And
just for the record I did eventually do frozen embryo transfers with the
remaining embryos that I'd brought up from New South Wales and it just
happened that none of them worked. And so eventually as Jayse & Gypsy got older and
I ran out of those frozen embryos I started to try to conceive again - and
eventually succeeded with the same donor. So all four of the twins do have the
same donor. I did another video very recently about pathways to pregnancy
through the use of donor sperm and eggs and so on, and in that particular video
I've already talked about the differences between anonymous donors and
ID release donors and known donors. And in my particular case my children were
conceived using an anonymous donor. But I would strongly recommend to other people
to use ID release donors which are much more commonly available nowadays. I
personally have quite a bias against known donors, but if you have a look at that
video it'll explain why. You'll find that in the description below. So the first of
my top ten tips is to consider how much sperm is actually available. Your
decision making process is going to be different if you're just adamant that
you only ever want to have one child versus if you think you'd like to have a
big family and you want to have an opportunity to complete your family
using the same donor. So for practical reasons of course it would be
advantageous if you had a lot of samples already saved and available at your
clinic. Number two is all about the cost. If you're having to import sperm, that
can be a really expensive process versus if there's sperm locally
available. And it also makes a difference in - again - how much is available to whether
or not you will need to reserve sperm versus just access sperm from the pool
supply that's already available. If you do need to reserve sperm to ensure that
there's enough available for you and for your family and future, the freezing
costs are usually billed six monthly at most clinics, and they can be quite
expensive and particularly if you're reserving sperm for a certain number of
years until such time as you're finished having babies - those costs can add up
monumentally. Number three is actually considering how many live
babies have been born as a result of this particular donor. All of the clinics
do a lot of testing to ensure that there's an adequate number and quality
of sperm that's available when they when they accept a donation, but the truth
does seem to be that there is a fair variation between which sperm works and
which doesn't. And sometimes there just does seem to be more compatibility
between some people and some donors versus others. So particularly for older
mums, and mums who are on tight budgets, and also for people who have known
fertility issues, it can be quite an advantage to consider whether or not
your donor has a history - a significant history - of success versus failure in
producing live babies. So tip number four is to consider the ethnic background and
coloring and characteristics of the donor to the extent that you have them
available. I've never seen photos of donors and even if you do have a photo
available, it's probably going to be a baby photo. But some people like to have
a look at their donor. And the reason why we look at physical characteristics is
that we tend to like our children to look somewhat like us, like their
siblings if we already have older children ... But in my experience you
honestly really care very little when it comes right down to it. Heritability is
just such a pot luck thing. And when your children are born, whether or not they
have the height or the colouring or anything else that you thought they
might have - you just really don't care. Number five: I've known many people who care
intensely about the intellect and the personality of the donor
on the theory that those characteristics can be quite heritable.
Number six is to consider - if the information is available - about any
sporting or musical kind of talents that might also be heritable. I've got to say
though that people really overestimate - in my opinion - how heritable those things are. I
honestly think it's just a big media drama exaggeration that paints parents
who conceive with donor sperm as being trying to build designer babies. I don't
think there's any evidence whatsoever that where medical science is anywhere
close to being able to do that. And even if we were I'm not really convinced that
a whole lot a lot of people would bother trying. Number seven: It's not just about
trying to match physical characteristics and qualities with yourself or your
partner or your elder children if you have some. There is a fair degree to
which people will try to correct what they perceive as being a lack in their
own genetic material. So for example many of us are gonna be tempted to seek out a
darker-skinned donor because it's not just a fashion thing it's it's
protective in a country where skin cancer rates are just so high. And another
example yes I think it is a thing that if you're a bit on the short side you do
tend to favor a taller donor in hopes that your children might turn out to be
slightly more regular sized. I don't personally see anything wrong with that.
Number eight. Most people will give at least some
degree of consideration to heritable physical conditions and vision
impairments and other sort of health related issues. So for example I have
asthma and I have allergies. And I feel really fortunate that I only have one
child who has asthma - and although they all suffer from allergies to some degree -
But if I'd had an option of donors that had a history of asthma in the family
versus not ... for me that would have been a much bigger consideration. Whereas
somebody who didn't have that family history, that might not be such a big
deal? Number nine: Receptivity to contact. It's just about whether or not the
donors hopes for the future are compatible with yours. So I have
absolutely no idea what my children's donor's feelings about contact might be?
Because there's no evidence that he was ever asked the question and nobody has
any memory of what his (or guess of what his) attitude might be? But if you do
have an opportunity to find somebody who has a compatible hope and expectation as
you do, then that would make a better match. Number 10: What country they're
from, for so many reasons. So starting with the idea of contact, it turns out
that my children's donor was from Canada. I had no idea. He was living in Australia
at the time that he donated, but it seems like he returned to Canada after that. If
I'd known that he wasn't an Australian citizen I ... well I'm grateful that I
didn't know because I would have missed out on these children - and they're
definitely the ones that I want. But at the same time I ... that's not a thing I
would have chosen because it obstructs the potential for any sort of contact to
occur later on - if that's what my children want when they're older. But
apart from that, you've still got the considerations of cost because
transporting frozen sperm or eggs or embryos is not a simple procedure. It's
very expensive. There are quarantine restrictions. And there's all sorts of
considerations about when the donor children are born, will there be diblings?
Will there be other children who are conceived of that donor? What are the
opportunities for contact with those children? and just all of the usual
considerations for what sort of storage costs are going to be involved, and as I
mentioned earlier: selecting a donor isn't necessarily the end of the story
because sometimes you do find that for various reasons you're medically
advised to try a different one. My personal observation has been that the
women who have the most difficulty in choosing a donor are the ones who
haven't had any children and who seem to be thinking about it in terms of which
of the profiles available look
the most dateable to them. But
when it comes to family building I can't personally see how those sort of
considerations are going to help you in your decision-making process. But in any
case my biggest advice is just to understand that you honestly just don't
care in the end. Whatever child you get, you are gonna be so grateful that you
have that child. You will ... your skin will run cold ...
like I get little hairs prickling up on my body and like it scares me to just a
phenomenal degree when I consider that I might not have chosen this particular
donor and I might not have ended up with these particular children. You get the
children that you're meant to have is my personal belief. Before my older twins
were born I remember feeling like it was probably going to be a very unusual
thing that I had donor conceived babies. So I'm really interested to know: please
vote in the poll and let me know how prevalent you think that donor
conception is? What's your perception of how many people actually go ahead and
use donor sperm or donor eggs or donor embryos to complete their families? If
you're still watching this video I hope it's because you found it helpful and
interesting and didn't just fall asleep to the sound of my lovely lullaby voice.
If so please give it a like. If you'd like to Ask AMY a question, just
#AskAMY in the comments below or tweet me @Fortune8Family. Don't forget
to subscribe if you haven't already. My videos come out at the beginning of
every week end. You'll find more information in the description below
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