The millennials who choose their friends as sperm donors

When Alice, now 39, started thinking about having a child on her own, the idea of ​​using a sperm bank seemed “very strange” to her.

He didn’t know how to choose from the list of potential donors, whose attributes ranged from one extreme to the other: bassists, English university students, and blue-eyed men. For Alice, choosing a close friend as a donor “seemed simpler and richer.”

Today, Alice’s daughter, whose biological father is a friend Alice lived with during college, is 3 years old.

“It was the obvious choice,” he says of his donor. “Honestly, I don’t have that many cis male friends that are really close.” Over lunch, she asked him if he would be willing to donate her sperm, and he said yes.

Alice remains in close contact with her donor and her partner, whom Alice and her own partner refer to as their daughter’s “uncle” and “aunt”.

“I liked the idea of ​​my son having a relationship with him. [donante]says Alice, who lives in California. She also presented the “possibility of broader community and family structures queer (a youterm borrowed from English that encompasses people with a sexual or gender identity that does not correspond to established ideas of sexuality and gender).

Over the past several years, the gap between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ people planning to expand their families has been narrowing.

According to 2018 data from the US-based LGBTQ Family Building Survey, 48% of LGBTQ millennials have made the decision to increase their family size, compared to 55% of non-LGBTQ millennials.

In contrast to previous figures, almost 70% of non-LGBTQ people over the age of 55 have children, compared to just 28% of LGBTQ people in that age group.

Personal experience

For certain LGBTQ couples who cannot have biological children together, Sperm donations have become increasingly attractive.

Australian data from 2018, for example, indicates that single women and lesbian couples accounted for 85% of sperm donor recipients that year.

many couples queer who are looking for sperm want the experience to be personalwhich means choosing to know who the sperm donor is.

Several reasons drive this choice, such as meet the biological parents of the future child, be in contact with them for medical consultations and create a extended family.

While this is possible if a couple goes to a sperm bank or other type of connection service, choosing a friend or family member for the donation is less expensive.

Regardless, these choices require a careful and deliberate process of thought involving emotional, financial, and legal considerations that affect not only the lives of parents and donors, but also those of their future children.

More options

While many services exist today to help LGBTQ couples conceive through sperm donation, that was not the case when Lisa Schuman, founder of the Center for Building Families, began working in the industry more than 20 years old in New York.

Among the leading organizations at the time, such as the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the American Fertility Association, there was “no person queer represented at all,” he says.

Many gay couples he spoke with would consider adoption their primary option for starting a family.

“They didn’t really understand that there were so many other options for them,” says Schuman.

Schuman started a workshop for LGBTQ people looking to start families at the New York City Gay and Lesbian Center, through which he could teach them about options other than adoption.

At first, remember, only about five people attended per session. “I just kept doing it,” she says. About a decade later, a conference she presented for lesbian mothers-to-be drew 100 people.

“The legalization of same-sex marriage [en 2015] it helped a lot,” she says. Through efforts like Schuman’s, LGBTQ families were able to learn more about their options for starting a family.

Still, while there are anecdotal accounts of growing interest, it’s hard to find data on how many LGBTQ couples choose to use friends or family as donors, as opposed to donors found through sperm banks.

Laura Goldberger has worked for two decades as a psychotherapist leading groups for LGBTQ people trying to conceive.

Goldberger says that approximately half of the couples he talks to choose a donor they already know, compared to one found through an outside service or sperm bank; that rate has remained the same throughout his experience.

Schuman, however, says he’s seen “more and more” expectant parents opt for donations from friends or family over the past few years.

A “wonderful and delicate” presence

Alice’s choice was not only obvious to her because she felt the sperm bank route was alienating, but she also knew immediately who she would ask to donate.

She and her friend were part of the same community, had worked together on a political project, and attended the same university. She trusted him deeply.

Over lunch Alice asked him if he would be willing to donate his sperm and he said yes.

“I knew that our community would hold us both accountable with how we were going to create a nuclear family,” he says, acknowledging that their relationship did not exist in a vacuum, but that their mutual friends would help ensure they maintained communication. fury.

Alice and her donor friend also had numerous and long conversations about your expectationswhich covered your family’s medical history, what your role as a donor would or would not be, and how your family would be involved in the child’s life.

They also had a conference call with his parents and sister to help clear up misunderstandings about the donor-child relationship they had decided on.

“I was glad we had the conversation,” she says. “They have been a wonderful and gentle presence throughout [la vida del niño]”.

“Ruthless” conversations

Of course, even with the closest of friends, there can be unexpected problems with something as sensitive and shocking as a new life.

“Everybody thinks ‘we have this under control, everything is going to be fine, we are the best of friends,'” says Schuman. “But people get married with the same idea, thinking they’re going to be together forever, and it doesn’t always happen.”

Schuman highlights the importance of prior counseling to the donation to make sure the recipient, their partner (if they have one), and the donor are all on the same page.

Communication is key, agrees Erika Tranfield, 41, founder and director of Pride Angel, a service based in the North West of the UK through which recipients can connect with sperm donors they don’t already know, but want to. meet and talk before beginning the donation process.

Tranfield says it can be difficult to tackle “cutthroat” and uncomfortable questions, like beliefs about religion and child discipline, that are important to ask a potential donor when that donor is already your friend, she says.

To avoid those difficult conversations with friends, Tranfield founded Pride Angel in 2009, in part to find his own donor with his now ex-wife. Currently, approximately 25,000 sperm recipients use Pride Angel in the UK, US and Europe.

Tranfield and his then-wife wanted to meet their donor and make sure it was someone who wouldn’t want to share parenting or share financial responsibilities, but would be open to looking at the boy’s school reports or visiting him at Christmas.

Signed agreements

To make sure the relationship was the way it was, Tranfield, his then-wife, and the donor signed a “intention letter” specifying the boundaries of their relationship. This was not a legal agreement.

US lesbian couples who spoke to BBC Worklife were more likely to say they signed notarized agreements prior to donation or signed agreements drawn up by lawyers.

Rosslyn, 40, and Laura, 37, a married couple in California, say they worked with a lawyer who specializes in conception queer to create an agreement with her donor, a good college friend of Laura’s (he offered after Laura told him about her difficulties finding a donor).

The agreement stated that the donor would relinquish all parental rights, but would remain a friend of the family, just as his current partner is. Rosslyn and Laura’s two daughters, now 5 and 2, simply call him by his first name.

Other legal processes may include the non-gestational parent (not carrying the child) legally adopting the child to gain parental rights, what Alice’s partner plans to do with their child (already calling Alice’s partner “mom”) ).

costs

For Rosslyn and Laura, this cost approximately $2,000 per child. Other costs went to conception. For example, they paid around US$300 for a session with a midwife specializing in home conception for their first child.

The cost of conception can be considerably higher by going through a sperm bank. For the married couple from New York, Elizabeth, 32, and Joy, 36, using a sperm bank has so far cost them about $6,000.

Some of this covered medical copays and shipping of the sperm, but most of it went towards the vials, five of which cost around $5,300. It costs about $200 to thaw the frozen vials before the IUI (intrauterine insemination), which they plan to do soon.

Although the process is expensive, the couple ultimately decided on an unknown donor, whose identity they learned through the sperm bank, due to the complications that could arise when seeking a donation from someone who is already a part of their lives.

“They can say ad nauseam that they can watch their biological child grow up in front of their eyes and not have that special connection,” says Elizabeth, but she worries that that could change with the baby’s birth.

Since Elizabeth plans to have the child, they also considered using Joy’s brother as a donor.

“Originally, the idea of ​​having my own blood so I could donate was intriguing,” Joy says, but ultimately decided against it for the reasons Elizabeth mentioned.

“I come from a big Italian family, and they are literally always around,” adds Joy. She and Elizabeth did not want to deal with all the conversations that might come up between the child and various members of the family about the child’s conception.

Options to expand the family

Over time, LGBTQ couples and prospective parents have gained more information and resources to help them make decisions about building their families.

While many still adopt, many choose to ask close friends to donate sperm, like Alice, Rosslyn and Laura, while others prefer to connect with donors through services like Pride Angel or sperm banks.

Whatever decision these families ultimately make, the fact that the donor option is now so visibly on the table has expanded its possibilities.

Unlike when Schuman began working in the field of fertility, couples of all kinds are now presented with a variety of ways to create families, whether that includes a donor friend, a known donor who is just on vacation or someone who is completely left out of the children’s lives.

For Rosslyn and Laura, the kind of extended family they could form with their donor partner and their future children remains up in the air.

Your children and the donor’s children”they will invent their own narrative about how they feel about each other, what they call themselves… and the biological link they have with each other. [el donante] as they grow,” says Rosslyn. “But right now, everything is super cool.”