Sperm donors Galore

ticktock0903 · March 2014

I'm sure that many of you have used sperm donors and I have a mega-ton amount of questions. You don't have to answer all, but I would appreciate any feedback. First off, what sperm bank would you recommend and why? I have been on the website of several and I can't make up my mind about any in particular. What are your thoughts on open vs anonymous donors? I want to use an open donor but my wife doesn't. Has anyone come up with this issue with their spouse and if so how did you come to a compromise. Do you know of any sperm banks with a fair selection of Mexican/Puerto Rican donors? I would like for our kids to look as much like us as possible. What is the avg price paid for vials of sperm with the shipping costs etc.? Whats a good motility rate for a vial of sperm to be used for an IUI? Again do not feel as if you have to answer every question, but any feedback is appreciated. Please feel free to add any other knowledge about sperm donors that you have come across. Thanks everyone!!

ticktock0903 · March 2014

I think for my wife she wants someone with at least her background heritage. I didn't know that Fairfax did lifetime photos. I thought sperm banks usually just did baby photos and adult photos. I will have to look into them further. Thanks for the response @TwoMomsInTX

ticktock0903 · March 2014

What were the prices at Fairfax? How far did your vials have to ship? Did you buy more than one vial at a time? @TwoMomsInTX

Belovedvirgo0209 · March 2014

We used a site called known donor registry and found our wonderful donor.We looked into sperm banks however we decided to go the known route for many reasons.We wanted the baby to have the option of knowing who the donor was. Because my partner was adopted and doesn't know her birth family and our daughter was adopted but she has a open adoption so we felt it was best and fair for all our kids to know where they came from.It was scary at first meeting a stranger but our donor was super nice and friendly and nothing but professional we tried twice with him and became pregnant the second try.Plus is was kind of idiot proof we didn't have to deal with thawing and all that it was just plain easier for us and we are both impatient and felt using frozen sperm would take longer to get results.Now these are just our options many on the board have conceived using frozen donor sperm.I keep in contact with our donor every so often I mainly text him to just let him know hey we got pregnant or when we had the ultrasound and things like that.It isnt required he just simply asked to be notified if we did become pregnant and to send a update once a yr.They great thing about known donors are you get to know the donor and you make all the rules .In the end it is whatever works best for your family.There is no right or wrong way to do this.Good luck

firstcomeslove2013 · March 2014

stringy813 said:
I can come back in a bit and answer some of these questions - it is a daunting task when you first get started...

But didn't we used to have some FAQ's with a lot of these answers?

We did used to have an FAQ and we are going to have another one again soon! I am working on it! :-)

ticktock0903 · March 2014

My wife feels like the donor won't be a part of raising the child so she doesn't feel they are important. Her father wasn't a part of her life growing up so I can see her reasoning though I don't agree with it. I want our kids to have the option of seeking out the other half of their DNA. I don't want to have to look my child in the eye and say I could have given you that option but I chose not to.

Belovedvirgo0209 · March 2014

@ticktock0903 My father wasn't in my life either but I did feel it was important to our child to at least have that option.As for our daughter's birth parents the BM moved back to the west coast 6 weeks after she was born and we haven't heard from her since and her BF meet someone new and moved out of state he gets photos from time to time and we have a wonderful relationship with his mom but Adasyn will always know who they are and she will have the choice of meeting them one day.I say this just because your wife is right they aren't a part of raising the child it will be your child however I think every kid wants to know where they come from I mean look at that mtv show generation cryo.Besides even if you do go with known donor it is up to you guys what he can know.Best of luck parenting is never easy there always has to be room for compromise and it doesn't start the minute the baby is born it starts the minute you think about having one

JGY · March 2014

ticktock0903 said:

My wife feels like the donor won't be a part of raising the child so she doesn't feel they are important. Her father wasn't a part of her life growing up so I can see her reasoning though I don't agree with it. I want our kids to have the option of seeking out the other half of their DNA. I don't want to have to look my child in the eye and say I could have given you that option but I chose not to.

Well I agree with your wife that the donor is not "Important" from a parenting perspective. That is why we shifted gears from a known to an unknown donor. We had been hung up on trying to have a relationship with the donor and finally realized that WE are the parents, and that's what matters. However we felt that being able to identify the guy in the future for our son, should he be interested, was one of the MOST important criteria in our selection. I think there's a huge difference between not having a relationship with a genetic parent, and not knowing ANYTHING about them or their family. We were lucky, we totally agreed on this. I'm sorry that you two don't see eye to eye right now.

One suggestion I have ... are you going to be doing IUI/IVF in a clinic? Or are you inseminating at home? I ask because if you use a clinic, many of them require a visit with their staff phsychologist prior to moving forward with insem. While I am enraged by that requirement on principle, I will admit that it IS a good opportunity to work through issues such as this one. Especially since the pysch. is really an expert in all things 3rd-party-reproduction.

To answer some of your other questions, we looked for a donor who was the most "Like" my partner that we could find. We got pretty lucky, because as @stringy813 mentioned their hobbies and interests can be so conditional to their environment. But we found someone whose actual personality (as described by staff at Fairfax, and as he describes himself) is spot on. Also, I got really snotty about some physical traits because hell, why not? I get to actually choose this stuff, right?

Anyway, we were unhealthily invested in this particular donor and I don't know how we would have handled having to switch. Luckily we will never know because we got pregnant on his last available vile, ordered and stored at our RE just prior to him being inactivated by Fairfax. Whew!

Like others, we shopped many banks and were more concerned with finding the right donor match, than with which particular bank we used (assuming all the banks had decent testing and protocols and reviews). And yes, shipping will bankrupt you.

holdingThumbs · March 2014

We really enjoyed the process of picking the donor! It encouraged so many discussions about our childhoods and our imagined family.

We went with California Cryobank for some of the reasons already mentioned, and we knew we wanted an open donor. We went ahead and bought a 3 month subscription that would give us access to all the information they had on the donor, including a voice recording, which we assumed we wouldn't even listen to.

Interestingly, the things we thought would be most important - specifically education and career path - proved to be tertiary. We were drawn to someone based on his pictures, and somewhat swayed by their personal statements, but really, the voice that was the deciding factor.

In the end, we picked our donor because he sounded like a genuinely nice guy. Honestly, we surprised ourselves.

ticktock0903 · March 2014

Thank you @JGY for your comments. We are preparing to do an IUI in a clinic though we are discussing the possibility of trying once at home from a cost perspective. I hadn't heard anything about the psych visit at clinics that I have spoken to though I have just been searching prices and success rates.

JGY · March 2014

I think a lot depends on whether you would be at an RE clinic or an OB clinic. Also what state your are in and I'm sure a million other things. I found that all RE clinics in this area (Minneapolis) had this requirement.

At any rate, if this is not something that is available to your or required by your clinic, it might be worth doing anyway. A single visit with a therapist or social worker, while expensive, wouldn't be TOO costly in the long run. And I'm sure you could find someone with experience in infertility. Not sure what your employment situations are, but MANY large employers offer an EAP (employee assistance plan) these days. Those plans can usually get you 1-3 free visits with a licensed therapist.

Good luck!

(And I'm not suggesting that you two can't work through this on your own, I just know how helpful it can be to sometimes have a third person in on the communications, when that thirs person has no emotional involvement in the issue)

JGY · March 2014

holdingThumbs said:

We really enjoyed the process of picking the donor! It encouraged so many discussions about our childhoods and our imagined family.

We went with California Cryobank for some of the reasons already mentioned, and we knew we wanted an open donor. We went ahead and bought a 3 month subscription that would give us access to all the information they had on the donor, including a voice recording, which we assumed we wouldn't even listen to.

Interestingly, the things we thought would be most important - specifically education and career path - proved to be tertiary. We were drawn to someone based on his pictures, and somewhat swayed by their personal statements, but really, the voice that was the deciding factor.

In the end, we picked our donor because he sounded like a genuinely nice guy. Honestly, we surprised ourselves.

So funny, we put off purchasing pictures until after our BFP. He's totally fine looking, but average. Which is perfect. We had ready access to his voice recording without paying anything for it, so we listened to that right away. I HATE his voice. But loved everything else about him.

It's such a personal process, unique to every couple.

holdingThumbs · March 2014

Just my experience regarding the psych evaluation -

The clinic we are using starts with a very comprehensive visit - we met with a doctor, a therapist and a financial counselor. In addition, S was able to have some of the initial bloodwork done at that appointment.

The psych eval was nothing more than a conversation about our plans and an opportunity to ask questions. My partner is very nervous about being pregnant, and has a visceral reaction to the idea of semen, and we clearly articulated that. There was no sense that we were being tested, or that we wouldn't be accepted as patients.

For me, what was significantly stranger was signing a stack of legal documents providing consent for my partner to be inseminated with donor sperm. I wish I had them here so I could quote directly, but the statement was pretty much, "I acknowledge that I didn't get her pregnant." We were in hysterics.

redrockmama · March 2014

A couple of things....

1. Our friends wanted a Mexican/Puerto Rican donor and went with Xytec. They seemed to have a pretty big selection and found quite a few that they liked (and were very good looking, we got to see pics)

2. My wife and I weren't quite on the same page about WTBK or not. Years ago when we first started talking about kids we thought for sure anonymous. I spent a lot of time reading research studies and experiences of parents and kids with donors and ultimately changed my mind. My wife got there a little bit later. In the end, we decided we didn't want to take that option away from our kids. If they want to contact the donor they can when they are 18 and if they decide they don't want to, they don't have to..but it's up to them not us. I explained my thought process and research to my wife and after she thought about it for a while, she agreed. Good luck!

Oh and we used Pacific Reproductive Services, and have been very happy with them.

SweetPea0307 · March 2014

My wife and I used California Cryobank, basically because they had the easiest to use website.

We had some pretty significant disagreements about how much to know about the donor. I leaned toward picking an open donor and wanted to find out as much information as possible (e.g. look at pictures, listen to voice recordings, etc.). My wife wanted an anonymous donor and wanted to find out as little as possible about him. It was actually one of our more significant arguments we've had. But I think we ended up in a good compromise. We chose an anonymous donor (basically we just didn't filter on this and ended up picking one that happened to be anonymous), and we got the baby pictures and the long profile, but nothing else.

For selecting a donor, we did a multi-step process. First, we filtered based on ethnicity (caucasian, like my wife), height (over 5'9"), and area of study (physical science or engineering). Then we created a spreadsheet with the key pieces of information about the remaining donors that was available for free. From that we calculated BMI's and threw out some outliers. Then we read through all the health history notes and threw out anyone with a history similar to mine (we don't want our kids to have the possibility of getting mental illness or diabetes genes from both sides) or with anything that seemed to significant. Finally, we each read through the essays and ranked the candidates. We then threw out the ones from the bottom of each of our lists until 4 were left. From those 4, we picked a favorite based on how his interests and personality seemed to align with my wife's.

It was exhausting. Now, unfortunately, we are on our last vial of our first choice donor and we're planning to switch if this next IUI doesn't take. Since we don't want to take off a month, we're planning to pick donor #2 during this next TWW. I'm not looking forward to it.

Belovedvirgo0209 · March 2014

Hey quick question when picking a donor I've noticed some of ya'll are saying one wanted a known donor the other didn't.I say this because it was like that for us I wanted to know as much as possible and Heather didn't want to know anything.So I was wondering if in most cases the one that didn't want to know was it the one that wasn't carrying? Heather said she didn't want to know because it was just weird I'm not sure why its not we slept together.However after she met him she was very comfortable with him.See we rented hotel rooms and he had his and we had ours and what not anyways after the first insem she was so comfortable with him she invited him to our room for take out lol.Basically I wonder if for the non bio parent (I hate that term) if its a security thing like if they don't meet or whatever than he isn't really a threat of some sort if that make sense.This is just a question guys not meant to stir the pot or anything.Sorry I'm having a really boring day at work and have lots of time to think lol.

KH826 · March 2014

There have been several older threads about this topic that I remember posting on... here are a couple that I was able to quickly find:

https://forums.thebump.com/discussion/12062501/sperm-banks#latest

https://forums.thebump.com/discussion/12215311/sperm-bank

There have been other more recent threads too, but I haven't been able to find them in a quick search.

I posted in some of these other threads before I got pregnant (I think), but to recap... we ended up getting pregnant via IVF with our last vial from NW Cryo. We started with 3 vials from Fairfax, and didn't get pregnant, so we switched. We decided to switch banks (not just donors) when we learned that NW Cryo was about 1/2 the price for IUI vials than what we were paying with Fairfax ($300 v $600 respectively). I have not had issues with either bank, and would recommend either in terms of ease of use/ordering and customer service.

Hope this helps a little...

Good Luck!

ball.and.chain · March 2014

We used California Cryobank. They had a huge selection compared to some other banks and I found their donor catalog more easy to search/filter/navigate. They have been around for awhile and are pretty reputable. Their prices are similar to the other big banks, which is more costly than some smaller banks -- I think we paid around $700 per IUI vial. Their customer service was great --however, we got a few vials that did not have very good motile counts. Although we were reimbursed for them, I can't help wondering if my journey would have been shorter with different sperm. I don't remember what the minimum guaranteed motile count was, but I believe it was listed on their website. As far as number of families that can use each donor, CCB is somewhere in the middle -- not the smallest number of families, but not the largest either.

An Open ID or WTBY (willing to be known) donor was very important to me. It's true that the donor is not an important part of the child's life in terms of parenting -- but you can't deny that that is the genetic father of your child, and that may matter to your child one day. I don't think this has been studied much with children of same-sex parents, but I did read studies of adopted children that indicated that the VAST majority of them felt some kind of connection to their biological parents and expressed a strong interest in wanting to meet them or learn more about them at some point (or at least have the option to) -- this was true whether or not the adopted child had grown up in a happy home. It will be up to our son when he is 18 whether or not he would like to do this -- but I didn't want to make the decision for him.

Another thing to consider is whether you (or your partner -- whoever is carrying) are CMV- or CMV+. I had to be tested for CMV antibodies as part of my pre-conception work-up, and I was negative, so it was recommended that I choose a CMV- donor (women who are CMV+ positive can choose a donor that is negative or positive). This cut my selection in half at least, and one of the reasons CCB was good is that they indicate CMV status up front in the main (free) profile, so I could rule positive donors out right away. I will note that some healthcare providers seem less concerned about CMV status than others, so you might want to check with yours before you select a donor.

ticktock0903 · March 2014

Thank you everyone for their responses! I am taking a crazy amount of notes right now. The known vs anonymous donors discussion is going to be a topic of discussion between me and my wife for a while. We plan to ttc with both my eggs (1st) and hers at a later date. She doesn't want a known donor for her egg but I feel it will be unfair to that child that their sibling has that option and they don't. I am compiling research to plead my case. Like @Belovedvirgo0209 I feel like its a security thing. I don't know how to make her feel secure about that though. I like @SweetPea0307 plan of narrowing down the list. There are just so many factors to consider, its quite daunting.

twobrooklynmoms · March 2014

We used California Cryo and we bought 6 vials the first time. We didn't know at the time that we would be using 2 vials per cycle, so we thought it was plenty. We would like the option of having more than 1 child so we called back and tried to order more and he was sold out. I had a cow because we didn't really have a lot of options since we wanted a Jewish donor and he needed to be CMV neg.

We looked for a week or so and tried to find another and THANK GOD he popped up again and more vials were released. We bought several more vials, prob too many, but if you store them with CC you can sell back unused vials for 50%.

I think the moral of the story here is buy as much as you might need, and store it with them if possible.

At our last IUI, the nurse told us the vials had 85% motility (which is great) and I think count was 14 million.

ticktock0903 · March 2014

twobrooklynmoms said:

We used California Cryo and we bought 6 vials the first time. We didn't know at the time that we would be using 2 vials per cycle, so we thought it was plenty.

At our last IUI, the nurse told us the vials had 85% motility (which is great) and I think count was 14 million.

May I ask why you ended up using 2 vials at a time? I am still in the research phase about sperm banks but I thought that only one vial was used for each cycle.

rkbo · March 2014

@twobrooklynmoms did you know that if you buy ICI spermies from CCB and they are under 15mil that they will refund you your money?!

I just found this out. Of the 6 vials we purchased and used, only 1 vial was 30mil. The others were 11, 9.9, 9, 7.79 & 7 mil

Heck, this is all out of pocket for us, so I am definitely asking for a refund on those 5 vials.

We also do 2 vials at a time. Our doctor likes to do two IUI's back to back. I just had mine this week on Tuesday and Wednesday. Our doctor says that she feels it ups our chances..and since everything is out of pocket for us, we thought we wanted to get as good of a chance as we can. Most of our costs come from ultrasounds, labs, meds...so spending more on sperm was actually the low end of the costs.

2momsinCA · March 2014

We also used CCB and had a pretty great experience. It was between them and Pacific Reproductive (lesbian owned) we stuck with CCB because they had such and easy to use and comprehensive website. Our donor is willing to be known. I think many posts have made the case for how important this is just so the child has the option to have at least one meeting with the bio-dad if they have that curiosity. Maybe they won't, but if they do then I would feel so bad denying them the option. I think over the course of 10 months of ttc we spent $8000 on sperm. We still have 5 vials left if we want to try for baby number 3. Our donor is now retired so that's all we get. That's a big consideration too- if you want enough for siblings, make sure you pick a donor with lots of availability.

We also got lucky and had crazy high counts for most of the vials we got from CCB, I found that the IUI ready vials had way higher counts than the ICI ready. I think they might figure that an RE is going to do and SA on the IUI ready but most likely with ICI ready you will do a home insem and never know. They enclose the pre-freeze SA results with the vials when you pick them up but my ICI vials (if I took them to the RE to wash) were always lower (even prewash) than the paperwork said. IUI vials would often exceed the prefreeze numbers. I don't know if it was just our donor, but we had well over 50 mil total motile several times and once over 120 mil.

Also some REs prefer to do back to back IUIs separated by 24 hours or so to cover ovulation. Our RE would only ever do one per cycle and we still got pregnant a total of 3 times with single IUI and trigger shot. If you're doing a trigger shot, it pin points your ovulation. If you aren't doing a trigger shot and trying ICI at home I would definitely use two vials because ovulation could be anywhere from 6-48 hours or so after LH surge and those frozen swimmers don't live too long.

ticktock0903 · March 2014

Whew! I was nervous for a sec. We don't want to do two vials per cycle from a cost prespective. I would prefer to do the trigger shot but only if we don't get pregnant the first try. I initially want to try no meds, no added assistance other than the sperm of course lol. As I don't have any fertility issues as of now, I want so see (and hopefully it is) if its possible. My family is super fertile so fingers crossed!

mrs&mrsk · March 2014

@twobrooklynmoms any reason you didnt use one of the NYC sperm banks, friends of mine did that and drove in to save on shipping. Is it not that good?

twobrooklynmoms · March 2014

@ticktock0903 because we did 2 IUIs per cycle, 24 hours apart. We also do the Ovidrel trigger shot, but its not that precise and washed sperm doesn't live as long as unwashed. Also, OPKs do not work at all for DW for some reason so all we can do is check and make sure the follicle hasn't released with an ultrasound.

@rbko holy crap! I had no idea. Also, I may have gotten that number wrong so I need to ask when we go back.

@mrs&mrsk we used CC because it was recommended to us by both a friend and our doctor. We bought a lot so we got free shipping and its stored at their NYC facility. You do have to pay $50 every month when you pick it up from them.

mrs&mrsk · March 2014

Thanks!

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