Introduction and a question on picking a sperm donor.

LaireAndLia · April 2014

Hello. My partner and I have decided to start a family, and are currently trying to pick a sperm donor. We are doing a reciprocal, shared programme of IVF. We are using my partner's eggs, I am carrying and we are donating half of my partner's eggs to her sister. We can begin the process properly once we have chosen a sperm donor, and once my partner is on CD 3 of her next cycle (she's currently on CD 4, we just missed it).

I was just wondering if anybody has any advice about picking a sperm donor when you can't see their picture? We have narrowed our options down to four donors now, but we really can't pick between them. They all have the traits we are looking for, but without actually looking at them we can't seem able to pick which one we actually want.

curve31 · April 2014

When we started looking at donors, we thought we only cared about their looks. But as we started narrowing them down, their personalities became much more important. Some guys seemed dumb as rocks even though they were nice looking. We ended up picking a guy that had reddish hair, which I hate, just because he seemed like a great person. Plus, we wanted a profile we were proud to show our child later.

That being said, we paid for a subscription so we could see pictures and hear audio interviews. We wanted to know as much as we could about them.

2MamazInSeattle · April 2014

Ditto on PP here. We were much more concerned with "would we like this guy if we hung out with him?" than looks - however we did pay for the childhood photos and audio interviews as we want to give our child as much info on her donors as possible.

That said, we had 4 as well that we narrowed it down to and honestly did start to get 'petty' with things like eye color just to rule out some! Also, I'm assuming you know your partners CMV status - I was negative so that wiped out a huge batch of donors for us (which actually helped).

In the end, when we had it down to 4, we did at that point just pick the one whose looks we liked best since all other conditions were equal.

Good luck!

curve31 · April 2014

Also, the place we will be ordering from suggests you have a list of donors (I don't remember how many. I did 5.) you like and rank them. Have that ready when you order because their inventory change so quickly. They may not have your #1 dude.

healz413 · April 2014

Our RE doesn't care about CMV status so we didn't have to rule ones in or out that way.

I know that you're in a country that is not the U.S. or Canada (can't remember which from the LGBTParenting board-- UK?), which is why you can't see photos, right?. Are there different "types" of donors there? For the U.S., some donors are anonymous (you can never know who they are) and some are Open ID (at 18, you child can contact the donor via the sperm bank). We were only interested in Open ID donors, so that narrowed it down a lot. We also wanted someone with a particular ethnic/cultural heritage.

Beyond that, we wanted a donor that we would look forward to telling our kids about and would be able to explain why we chose that person's sperm to help make them. We wanted someone that we could imagine being ok with our kids contacting some day.

I don't have any reason to believe that a penchant for musical theater is genetically passed, but that was one of the things I loved about our sperm donor. @Manada was a musical theater person as a kid and we both love musicals and try to treat life like a musical (sometimes, at least) and so that really drew me to the donor we chose. Little things like that can sometimes makes the difference.

tifga · April 2014

I was lucky too as I'm CMV negative so that left me with like 6 donors from our local sperm bank and only half were the same race as my husband so that left us with very little option.

I agree with 2MamazInSeattle you have to like the guy. Our new donors essay really won us over he was funny and he has the same hobbies as me and hubby so we both insistently liked him.

I don't think his love of games is genetic I just want my babies to know that the person who helped bring them to us was a good person.

[Deleted User] · April 2014

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Want a personalized experience?

Introduction and a question on picking a sperm donor.

Re: Introduction and a question on picking a sperm donor.

Choose Another Board

Search Boards