Donor Conception Network - Articles
FIRST TIME AT A NETWORK MEETING:
Reflections of new members
Still waiting….
An honest and moving account of the reality of trying to conceive with
donor sperm.
It felt hard being an infertile couple at the DCN London Conference. This
might seem like a strange thing to say – after all one assumes at
least 50% of the heterosexual couples there are infertile in some way
– otherwise why were they all doing donor conception?
But the main impression at the conference is that of a gathering of
parents – there are children everywhere, and parents talking
proudly about their beautiful donor children. As they should –
it’s important to lift any stigma and good to know that there are
other special children out there. And perhaps parents have more in common
with each other, than with people like us with no strings except those to
the clinic where we are receiving treatment.
And it’s true that not everyone at the conference was a parent. We
met several people who were about to start treatment.
But starting treatment and having already gone through bouts of fertility treatment are not the same thing. We remembered how we used to feel a year and a half ago – excited and eager to gather as much information as possible. Despite the trauma of diagnosis, donor conception was the thing that was going to solve all our problems. Nine failed cycles later, we feel world-weary. I kept wanting to tell people not to get so excited – that just because they’d found a donor and sorted out a treatment package, didn’t mean they were going to get pregnant. I restrained myself – it seemed mean to insert a reality check.
But from where we were standing, it was easy to feel cynical. We did meet a few people who had tried and failed and were still trying. They tended, I think, to be a bit quieter, a little less vocal. It would have been nice to meet more of them and it was a shame that there was no small group for those dealing with ongoing infertility. The DCN is a fantastic network – just this last week we rang a complete stranger on the contact list to discuss a donor issue with him – maybe it’s unfair to expect it to be a forum for infertility as well.
But I think we’ve got to the stage where it’s really hard to feel common identity with anyone who has actually has a child. I know you can learn a lot from people who have been there an moved on - – a couple told us how they, like us, had also had nine failed cycles and succeeded on their first IVF attempt, which did make me feel better. And a woman I sat next to said that she, like me, used to come and cry through half the conference before she got pregnant. But sitting in groups, talking endlessly about how to tell your child they’re donor conceived became excruciating after a while, when you have no child to tell and fear, deep in your heart, that maybe you never will.
So where are we in our journey, you may be asking. We’ve had nine DI attempts – six ordinary, three with IUI and are now in the middle of our first IVF attempt. IVF is hugely stressful at the best of times. I am pumped up with Buserelin, tired, headachey and feeling very emotional most of the time. Injecting me every morning is no picnic for my husband either.
But of course IVF with donor sperm is that little bit more stressful. And we are caught in the middle of the pre-2005 transition. Sperm donors are pulling out left right and centre. There may well be a recruitment campaign but it hasn’t come yet. There are of course still donors – it’s still nowhere as bad as it is for people seeking egg donors. But there’s not much choice – and very little information around.
The situation is even worse for anyone seeking an ethnic minority donor. We had been using Jewish sperm for our previous DI cycles. This is not particularly for religious reasons – Jewish identity is passed down through the mother’s line, not the father’s. But we felt it gave the chid a closer ethnic connection to my husband – and given that our old clinic gave no non-identifying information whatsoever, it was an extra nugget of information we could pass on.
At the IVF clinic, we’ve been told there are no Jewish donors left in London at all - the only one available is an old donor with not enough ampoules left to father a possible sibling. Our embryologist scoured the country and came up with one out of London – again he’s an old donor, the clinic is no longer in contact with him, and so there’s no chance of any voluntary contact.
We are now reconsidering whether we still want Jewish sperm. The Jewish community is very small - only about 300,000 in the UK, most of them in London and, given that we are quite involved in the Jewish community, the chance of our child (should we ever produce one) falling in love with a half-brother or half-sister is much higher with a Jewish donor. And there is a non-Jewish donor available who has given a bit more information although he, like all the others, has refused voluntary contact after 2005.
So we are working through it slowly. We’re not looking for advice – these are very personal issues we need to work through at our own pace. It’s extremely hard to talk to anyone else - although many of our friends know we’re doing IVF, only the very closest know that we are using donor sperm, so very few know the real source of stress.
I hope we’ll have a happy outcome. The average chance of success on the first attempt is 25% but hey, you never know. As they said in the last Sex and the City episode: God might remember our address. But I don’t think we’ll be going to a group to talk about it until it happens.
