Feeling a bit anxious as I’ve got my transfer scheduled for tomorrow, 4/14. Any fellow transfer twins out there going through the same experience? It’s always comforting to know you’re not alone in this journey. Share your thoughts, fears, or just how you’re holding up. Let’s support each other through this process!
Excited to share that we are transferring a tested female embryo in hopes of adding baby #2 to our family. Send good vibes our way!
I wish you the best of luck! 
I will be accompanying you tomorrow as we transfer just one, and despite feeling a bit overwhelmed, it brings comfort knowing we are in this together. A peculiar blessing in all of this is feeling a strong connection with others going through the same experience. You’ll be in my thoughts! 
This is my second FET, wishing for success with my transfer mates!
I am transferring two blastocysts on the 17th as well.
I had 4/13. Best of luck to you!
I am pursuing IVF as a “single mother by choice” as they call it, so I had to choose donor sperm.
Different sperm banks provide different levels of information. I went with a bank that has an interview, health history, and baby photos of the donor. Some banks offer adult photos.
You might want to consider genetic testing to make sure you don’t select a donor who is a carrier for a genetic disease that you are also a carrier for.
You can sort by many physical features to try to find a donor who matches your collective family traits.
I personally preferred donors who reported more family health problems. It seemed more real to have a grandparent with heart disease and a sister with acne than to choose a donor who said their family had never had any health problems ever.
Hi! Due to extreme MFI our urologist told us not to even attempt a TESE so donor sperm we went. My first batch of research was learning about donor conceived peoples experiences. First off you will find lots of negativity on those pages and lots of resentment, mostly about being told very late in life. The negativity hit me so hard we didn’t want to move forward with donor sperm and we stopped dead in our tracks. That was a good thing because it gave us time to come to terms with the grief of not having a child both biologically ours, we asked the hard questions, when were we going to tell the child, how early is too early, how we were going to share the news to our close family? What we were going to do if the child wanted to reach out to the donor? We sat and we talked and talked until we were ready. Then we had an ahhha moment (you can read one of my past post about coming to terms with donor sperm) and then we were ready.
For the process it was easy we picked a local sperm bank and picked a donor who would disclose their information once our child turned 18, I purchased pictures of him as a child and adult, letters from him and even a voice conversation with the bank asking him questions like what would you tell your biological child. We had our egg retrieval in March and will be transferring this May. If we are successful I plan to join the sibling registry and maybe even do a 23&me just to have answers just in case there is any future health issues.
There are so many things to think through and I know it seems like a lot but I am 100% content with my decision, I am at a peace I’d never thought I would be when I first heard the news. If you want to ask me anything else feel free to DM me. I am wishing you peace on your journey ahead!!!
I am part of an LGBTQ couple so this was always going to be part of the experience. Our clinic recommend 3 different banks, and ranked them, and we went with the top ranked one. Then we bought a 90 day pass to view all photos, medical information, voice recordings etc. We only considered open ID donors.
We made a big spreadsheet to narrow it all down. We did some reading on the experiences of donor conceived people and learned that having similar family interests is helpful, so we chose a donor who looked similar enough to my husband AND shared a similar education background, plus hobby interests. Who knows if that stuff is nature or nurture but it was a helpful tiebreaker when looking at multiple donors. It was also important for us to listen to the voice recordings and that our bank specifically offered photos of donors as adults.
You can also usually filter the sites by any genes you are a carrier for, to ensure the donor is also not a carrier. One thing I found was that the donor had a larger genetic screening panel than I did, so I had to be tested for an additional 2 genetic conditions, which was an added cost (though small in the scheme of ivf). Not sure if you’ve already done your own genetic testing, but if not I would get a sense of how many genes the sperm bank screens for and see if your clinic can match that number to make your life easier.
Good luck! It’s overwhelming getting started but once we picked the donor, that part has kind of been an afterthought as we go through IVF.
We did genetic testing for both myself and sperm donor, but elimination criteria was : had to have live births and not a carrier for anything.
In our case we also selected for height, higher education, lower bmi, more extroverted personality (I’m very introverted), and being particularity good looking etc. Why wouldn’t I look for ‘ideal’ quality if it’s a database?
Made a spreadsheet and went to town looking at donors - added everything from height and weight to education and hobbies. Bought our 2nd favorite as our favorite was sold out - but got 2 of our favorite donor at last minute.
It was like online dating except on the couch with my husband. Very weird.
I’m a donor conceived person pregnant with a donor conceived baby, so happy to weigh in.
The donor sperm experience varies from bank to bank, as others have said some have adult photos, others have voice interviews, etc. The key is to only consider donors who are open at age 18 to contact (80 percent of donor conceived people want at least one lifetime contact with their donor) and a robust sibling connection process, for many of us our sibs are more important than the donor.
The ethical gold standard is to use a known-from-birth donor, though this tends to be very hard to accomplish. In the alternative, I used the Sperm Bank of California and it’s considered by many to be the only truly ethical bank out there, it’s LGBTQ run and owned and provides a much higher level of support vs most of the others. It also hasn’t been subject to the high rate of ethical catastrophes of other banks, to give you a sense of the stakes my 32-day-old son died of a preventable donor-side genetic disease caused by a fake medical history, and this is common in the industry. You can’t trust any claims these banks make.
I’m a mod at r/donorconceived, r/donorconception and r/askadcp, and we invite you to learn more about the industry there, directly from donor conceived people. The only prerequisites to doing donor conception in our process are a willingness to tell the child before age 3 and to use open at 18 (often called open ID) sperm, beyond that we’ll work with you through TTC, pregnancy and beyond to achieve the most child-centered outcome possible.
Currently 20w with our donor sperm baby due to MFI. We knew the TESE wouldn’t result in sperm, so we went right to a donor. We used Fairfax Cryobank. It was pretty easy. Look on Reddit for promo codes that will give you a 3 month membership so you get photos for free and don’t have to pay extra. We chose our donor mainly based on qualities that were similar to my husband - similar values, interests, and education level. That was just what was most important to us. We also chose one that had adult photos just to give us an idea. I did genetic screening and infectious disease testing through my fertility clinic, and we just had to make sure our donor didn’t have anything that I carried. I’m CMV negative, so our donor had to be CMV negative. We shipped our vial to our clinic when we were ready for egg retrieval. It was a pretty smooth process - just took us a little while to choose the best donor for us. There have been ups and downs as we’ve navigated this, but we wouldn’t have it any other way! Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions or need support or advice from someone who is in a very similar situation as you.
My husband has the same thing azoospermia or whatever we did donor sperm with ivf (my eggs)
We went through xytex, you can do the membership it shows you pics and everything you’d want to know. You sign consents and ship to your clinic. There’s a few other sperm banks. — I do recommend if you want multiple kids to buy a few because they do retire eventually. I had that happen with my daughters donor and my last transfer failed, so now I’m doing ivf with a new donor and they won’t be full siblings not that it matters much I guess. But it was our fault for not buying extra sperm vials. But we just want a healthy baby in the end. Good luck!
Depends what country you are from. But from my experience as a solo mum, in Australia, there are few donors and Caucasian donors are in high demand and get snapped up quickly. You get a survey and a couple of photos of the donor as a child.
You may be interested in this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/queerception/comments/1dhjemr/sperm_bank_list/
The Donor Sibling Registry also have very interesting pages for people “Trying To Decide Which Sperm Bank/Egg Clinic To Use?” and “Prospective Parents”:
https://donorsiblingregistry.com/which-sperm-bank
https://donorsiblingregistry.com/prospective-parents
There’s only one sperm bank they actually recommend btw - The Sperm Bank of California (TSBC) :
See also the “Sperm Bank Traffic Light Chart” from the US Donor Conceived Council:
https://www.usdcc.org/u-s-sperm-bank-data/
IUI might work for you btw, and would be a lot cheaper.
You and your husband may also be interested in these links for “DI dads” and men considering becoming dads via DI:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210413074440/http://www.dcnetwork.org/men
https://web.archive.org/web/20210302194926/http://www.dcnetwork.org/letter-walter
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2259512504329244
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/nov/26/my-real-dad-steven-gauge-adopted
http://www.redbookmag.com/kids-family/advice/sperm-donor-dad
Good luck!
Seed Scout is an alternative that we found through Reddit since they are a matching agency that connects known sperm donors with couples. While they may be costly, they only allow donors to work with up to three families, resulting in fewer half-siblings compared to sperm banks. Additionally, they allow families and donors to maintain communication for medical updates indefinitely. Our experience with them was fantastic, so we highly recommend considering them if you’re in need of their services! 