Among the parties we attended for the New Year was one that happened to be populated with couples hoping to conceive this year. (I hope they all do because they were truly lovely people). They were almost all lesbian couples and the topic du jour seemed to be sperm. Whose sperm, how it scored in performance tests, and the contractual arrangements it came with etc.
Now, let me tell you my preferred method for getting pregnant. Or not. Say, you’re related to me or are friends with me in real life, you might not want to read this. Understandable. You can read interesting things somewhere else instead.
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… Sooooo, back to procreation. Some people like to try to get pregnant casually. It will happen when it happens, kinda thing. They must be very zen. If I want to be pregnant I want it to happen right away. (And likewise, if I don’t want to be pregnant I really don’t want to be pregnant). I figure if I am going to be watching for my period, imagining pregnancy symptoms and avoiding alcohol then it might as well be with good reason.
So, this is how I like to get pregnant. We make a plan to have a baby. Then I narrow down the time to when I think I might be ovulating and Bill and I have ridiculous amounts of sex over that time so I can be absolutely sure that the egg is awash with sperm and that there is no possible way we can still be enjoying the sex by the end of it. Sperm, sperm and more sperm. I am not zen.
Yes, there is sort of a point to this story.
The first time we got pregnant my preferred method of conception was very effective. We could have sex in the morning and sex again that evening and sometimes more sex in between, as well. We were carefree. We weren’t already parents. We laughed a lot. We loved it. The sex was brilliant fun. We got pregnant straight away.
That is Lauca’s conception story, she may not want to read it.
The second time we got pregnant wasn’t so straight forward. We had a pretty very demanding little kid by then who slept in our bed and who liked to sleep with her arms and legs wrapped tightly around my torso. Procreation sex can lack spontaneity at the best of times – you already know what positions are likely to be involved and exactly how it is going to end – but when you have to include with it a plan to escape from a pre-schooler beforehand it really can slip into ‘chore’.
Also, when we were trying for our second pregnancy a lot of shit was going on in our lives – a serious health scare; someone close to us was also pretty much killing themselves on drugs; Bill’s then-job was under threat; Lauca was suffering terrible anxiety problems at daycare; and me, I was wondering how much longer I could continue working with Lauca like that – and these were just some of the problems we were dealing with. I really should have taken all that as a sign and stopped thinking about having another baby for a while. With so much shit going on in our lives I was too stressed out to have regular cycles and I couldn’t get a handle on when I was actually fertile. It was confusing. We didn’t get pregnant straight away and I panicked. So, I started enforcing abstinence for Bill and I over the week prior to ovulation to ensure that we had the best possible sperm to drench my eggs with when we tried. Months passed. As you can imagine it was all very romantic.
Eventually, when we were almost in despair I read someone’s blog and she mentioned using an ovulation test kit and how you could buy them in the supermarket. How interesting and why didn’t I know that already? I should be more observant in supermarkets. We bought a test kit and discovered I was way off with my ovulation estimations and that we had been consistently abstaining during ovulation. Now with the test kit we could return properly to my preferred method of conception, which is to have lots of sex before ovulation and not leave anything to chance. And we got pregnant.
Then I miscarried and thought life was hopeless again.
The obstetrician told me to leave it a few months while I recovered. But I wasn’t zen enough for that so I used another ovulation test kit, proposed more scripted-and-scheduled procreation sex with Bill, who I think was finally beginning to hate sex, and I swam about in sperm and we got pregnant immediately; thank god, because neither of us had any more libido left in us. It was probably the most tedious sex of our lives. (Hallelujah that that is all behind us and we can have the fun pointless kind of sex again instead).
And that is your conception story Cormac, you may not want to read it.
As you can see these stories involve a lot of sperm. So, now back to this party with the girl couples who are hoping to get pregnant this year. During the conversation they told me that it costs one thousand dollars for sperm in Australia. One thousand dollars! And you only get one shot of ‘trying’ out of your sperm dose. If nothing happens that month it is back to your savings account for another thousand dollars. I thought about Bill’s and my conception methods and the sum of our months of trying and I gave an involuntary gasp. Good lord.
As someone who quite likes cheap champagne I can assure you that I have never before in my life gorged so extravagantly on something quite that expensive. Never ever.
Wow $1000 a pop? I too am a fan of your chosen method of contraception. Our experiences were kind of the exact opposite of yours. I decided we needed to become pregnant before my 30th birthday. I was desperate to do it NOW and started trying immediately after stopping the pill (after 10+ years). Our first conception was very un-romantic and involved some anxiety on both sides. That pregnancy resulted in a miscarriage. My OB told us to get back on the ‘horse’ as soon as possible and we got pregnant again straight away. That was Scarlett. Xavier on the other hand was conceived in the throws of passion after Scarlett finally stopped breastfeeding and I momentarily got my libido back. Oops!
As much as I dying to relay this extremely interesting story to my husband (especially since were approaching our own story about this), I am hesitant to tell him that his sperm could be worth that much.
What share of that does the donor get, if any?
Do we have six grand sitting in our bin?
(I suspect I’m too curious to know what he thinks to keep it to myself…!)
Hmmm, Blue Milk, I pegged you for a free spirit, if-it-happens-it-happens kind of girl.
I was exactly the same way. But prior to my first pregnancy, I was CONVINCED I was infertile. For absolutely no reason, just fear. I had ovulation kits, that very well-known book called “Taking Charge of Your Fertility” and I took my temperature every morning. It took 4 months to get pregnant.
With my son, I just figured I was healthy and fertile and didn’t sweat about it. It took 2 months. My sex-starved husband was a little disappointed, I think.
I was blessed, for sure.
Oh, and my friend who used a sperm donor (in the US) said it cost her $300 dollars per pop. That was a few years ago.
We had exactly the same experience with our second (high maintenance cosleeping daughter and other stresses made conceiving impossible the first time we tried). It was almost enough to make us decide to just stop at one.
At $1000 a pop we’d be broke!
Lol blue milk – once you read to the end that title sounds so, so dirty
I was exactly the same as you with conceiving our first so luckily we got pregnant the first month otherwise I think I could quite possibly have driven my husband off sex permanently. Hopefully it will be just as easy next time.
I have something of a talent for filth.
Wow, people try to get pregnant?
I’d heard rumours, and now it turns out that people really do.
Now I must go tell the Bloke he’s my new money making idea. Blackmarket sperm.
It was only after I had kids and started hearing/reading about other people’s conception stories (and infertility stories) that I realized how lucky I am that I’ve always been a little uptight about birth control. (Also, how lucky I am that getting pregnant was so easy- and cheap!- for me, particularly since I waited until I was in my 30s to do it.)
Here’s how I conceived, both times: stop taking pills. Have a lot of sex all month, but particularly around the day or two I suspect I’ll be ovulating. Get pregnant. It took two months the first time, and one month the second time. I was 34 and 36.
So now, I’m really, really uptight about birth control because I’m pretty much convinced that if I’m not, we’ll end up a family of 5.
In the good old days of British Rail there was nothing like a long train ride and an individual carriage to get things sorted.
I was hoping for a little romantic getaway while we’re trying for our second, but I have to settle for the small miracle of getting the baby to actually sleep in her crib for the first part of the night. Though, with enough imagination, our bed could be a beach. Sadly, my imagination is wrapped up in 2 hours of creative story telling that gets said baby into her crib.
But yes, I am a fan of your described procreation method. Huzzah to chore sex – because that’s all I’m getting these days. Fingers crossed.
I had a boyfriend whose main accomplishment in life was being good in bed. He was inordinately proud of things like “distance away I can hit things with semen”. (he was a lot of fun, though, truthfully.)
So he decided, while unemployed, to donate sperm for money. It paid big bucks, maybe $100/week for up to 7 weeks? Much more than donating blood serum.
Donors had to have above-average sperm count and motility as well as general health and whatnot. He passed the initial screening and it turned out his sperm were only average. That threw him into a depression for months.
I am *Stunned* that they are able to access any at all, even at $1000 per pop. Is this in New Zealand rather than Australia?
There are currently zero donors in West Australia willing to give to single women or lesbians. Two in New South Wales.
My process for getting pregnant included finding my own donor and spending $20,000 to get the sperm frozen and do IUI. It took two and half years to source the sperm, three months to conceive.
I was advised by a gynaecologist to ‘just go out and have sex’. Yep, random sex with strangers.
Lesbian friends of mine in Victoria have recently become pregnant with donor sperm – hideously expensive but possible (it’s only recently become legal here, single & lesbian women used to travel to NSW). I’m really sorry you had such a hard time.
Lesbian friends of mine in Victoria have recently be come pregnant with donor sperm – hideously expensive but possible (it’s only recently become legal here, single & lesbian women used to travel to NSW). I’m really sorry you had such a hard time.
Well, it was definitely worth it. Plus, my second child was much cheaper (a mere $2,500) as I had teh sperm on ice so to speak.
The problem is that the donation rates dropped by 99% when laws saying the children could get their fathers’ details when they were 18 if they wanted. I think this is a good idea as lots of people want to know this stuff, but it is ridiculous that the fertility clinics cannot import sperm from donors who are willing to be identified. There are literally dozens of donors willing to be known in one clinic I like in the USA alone at any time – but it is illegal to import sperm. (Which amuses me as men surely smuggle it in inside their bodies all the time).
What? That’s terrible. The individual donors get to choose who gets it?
What? That’s terrible. The individual donors get to choose who gets it?
With NO OTHER donated tissues do individual donors get to specify who gets it. For instance, if I donated a kidney I could not say it could not go to black folks or gay folks (not that I would want to, obviously). But donors can specify who gets their eggs or sperm (ie. commonly not lesbians or single women).
THe analogy is made to adoption rather than donation. People who put their kids up for adoption can also make specifications about the kind of people they want to take teh children.
I think this is a faulty analogy as sperm is not a person.
A truly appalling area of discrimination. That is one very expensive track you were forced on to Emma, thanks for providing your perspective.
A Brisbane fertility clinic imports sperm from the US, that’s why the $1000 price tag. And I am shocked about the $20 000 to use your own donor’s sperm – that’s terrible – our clinic fees did not cost anywhere near that amount – maybe $500?
As a fertile male pretty thrilled with the experience of parenthood generally, I’d be thrilled to donate to whoever needed it to share that thrill free of any charge at all but for a few things:
1) financial issues. Whatever the law may be at any given moment in time re obligation of the donor to provide financially for genetic offspring, it could change with no notice at any time. Altruism could end up costing me money I don’t have and diminish the material resources I can dedicate to my own children;
2) my partner simply won’t permit me to (we’ve actually discussed it as a hypothetical). Any man with a woman in his life would be unlikely to donate behind that female partner’s back, and I certainly wouldn’t.
I think it’s pretty awful that for some women, advice from a medical professional to go out and sleep with strangers is the best we can offer. Also the poor women in same-sex relationships. Again, I’d be thrilled to donate to anyone at all who needed it, but for the issues above.
1) financial issues. Whatever the law may be at any given moment in time re obligation of the donor to provide financially for genetic offspring, it could change with no notice at any time. Altruism could end up costing me money I don’t have and diminish the material resources I can dedicate to my own children;
While this is a possibility, it would mean very major changes to the law. What I had to do was sign an affadavit that I went through a clinic and get teh clinic to confirm it – I like this as, from my pov, it gives me protection taht a donor might not decide he wants contact with teh child in the future.
I think the more you try the worse it gets. Well in my case it did. It was the month we took off from the regimental sex, no drinking, temperature taking and plotting on fertility friend and the day before my first fertility clinic appointment that I fell off the toilet seat open mouthed and screaming expletives at the test stick.
Planning a family is exciting but I am so relived not to be trying after 7 years of trying!
We had no trouble conceiving twice and would be happy for my partner to donate his Dom Perignon, except for the issue raised above. My partner does not want to find that the laws have changed and he suddenly has obligations towards a resulting child.
this is utterly fantastic.