TDQ (The Donor Question)
The first appointment we can get with the specialist is for 8 February, almost three months away. When we first started planning our baby, I optimistically imagined that the whole project from locating a sperm donor to a wrapped up bundle of love could fit into a ten month timeframe. I am now discovering that it will take a lot longer and we’ll be lucky to be visibly pregnant by next Christmas. Suffice to say we are glad that we have decided to start while we’re relatively young .
The time from now until our appointment gives us three months to (a) relax and take a break after a year of having a wedding, buying a house and general craziness (b) save some cash which has been seriously depleted by the aforementioned pursuits but which will be required in bucketloads for the baby adventure and (c) solve The Donor Question (TDQ).
Lo and I are in a fortunate position (or as fortunate as we can be for two girls who can’t have a baby between us) in that under the relatively progressive local laws, we have a range of donor choices and insemination methods available to us. These include the choice of using an identified international or local donor or locating a known donor. We also can embark on a co-parenting arrangement.
These questions are not easy ones to answer and I struggle with my pendulous feelings, going from utter conviction in the benefits of two mums, no dad, and no interference from outside parties, thinking that a sperm donation is like a kidney donation, where I do not want to have to have a permanent life long relationship with a person on the base of my needs for a bodily part, nor do I want for our child to see that having two mums is not enough. I do not want Lo and I to have to negotiate a relationship with a man or for our child to be born into a fragmented family. Besides, we can provide lots of good male role models but they don’t necessarily need to be related to our family.
Then I go to singing the praises of a child knowing its biological origins, how nice it would be for it to know its father personally, and for us to know whose sperm is making our baby. We think about how we would like to avoid the cases of the pink district child care centres where the childcare workers can’t help but notice that a large number of the children look startlingly similar, soon working out that the neighbourhood lesbian mums had all inadvertently used the same donor.
So we go back to our address book and start flicking through for eligible bachelors …
Conception
Last night Lo and I started our family. In theory, perhaps, if not yet in egg-meets-sperm reality. We crept in late, through the side door, to our local fertility centre’s information night, a compulsory experience before you can make an appointment with a specialist.
As we entered, we exchanged cheeky smiles with the only other lesbians in the room, our friends S&L, and took our seat next to one of the many garden variety heterosexual couples (except I quickly realised that there was nothing garden variety about these people, given their reason for being here). A man with sweeping, grey hair was speaking about the clinic’s work to a set of powerpoint slides.
At first, I instinctively felt cynical and wary of this man and his patriarchal, heterosexual medical model approach to fertility – warning men not to wank before donating sperm and women to remain lying down after insemination – but then another doctor, a leggy blonde with a warm smile and classic chignon, with a name not dissimilar to Dr Heavenly, went on to introduce the next slides and, in doing so, apologised for the penis and vagina nature of some of the material outlining the centre’s commitment to working with same sex couples. From my seat, I beamed one of those ‘thank you’ smiles that we members of marginalised groups use to great effect, I guess when we’d rather be leaping to our feet in applause for someone who has acknowledged our existence but know we’d better not.
As the seminar progressed, I started to see Dr Heavenly and Dr Big Gray Hair and their contemporaries as the heros they were. If it were not for the brave, pioneering and radical work that they had done in the early days of fertility treatments, in the face of severe criticism and judgement, Lo & I would not have the options for starting a family that we do. When we left the centre, we felt validated and awash with the options before us. We floated on the emancipatory promise of science – the everyday miracle that fertility treatment offers us homo folk. There is something entirely pro-feminist and radical about the options available to us for designing our family. We know that men will have to be in there somewhere, either inserting the speculum or jacking off for our benefit in a privacy room but we also know that we hold such choice and options before us.
For us, by virtue of where we live, we will be able to have a child who has both parents’ names on its birth certificate. We will be able to retain our five star lesbian status without having ever to have to experience the feeling of warm sperm running down the insides of our leg. By starting our family, Lo and I are doing what we believe in, knowing that the road ahead will not be an easy one. Knowing that we will have to justify our decision to form our family intentionally, to a design that continues to be scrutinised. But knowing that we are doing a right and brave thing that has been done in so many different ways by the global community of GLBT families. And I am so excited about being part of that.
