Deciding to Become Embryo Recipients
- Keira
- Mar 8, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 30, 2020
Sometime in the late Spring of 2018, my spouse Sami and I started talking more seriously about having children. Like most couples, it was a developing conversation throughout our relationship - but that Spring was when things started to get real. As a same-sex couple, we had the advantage (?) of knowing that our path to parenthood would require “outside assistance” of some kind. We were able to make decisions about our fertility from a less emotionally charged place, as opposed to one of grief. That’s not to say that it’s been easy - it’s just that unlike many other couples who turn to assisted reproduction after an infertility diagnosis, we never had to come to terms with the fact that our bodies in combination couldn’t produce a child. Those are just the hard, cold, gay facts. Human reproduction 101.
That left us with a decision to make: how did we want to have a kid? Sperm donor? Known or anonymous? Adoption? Reciprocal IVF? There are tons of options out there for Queer folks to become parents, each with its own positives, and each with its own unique barriers. When we first started exploring our family-building options, we were stymied by the cost and uncertainty of many of the methods available to us. We were able to establish a few things off the bat:
We wanted to keep our conception costs low in order to increase the possibility of Sami staying home for the first several years of our kids’ lives.
Traditional adoption was outside of our budget, and we wouldn’t be comfortable adopting an older child from foster care until we had some parenting experience under our belts. I still hope that foster care adoption will be in the cards for us someday.
I was (and am) increasingly excited about carrying a pregnancy, but was not willing to use my own eggs due to conditions I carry with a strong genetic component. Sami’s views, on the other hand, were flipped: Using their womb was a no-go, but they were ambivalent about using their genetic material. However, Reciprocal IVF is expensive, and the potential dysphoria Sami would undergo during egg-retrieval cycles would not be worth the cost. Ultimately, the bond developed while caring for our child before they are born is far more important to us than any genetic relationship. Sami and I both come from very close, very blended families - and our family bonds to siblings or parents have always transcended genetic qualifiers like “Half” or “Step.”
So to summarize: We were looking for a low cost way to conceive a child who I would carry, but who did not need to be genetically related to either of us. Enter the perfect-fit solution: Embryo Donation / Adoption, or EDA for short. Now something that once felt impossibly out-of-reach suddenly seemed much more attainable.
I first read about EDA on the National Embryo Donation Center website. Like many resources in this arena, they are Christian, and pro-life. They believe that frozen embryos are already human children, who need to be adopted and given a chance at life. Suffice it to say, many of my views are not the same as those expressed by the apparent national EDA authority, but nonetheless I was ignited by what I read. To summarize: Embryo donation usually takes place when a person or family has more embryos than they intend to use following IVF treatment, and they elect to donate them to another person or family to have children of their own. (Read a more in-depth explanation here).
I turned to direct forums like Reddit, to read about parents’ experiences conceiving this way, as well as to get more insight into the experience of donor-conceived adults. Eventually, I joined the Facebook group where I would ultimately meet our embryo donors. The final piece of our reproductive puzzle didn’t fall into place until we matched with our donors - once that happened, we knew this was without a doubt the family-building method for us. We had hoped for an open relationship with a family who lived within a few hours of us, and with whom we agreed on certain basic beliefs. Our donors have met and exceeded those expectations. We feel totally aligned - not just in our goals for the donation, but also as friends. We’re truly looking forward to adding them to our extended chosen family - at this point, I can't imagine growing out family any other way.
Please reach out with any questions about how we chose EDA to grow our family!
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