Our Donor Story

In the year of 2019, it is as yet still scientifically impossible for lesbians to conceive without help from a donor. Through the course of our research, we’ve realized that acquiring sperm from a donor can be achieved in many many different ways. And nothing can really ever prepare you for all the questions you will have about almost every part of the donor selection and sperm buying process.

Will you choose a known donor or a stranger? Will you go through a cryobank? Which one? What are their policies and prices? Have they been sued recently (ok, maybe not everyone asks that, but the lawyer in me is fascinated by the ethical implications of selling biological material in a nearly unregulated market)?

Once you, like us, decide that you want to go through a cryobank, the questions only continue. What traits do you care about in a donor? Are they CMV positive and does that matter? Have they had successful pregnancies before? Do you want your future children to be able to contact them?

To buy sperm from a cryobank, you have to select a donor from the bank’s website. And it turns out that cryobank websites – well, the major ones at least – are intense. Lengthy profiles of each donor, often times with child and adult photos, give excruciating details on every aspect of the donor that you can possibly imagine. Never mind just physical characteristics (every one of which is documented in careful detail), the profiles include essays, personality tests, detailed genetic and health reports, audio samples of their voice, multigenerational family history, THE WORKS. Suffice it to say, you’ll know more about your donor’s genetic profile than you will about your own.

T and I thought we were ready for what we imagined would be a fun if slightly creepy shopping trip to a virtual sperm department store. Just casually perusing at first, we approached donor selection much like I imagine my single friends approach dating apps: keep scrolling/swiping until you find a profile that appeals to you! We’d click on profiles that caught our interest on things that were important to us like race/ethnicity, education history, height (yes, we’re shallow), hobbies and interests.

We quickly decided that race was the most important factor for us (another post for another day on why we care about us “looking like a family”). And let me tell you, finding a donor of color dramatically reduced our options. As in, to less than a tenth of the potential donors otherwise available. Dramatic.

With so few donors of color to choose from, we found we were having a hard time feeling that magical connection with any one. We cycled through various cryobanks, set up alerts for new donors, and periodically checked back to hit “refresh” on our searches.

One day, someone mentioned a crybobank we hadn’t tried, Xytex. It was a little smaller and less well-known but we decided to give it a try. Our first impression was that there were a lot more donors of color and the free trial let us see WAY more info than the other sites, including adult photos (which you ordinarily have to pay a pretty penny for). Encouraged, we kept scrolling. And there he was: Donor X.

Donor X was our guy, we knew it. Of mixed black and Latino heritage, athletic, tall, a science background, clean bill of health, and a well-written essay. To be fair though, T stopped reading his profile when he listed his favorite author as JK Rowling. We’d found the magic. We “favorited” him and decided to keep an eye on his “inventory” for when we felt more ready. Who buys sperm before you’ve even talked to a doctor, amirite?

A few days passed and another wine-filled evening led us back to perusing cryobanks (the exciting life of 30-something year old lesbians!). We logged onto Xytex and were instantly horrified: SOLD OUT. No more inventory for Donor X. We were heartbroken. We favorited a few other donors out of a need to feel less devastated but none really compared to Donor X.

My loved ones will tell you that one of my less endearing qualities is that I’m doggedly stubborn. After the initial heartbreak, I simply decided to be unfazed. I was going to get us Donor X sperm. I refreshed the website daily. Signed up for new alerts. Finally, I just started calling the cryobank. No, they didn’t have any more inventory for sale but he did have more that would eventually come available, they said. Hope! That was all I needed.

My persistence won me a friend at Xytex, DeAnne. DeAnne told me about a waitlist I could get on so that when Donor X’s inventory became available, I’d be only the second person to know (Donor X was popular, apparently). You had to pay to be on it, but we decided it was well worth it.

I was filling out the waitlist paperwork at work when I got an urgent email from DeAnne: Donor X has vials! Only a few so not as many as we needed and they were A.R.T. vials, which meant they would only work for IVF. (ART vials are the “weak swimmers” extracted from a donor’s sperm: cheaper but tend to only work if you’re literally doing all the little guy’s work for him and physically inserting him into the egg.) But I jumped on it. I put the 4 vials of Donor X’s ART sperm on hold pending talking to T. The countdown until our holding time was on…

We were on our way to Boston with our puppy in tow for a vaca planned purely around a Beyonce concert. I got an email from DeAnne that our time was up: as my Southern family would say, s*** or get off the pot. Someone else wanted our ART vials and we had to either buy them or give em back. We were somewhere near Philly on I95 when we made the decision and called DeAnne. She could have our vials back. We were sad but knew that 4 vials of ART sperm alone weren’t gonna do it for us and better for someone to have it than us to sit on it hoping more came available.

The thing about being kind people and putting positive energy out into the world is that it really truly so often finds it’s way back to you. We returned to DC sperm-less but having been blessed by Beyoncé, ready to pay our waitlist fee to get back on the list for Donor X’s future inventory. In fact, we had submitted our form to DeAnne and were just waiting for her to officially sign us up. That’s when it happened.

I was in my office on August 7, 2018, looking out the window across the Potomac and watching the planes take off and land from National when DeAnne emailed. She said to me, I have 7 vials of Donor X’s sperm, half washed and half unwashed, they are yours if you want them. In fact, DeAnne had taken it upon herself to put 4 on hold for me before even asking. See, some couple had returned theirs to the inventory and they hadn’t even been put on the website. But DeAnne knew how much we wanted those vials, and I was her first stop. I called her immediately. Not only had she put as many on hold for me as she could, she said that there were even a few more available: 10 total. They hadn’t called anyone else yet, they were ours if we wanted them. I said HOLD ALL THOSE VIALS, DEANNE and immediately called T.

“They’re ours! I know we haven’t talked to a doctor and we know nothing about this process really but THIS IS OUR CHANCE! It may be our only chance to get Donor X!” She immediately said, do it. Unwavering, my wife. I called DeAnne back and pulled the trigger. Several rainforests of paperwork and thousands of dollars later, we were the proud owners of 8 vials of Donor X sperm.

Because we had purchased so much, Xytex’s policies allowed us to store our vials with them for 2 years for free. In the event we were super lucky and got pregnant with one or two vials, our 8-vial purchase also granted us the right to sell back our remaining inventory at 50% the purchase price. Sweet deals all around, only possible because of DeAnne having our back.

It was a whirlwind process propped up entirely by our emotional adrenaline. Once the dust settled and we realized what we had done, it quickly became real. It’s hard not to be serious about the baby making process when you’ve spent several months worth of rent on sperm. Ready or not, there we were.

And ready we became. We were (and still are) over the moon about it all. Occasionally, we will go and look at Donor X’s profile and imagine what our future little one will be like. We couldn’t have picked someone more suited to our future family, and we can’t wait to see what traits our donor passes on to our children.