At home AI
Looking for advice or experience on at home AI.
We have a child via IVF with donor sperm from a sperm bank. We have no savings left and we're stretched pretty much to our limit paying off the loans and credit cards from our initial IVF plus 5 failed frozen embryo transfers.
We desperately want to give our child a sibling. But further treatment in a clinic just isn't an option.
I'm heavily leaning towards wanting to find a known donor and at least give at home AI a try. But my wife is incredibly cautious about this (I am worried about the risks too but the benefits outweigh the risks to me...provided we take steps to minimise risk).
Positive and negative experiences welcome and advice on making this route as safe as possible?
Also we don't have a male in our lives who would be a suitable donor so..how on earth do you go about finding a donor online?!
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I have never had a bad experience with a known donor I found both of my donors on Facebook a group for people looking for a sperm donor if you want to message me ill tell you more x
I found our sons donor on coparents.co.uk, he is going to help us with a sibling from next month
I looked at this website previously https://www.prideangel.com. We used a known friend in the end because I was very cautious with the risks. There are Facebook groups too. But yeah it’s difficult because you don’t actually know this person, how many times they have donated to others and there may have any number of half siblings. I would say really have a good think about it
we’ve found our potential donor through Facebook too! we’re due to inseminate for the first time in a couple weeks, so can’t comment on our experience yet but i have heard a lot of success stories! just make sure you ask all the right questions and you should be okay.🤞🏽
good luck! sending us both lots of baby dust.🥹✨
I’ve heard of a few bad experiences, sorry. A horrible legal battle where the donor tried to apply for parental responsibility. And a friend whose baby had a genetic medical issue that the donor had concealed.
That’s on top of all the usual worries like how many times they have/will donate. How traceable they’ll be in the future.
To me it’s not worth the risk.
i think if you speak to your donor properly, make sure they have all the documents to show you, and even meet them before-hand - it should be okay. unfortunately most of us in same-sex relationships don’t have +20k to spend on IVF or even IUI. even if you’re both working full-time, it’s completely unrealistic unless you have someone else paying for it for you or some sort of inheritance. which is really sad in this day and age just because we can’t conceive naturally, but i think if you really want something and you’re cautious about it as much as you can - then you make it happen.🖤
We found ours on fb and I’m currently 13 weeks pregnant. It takes a lot of resist in both sides and we have no regrets. We took our time getting to know him and he has put us in a sibling connection group so that our child can meet their donor siblings. We have been so lucky but also there are so many more like him, you just need to weed through the unsuitable ones.
A lot of trust***
I work in assisted fertility & would strongly recommend going through a clinic for both safety & also legal protection. Some IVF can be very expensive but there’s also lots of clinics that now offer interest free payment plans & low cost IVF packages that are more in the 2-3k mark rather than the crazy prices they used to be. Myself & my wife used a payment plan when we had IVF to conceive our daughter. From what I remember we put down an initial payment of around £1000 & then it was £180 a month for a year x
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