As I mentioned in a previous post, Wife and I decided to embark on the thrilling adventure of trying to procreate. We quickly discovered that this was weirdly difficult due to having the wrong set of hardware between the two of us. So this is the post about everything-you-never-actually-wanted-to-know-about-same-sex-family-making-and-therefore-never-asked.
Before starting this blog I did actually think about whether or not I wanted this journey to be a public one. But here’s Thing One about deciding to become same sex parents: none of it is easy or private. There are a lot of doctors appointments and nosy people and weird decisions you have to make. It’s not like you just wake up pregnant by accident one day. Not that getting pregnant as a straight couple is always easy, and honestly our fertility journey (so far) is a lot easier than most people struggling with infertility. But the thing is whether you’re a straight couple going through this whole process or a gay couple, it’s not really that easy to keep it quiet.
Plus, I’m also not great at keeping secrets anyway. And I like to talk about myself. (Okay, these are the real reasons I’m documenting this.)
Besides, these are all the juicy details that people secretly want to ask you about and now I can just give them a business card with my blog address on it and be done with it. I was thinking about making business cards in the shape of Tiny Dog’s head.
So, here’s the beginning of this.
I wouldn’t know what the road is like for gay men trying to become parents, but here are the basic choices for gay women:
1. Adoption. You can just chose to forego the whole pregnancy nonsense and adopt.
2. One of us provides the egg and carries. The “simplest” biological option, this is basically like being a straight couple except you have to borrow some other guy’s sperm. Once you choose to do this, you can pick a donor. If you know someone you want to use (and they’re not completely freaked out by the idea), you can use a known donor and ask them to provide a sample. Or, you can go with a donor through a sperm bank.
3. One of us provides the egg and the other one carries. More expensive and convoluted, you can have one partner take a lot of drugs to convince their body to pump out a ton of eggs at once, harvest them, fertilize them outside the body, and put them in the other person. This is similar to what straight couples do when they do IVF.
4. Outsource the whole deal. You could use a sperm donor and an egg donor and carry it yourself, or do option 3 but then use a surrogate. I’ve never heard of anyone actually wanting to do this option, mainly because it’s super expensive, but it’s sometimes a choice for people having fertility issues. Also I guess if you were both totally grossed out by pregnancy but did want to have a biologically related child, you could go with a surrogate.
Wife and I opted for choice 2 (at this point). We decided early on though that if we had major fertility issues we wouldn’t spend a lot of time and money trying to make it happen; we would then consider adoption instead. Door number 2 is a lot like being a straight couple having a little difficulty conceiving naturally, at least at the beginning.
They use a procedure called “IUI” or “intrauterine insemination”, which means they inject the sperm into the uterus directly. This is different from “IVF” or “in-vitro fertilization” which is what most people associate with fertility treatments. Even for straight couples with difficulty conceiving, IVF is not the first option and usually comes after a series of many other procedures because it’s pretty expensive and complicated and painful. In IVF, they take the eggs out (as described in option 3 above), test to see which ones are the best, fertilize those, test the resulting embryos to see which ones of those are healthiest and then put one or multiple of those back in the woman’s body and cross their fingers.
But, back to IUI. This is what we decided to do and we decided we would go with whomever was more fertile, although it’s not exactly a perfect science. Since Wife has never really had the desire to carry a baby (though said she would if it came to it), we started with me. Unlike with straight couples, you then have the option of going through the pre-insemination testing. We opted to do this because I have really good insurance and we’d rather do the work on the front end than try for a year without success and then find out there’s some type of fertility problem.
When we had our first appointment, it was really long. They took blood to see what my blood type was and to see if I had antibodies for the CMV virus (another weird thing most straight couples don’t think about). They also do an ultrasound to look at your ovaries to make sure everything looks good and count how many egg follicles you have, which is a weird experience. Wife was sitting there with me and we were both asking the ultrasound tech things like, “what’s that black thing?” and then feeling strangely victorious when she pointed out that I have an excellent number of follicles.
Then we had to meet with a psychologist (ironic) for pre-insemination counseling. Wife and I have a long history of being weirdly enraged/offended about all of the wrong things (for example, McDonald’s in our midwestern state should NOT have two drive through lanes because they are clearly not ready for that technology and it actually makes things slower). Other things which should bother us do not, so we were kind of surprised when our friends pointed out that it was annoying and unfair that we had to meet with a psychologist just because we are gay, but i’ll be honest that didn’t really occur to me. And it’s true that most straight couples would not have to do that if they didn’t need fertility treatments, but it also sort of made sense for someone to remind us about all these weird decisions we didn’t know we’d have to make, like do we want our baby to be able to know the donor some day, etc etc. It was a condition of our appointment anyway.
We also had to sign a lot of forms saying that we won’t sue the clinic if the baby turns out to be a serial killer or a conjoined twin or needs glasses.
There was another test I opted to get which is a really long name I can’t say but basically they inject radioactive dye into your body and watch it travel around your uterus and Fallopian tubes to make sure there’s no blockages or tumors or other weird things. The bummer about that test is that a) it can be painful and b) they have to do it a certain number of days after you have your period and before you ovulate so it’s a little bit hard to time. Also my doctor’s office only does this type of scan on Wednesdays, so it’s been a pain in the uterus to schedule (see what I did there?? hahaha).
After all that is done, if everything looks good, you then pick a donor. See future blog posts about the supreme weirdness of picking a sperm donor. We didn’t really know anyone we liked enough that we felt comfortable putting in the extremely bizarre position of being a donor, so we decided to go with a sperm bank. The other weird thing that I didn’t realize about using a known donor is that it can actually be pretty expensive. You would think you would save money, but all the samples from sperm banks come pre tested and treated, whereas your average Joe off the street has to provide the sample and then they do some fancy stuff at the lab to make sure it’s “clean” and everything. Plus you have to pay for storage anyway.
Sperm is pretty much the only thing my insurance won’t cover, and it can be pretty expensive. It’s usually between 600-1000 dollars per “vial”, and each vial can only be used once. You have the same odds (basically) of getting pregnant with IUI as you do with regular straight-people-trying-to-start-a-family sex, so you could get pregnant on the first cycle if you’re lucky. For most people it takes about 4-6 cycles though, which translates to 4-6 months and 4-6 vials. That’s kind of expensive. And yeah, I get that babies are expensive and so I shouldn’t really be complaining about it, but realistically most straight couples don’t have to drop $3000-$6000 just to START trying. So that’s kind of a bummer.
From there it’s basically like regular family planning… you try to figure out when you’re ovulating and then you have se… er, pop over to the doctor’s office and have them stick that stuff in you. A side note, some people opt to do this at home (read: the “turkey baster method”), but Wife and I decided that would be totally gross and weird and potentially messy, so we’re not going to do that.
For those of you who have never tried to get pregnant or don’t know much about it, basically there are a few days every month for a woman that are best to get pregnant, when you are “ovulating”. This is when your body releases an egg, and you try to time sex so that the sperm and the egg are in the same place at the same time, basically. You can use these handy-dandy things call ovulation predictor kits (“OPKs”) which is like a pregnancy test because you pee on a stick every day and then you get a smiley face when you’re ovulating. Then you call the doctor and they tell you to drop everything and come over there right away (or within the next 24 hours), and slam, bam, thank you ma’am, deed is done.
And…. that’s basically it. See? I told you it was something you never wanted to know and therefore didn’t ask. But I spent enough years creeping on other people’s personal blogs about similar topics that I thought some people might want to know. We are somewhere in between the testing phase and the selecting a donor phase, so I’ll write more later about what it’s like to try to find a sperm donor (it’s hilarious and strange and stressful all at once. And my mom had a lot of opinions.) In the meantime, we will be blissfully enjoying our (hopefully?) numbered nights of uninterrupted sleep.
Some Supervision Required. 