The Portable Pod

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).

A 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 A 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 …