In 2008 my husband and I were faced with the choice of whether to forgo having children or opt for donor conception. It was a privilege to have such a choice.
At the time it was a difficult decision for us. I guess I had never thought about the idea that I would never be able to have children, so it is not something that you plan for.
I remember the weekend clearly. My husband, Joe, and I had flown to Budapest for Easter weekend. We lived in the UK at the time, so this was no big deal and neither of us had been there and we were really looking forward to it. But what we didn't realise was that Budapest virtually shuts down over Easter weekend, so we had to fill our time at the movies and lots of chatting over beers. We took this opportunity to make one of the most important decisions of our lives. We had been trying to have kids for over 2 years, had multiple IVF attempts and were finally told that our chances of falling pregnant were about 2%, so it was crunch time. We either had to stop trying or try a new strategy.
If I remember correctly, we addressed the first crucial question:
Do we really, really want children? Were we both committed to be parents?
YES!
The next question is, do we want known or unknown donor?
If we went down the donor route, which country would we be best placed to access their donor conception treatments.
After the weekend away, I came home and started investigating donor conception....
So many questions had to be asked.....Which countries has donor conception facilities available to international recipients? Of these countries, which catered for English speaking recipients, what were the costs involved, what was their approach, who were their primary donors, what was their success rates, how many transfers did they do per year, did they have the facility to hold the embryos for the indefinite future at a reasonable cost, what was their approach, what were the expectations of us in terms of mediations and time and finally what was the cost?
We had chosen to go down the path of unknown donor, so after discussing my shortlist of potential countries we decided to go to Spain. We flew over for a weekend, visited two clinics, and chose one particular clinic, but trusted both.
It took just 3 months from choosing a clinic to be being seriously pregnant with twins A result that we had hoped for, but didn’t think it would happen that quickly.
Donor conception wasn't as daunting as I thought it was going to be. In fact I found it easier that IVF but probably because I didn’t have to have needles daily I am incredibly grateful to the "unknown donor" for giving up her time to help us to become a family.