Having Your Baby Through Egg Donation. Evelina Weidman Sterling
paternity so cavalierly and usher them on to donor sperm “as if it were nothing.”
In fact, thinking about donor sperm was hardly nothing! Carla and Rob remember spending several months thinking about donor insemination (DI), all the while “hoping the doctor was wrong and that we’d get pregnant on our own.” But that didn’t happen, Carla and Rob spent a good deal of time talking about what it would mean to have a child that was genetically connected to Carla but not to Rob, especially since Carla would carry the child for nine months. After a time the Gordons realized that they were beginning to feel receptive to the idea of using donor sperm. It was time to pick a donor.
When they made the decision to use donor sperm, Carla and Rob felt a sense of relief. “We’d done all the hard work—or so we thought.” The couple felt certain that deciding on donor sperm was the difficult part and that picking a donor would be an easier task. The process of decision making had brought them closer together, and both approached donor selection with optimism. “We’d have some fun with it. We’d look at profiles closely. We’d find someone we really wanted to have as a part of our family.”
The Gordons’ sense of fun and optimism carried them only so far and lasted only so long. The couple, who had expected to conceive easily on their own, now anticipated conceiving immediately with the first donor they selected. Neither could ever have anticipated trying with three donors and going through a series of fertility treatments all the way up to IVF.
“Eventually, we did conceive, and by that time it practically didn’t matter that it was with donor sperm,” says Rob. He remembers just wanting a baby and not caring so much how the baby came. But, for Carla, it was different. She recalls being pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, Rebecca, and worrying that Rob wouldn’t love this baby. When Rebecca was born and Rob was not as involved and attentive as Carla was, she worried that her fears had come to pass. It was not until one day—a week or two into motherhood—that she burst into tears and said, “I’m so sad that you don’t love her.” What a relief it was for Carla when Rob looked at her, baffled and confused, and said, “Of course I do. Of course I do.”
And, of course, he did. Rob and Rebecca were close from the start and remain so, even as Rebecca, now 11, heads towards adolescence. For Carla, watching her husband and their firstborn share such a strong bond has been a source of great joy and relief. Her pleasure has increased all the more since the couple’s second daughter, Jennifer, came along. Jennifer was not conceived with donor sperm: Rob is her biological father.
So how did that happen, you ask? Thrilled with Rebecca, Carla and Rob returned to the fertility clinic that had “given us our daughter” and requested “the same again.” They wanted the same donor, the same treatment and hoped for the same outcome. To their surprise, the physician responded to their request with a very different recommendation: “I know that we told you something different a few years ago, but with the use of ICSI—intracytoplasmic sperm injection, where a single sperm is injected into the egg for fertilization—we believe that you can probably conceive with Rob’s sperm.”
This news startled Rob and Carla as much as the original bleak pronouncement had a few years earlier. They were, however, happy to take the doctor up on his offer to try IVF with Rob’s sperm. Fortunate to live in Massachusetts, which has enjoyed an insurance mandate since 1985, the Gordons did not have to worry about the cost of treatment. Insurance would cover IVF and ICSI, and if treatment didn’t work, there was nothing ventured, nothing lost financially. They would simply turn to DI again. DI had blessed them with a wonderful first child, and Rob and Carla were certain that it would work again.
This time around it wasn’t going to be quite so difficult. The first IVF cycle didn’t bring a pregnancy, but it did bring nice evidence of fertilization. The same thing was true the second time around. “We were a little discouraged, but our experience trying to get pregnant a few years earlier had taught us that patience and fortitude pay off.”
And indeed they did. Carla was pregnant on the third IVF-ICSI cycle, and she gave birth to Jennifer nine months later.
“Was it amazing for you to be the biological father to your child?” we asked Rob.
“No,” he replied. “What was amazing was to see her born at home. Rebecca was there too and she was very much a part of things.”
A home birth is hardly something that most infertile couples aspire to. “Give me the lights, the instruments, the cast of thousands and all the machines,” many veterans of infertility declare. Many—but not Carla Gordon. For Carla, who hates to take so much as an aspirin, the whole high-tech trip through infertility had been difficult—“something I had to cope with because I wanted a baby so much.” Now, with a healthy, uneventful pregnancy, she was determined to have as natural an experience as she could—a home birth followed by a long period of nursing.
When Jennifer was four years old, baby fever struck again. Although Carla and Rob had initially anticipated having two children and had felt prepared to “bargain for one” before Rebecca was born, their struggles with infertility had altered their sense of family. “We had come to appreciate what an incredible miracle every child is and we wanted more. The only problem was that I had just about aged out of the picture.”
Carla, 26 when it all began, was 40 when she and Rob returned to the fertility center for yet another try. “By this time they had declared that Rob was just fine, but I could see that the doctor was worried about my eggs. He did an FSH and a clomiphene citrate challenge test and came back with news that was remarkably similar to the news we had gotten about Rob nearly 14 years earlier. “You are wasting time to try on your own. You should use donor eggs.”
“Donor eggs? When I heard the words, I wasn’t the least bit upset—I was ecstatic. The recommendation sent my heart soaring. After all, we’d long ago made peace with the idea of having a child through donor gametes. That work had been done, and we had a wonderful child to show for it. What sent my heart soaring was the news that egg donors were now available. When we had gone through donor sperm, I remembered hearing that women were on waiting lists for years for donor eggs.”
“‘No, it’s become easy to locate a donor,’ our doctor told us. He put us in touch with a lawyer who specializes in finding donors and helps match them with recipients. We made an appointment and eagerly piled the girls into the car for what would be the newest Gordon family project,” Carla continues. “The lawyer was lovely but when he saw the children, he seemed a little surprised and confused. He pointed to them and asked how we could look at donor profiles when our children were with us. ‘Oh, they came to help us,’ I explained. Then he looked really surprised.”
Indeed, Rebecca and Jennifer were there to help their parents select a donor. Needless to say, the real choice would be the parents’ decision, but Rebecca and Jennifer, who have both known about their own origins for as long as they can remember, wanted to be part of things. For them, it is entirely natural for families to be created in all sorts of ways and for parents to talk openly and honestly with their children about assisted reproduction and gamete donation.
Carla and Rob found a donor they liked. They were pleased to find that egg donation—at least with their lawyer—was more open than sperm donation had been for them. They were able to talk with their donor and to exchange letters and pictures in a non-identifying way. The process was set in motion, and, to Carla and Rob’s surprise, Carla was pregnant on the first cycle. But there was to be a bigger surprise up ahead.
When Carla and Rob learned that she was carrying twins, they were stunned. Having spent over a decade in reproductive medicine, they were well aware that twins were always a possibility, but, as Rob put it, “We weren’t surprised, we were shocked.”
Last year Carla gave birth to baby boys, Jake and Matt. When asked how this—her donor egg pregnancy—felt different to the others, Carla comments first on the fact that it was twins, then on the fact that she felt like an “old mother”—and only then on the fact that the twins came from a donor.
“I felt that if I couldn’t give them my genes, I could grow them as best I could. I did everything I could to eat well, rest well, take care of myself