My experience with deciding to use donor sperm for my family

My experience with the sperm donors was very difficult to grasp at first, knowing that my child or children was not gonna be mine “biologically.” And my whole life I’ve just envisioned me being the “biological” parent of my child and then knowing that all my friends, friends of friends that are having babies it was, “Oh, you got your wife pregnant on the first try. Oh, you didn’t even know, you guys were trying and you got your wife pregnant.” That was one of the hardest things to deal with, knowing that it took eight months of trying to get my wife pregnant followed up by immediate, “Andy, do you know who Lance Armstrong is?” You have testicular cancer to surgery to radiation to an IVF and a frozen cycle in over a year-and-a-half plus, and my wife and I are still not pregnant.

So when my wife said to me, “Let’s discuss adoption or sperm donor,” I just wasn’t ready to talk about it. It was just devastating enough that everywhere I turn around there’s a pregnant lady and everywhere I turn around one of my friends got his wife pregnant on the first try or somebody said, “Oh, you guys just need to relax a little.” And it was just extremely devastating knowing that we don’t need to relax, you just don’t know what’s going on and I understand that all my friends are getting their wife pregnant on the first try and I can’t give that to my wife and then the biggest thing was I couldn’t give my wife the greatest gift a man could give to his wife. And all my wife has ever wanted was to be pregnant and I couldn’t give that to her personally and that was just a horrible feeling. It was I don’t even remember the timeframe.
After being in therapy about it, I talked to my therapist about it and I finally decided there’s a bigger picture here and that is to have a family and have children and watch my wife get pregnant. I knew we weren’t gonna be adopting; we had to try the sperm donor route. So when my wife and I finally sat down together and looked at the computer, at the sperm banks, and I realized this really is gonna be the joy of my life is this bigger picture and I’m gonna have a child regardless if it’s my “biological child” or just my child that I raise personally and learn to love. I started looking around at my friends’ children, a lot of them I just love my friends’ children, most of them, and one of my friends I sat down with for lunch; he adopted a child because his wife couldn’t give birth and then they were able to retrieve four eggs and they were they had a surrogate with his sperm and her egg and it’s a very it was a healthy baby boy and the little girl is adopted. And when I finally made the decision that we should try the sperm donor route, over lunch I asked him, I said I told him, I said, “My biggest concern is am I going to love this child like it was my own ‘biological child’? Am I gonna be able to look at this child and say I am not your biological father; therefore, can I love you as much?”

My friend looked at me and he said, “Andy, let me tell you this. I love these children more than anything in the world. My little girl ” This is what he’s saying, “My little girl, the adopted one, I may even love more because she was my first and I never once looked at her as an adopted child. She is not biologically mine, she is not biologically his wife’s, and these two children mean more to me than anything else.” That was probably the most powerful thing that anybody has ever said to me during this process.