Just a Baby – that’s what the app is called – the app I used for about a month to find a sperm donor. The easiest way to describe it is as “Tinder for sperm”….. When I was looking at finding a sperm donor before I started my IVF to harvest my eggs, it seemed that it might be a good way to go.
Just a Baby is all about helping people to make babies. You can either find a donor, a surrogate, or a co-parent. You’ll find guys who are willing to donate sperm, whether through NI (natural insemination, aka sex) or by AI (artificial insemination, aka IVF clinic or turkey baster).
When I went on the app, there were literally hundreds of guys from all over the world offering their services; some are saying that they want to co-parent, and others just donate sperm. The ones I find *interesting* are those only interested in NI…. To me, that just says they want sex without a condom or any responsibility for the outcome….
I did match with a few guys from Just a Baby and even had a phone conversation with one. This was during COVID, and many were interstate, which seemed far too hard. I can’t imagine people being allowed to travel for sex!
One guy I spoke to seemed nice, and we were supposed to catch up. That is the hard thing about a sperm donor. If you just want to have sex and hope, it is not as simple as that. They really need to be able to time it with you. It’s not really about when they want to do it, but when it works out to be the best time for your body. With the guy I matched and chatted to, he just didn’t have the spontaneity that I think you need if you really want to have sex to donate sperm. We tried to catch up a couple of times, but I ended up deciding it was just too hard.
There was another guy who lived in Northern NSW and offered to come down and stay with me for a week to help me get pregnant… A “kind” offer, but I lived in a one-bedroom apartment and wasn’t super comfortable having someone I didn’t know stay with me for the week, especially as I worked from home and would potentially be with him 24/7. What if he were completely unbearable? Getting rid of him could be hard… Needless to say, I turned him down.
The other challenge you have with a sperm donor is that you don’t know whether they are healthy. I didn’t realise at the time, but there was a lot of syphilis going around, definitely not something I was keen to catch. Plus, there are diseases such as HIV that wouldn’t be great to catch. The other challenges are that you don’t know about any genetic defects, and it never occurred to me before IVF that couples should be genetically tested to check that 1+1 doesn’t equal 3. This is why using a sperm donor from a clinic can be so expensive… $10,000 for a USA sperm donor! Aussies are cheaper, but there is a very limited choice.
I was also concerned about the guy having a potential claim to the child, which I wasn’t keen on, as I didn’t know them. I did find a legal document that I could have got him to sign, which meant he would agree to basically donate sperm, and that was it. I am not sure how it would stand up in court, but it might have just put him off…
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