How Do You Know When You Are Ready to Have a Baby

From embryo adoption to sperm washing, making a baby is easier—and more than complicated—than ever. Doree Shafrir on parenthood's new frontier.

Today's nascency announcements come in all shapes and sizes. "Steve and Michael are Preggers!" "Sally, Maria, and Sebastian are Having Twins!" "It'due south an Adopted Frozen Embryo!"

We live in an age when the obsession with having a child has reached a fever pitch. Unmarried men and women, and couples gay and straight, have more options than ever before—and they're taking advantage of every single ane of them. The $iv billion fertility industry has couples going to untold lengths to conceive, and has pushed pregnancy toward the realm of science fiction. People are adopting embryos that would accept otherwise been used for stalk-cell inquiry, and HIV-infected sperm is beingness washed make clean so information technology can fertilize an egg. (Whose egg? Perhaps the 50-something single lesbian's.) At that place are sperm banks offering discounts to soldiers who want to shop their sperm for their wives to impregnate themselves with in case they dice overseas. And more and more often, shut family members are acting every bit surrogates.

With the art of babe-making going from surrealist to abstract, The Daily Beast talked to couples (and singles) whose paths to parenthood were complex, simply maybe all the more than touching for the length of the journey.

The Sister-in-Law Surrogate

Mindy Denney, a former TV news anchor, had a partial hysterectomy at 19 because of hemophilia in her family; she still had eggs, simply no uterus. When she started thinking about having children, she turned to her sister-in-police, Gina, whom she'd known since junior loftier school. Over a bottle of wine, Mindy and her husband discussed it with Mindy's brother and Gina, and Gina agreed. "For three months she had to take huge progesterone shots in her dorsum every day," Mindy said of Gina'southward ordeal. "We had to get our cycles together." Mindy'southward cycle had to exist lined upward with Gina's then that Gina's uterus would be set to receive the eggs at the exact moment they were ready.

Diagnosing an Embryo

Mindy as well knew she was a carrier for hemophilia—the reason she'd had the fractional hysterectomy—and then her embryos underwent PGD, or preimplantation genetic diagnosis. "Nosotros had xiii embryos, with viii cells to each embryo. They'd pull ane cell off at a time and send it to a clinic, and the dispensary would test that one prison cell and ship us dorsum the paperwork and say this one has PGD, this one doesn't, etc. We only had xiii embryos in consideration." Of course this raises the issue of genetic pick, every bit Mindy herself points out: "People say, oh, you lot decided not to have the hemophilia kid." She declined to say what happened to the rest of the embryos.

The first two clinics Mindy tried refused to work with her because of the genetic disease bug. The 3rd, the Huntington Reproductive Clinic in Southern California, agreed. "The doctor said, I've never done anything like this before. Let's do information technology," said Mindy.

Adopting Her Own Son

After the embryo was successfully implanted in her sister-in-police—who was living in Austin, Texas—Mindy discovered, months later, that there was another potential contraction: She had to get a court order proverb that she and her married man, non her sis-in-law and her brother, were the parents. "Otherwise, nosotros would have had to adopt our own son," she said. Today, Mindy'southward son Alec is a healthy iii year old. But she and her husband know if they want to take more biological children they'll have to find a new surrogate: While she was pregnant with Alec, Gina developed the anti-E antibody, a status that tin can result when a mother's blood blazon is incompatible with her child's. As a effect, Gina is unable to carry any more than children every bit a surrogate, though she tin still have more of her own biological children.

Sperm Washing

Today, even a homo who's HIV-positive can conceive with relative safety—he just needs to get his sperm washed first. Dr. Ann Kiessling, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and the founder of the Bedford Stalk Cell Research Foundation, pioneered the use of so-chosen sperm washing in the United States. Sperm washing tin can be used when a human with HIV wants his own biological child but wants to exist certain he doesn't pass along the virus.

The procedure foregoes soap and water, and skips correct to the spin cycle. Sperm is spun in a centrifuge and the salubrious, presumably not-HIV-infected sperm are the ones that are left in the heart. The healthy sperm are and then fertilized using IVF or through the "cup" insemination method. According to Kiessling, 101 babies in the U.South. have been born using this method since 1998. "We were going to take a large party when nosotros got to 100, but we realized that most people who have gone through this don't desire people to know who they are," she said. "There are quite a number of pregnancies ongoing at present."

At first, she said, she had trouble finding fertility specialists who were willing to work with sperm that had been "washed." "Vladimir Troche, who runs a fertility program in Arizona, was the very first to step forward and said, I'll help yous with these people. After he started, other programs had started." Sperm washing can too be used by men with hepatitis B, which, according to Kiessling, is "one of the few viruses that can infect the developing embryo."

Challenge a Frozen Embryo

Monica, a 38-year-old woman living with her married man Gary outside of Philadelphia, is pregnant with her first child. Simply the baby won't share whatsoever genetic material with either her or her married man. That's because she adopted the frozen leftover embryos of a Milwaukee adult female who had undergone fertility treatments. Many women who undergo IVF either discard their leftover embryos or donate them for stalk-cell research. But some IVF users—especially Christian ones—believe that life begins at conception and reject to destroy or donate their leftover embryos. Instead, they pay to go along them frozen and, in a process that has get like to adopting a child, wait for the right person to come along to adopt the embryo. The resulting children have come to be called snowflake babies.

Monica went through an agency called Embryos Alive, which has been run by a Cincinnati adult female named Bonnie Bernard since September 2003. Bernard matches leftover embryos with women like Monica; the embryo donors must approve each adoption. "On her Web site there's a list of the anonymous donors—what they expect like and what they're looking for, and how many embryos they take," Monica explained. "Information technology as well says what the mother and father's backgrounds are, and what religion or religious beliefs they have." The couple she chose to adopt her embryos "was perfect," says Monica. "They fit what we await like and our Christian beliefs, and they wanted a airtight adoption."

Monica and Gary had to submit a groundwork check, birth certificates, baptismal records, deed to their business firm, health-insurance cards, proof of life insurance, and information about the neighborhood they lived in, equally well as three letters of recommendation. Bernard's fee for everything was $three,200.

The Adoptee'due south Adoption

When it came time for the embryos to actually be transferred, however, Monica hit an unexpected snag: The male parent of the donated embryos was himself adopted, and had incomplete medical records. Several fertility clinics they contacted refused to do the transfer because of his unknown medical background. "They were agape they would contaminate the other embryos," said Monica. She finally found a clinic in Delaware that would practice the transfer, for which she paid $3,500. Despite these fees, Monica said, embryo adoption "was the nigh affordable style to get about having my own child." She's due 2 days after Christmas.

The Divorcees' Conception

Dr. John Jain, who founded the Santa Monica Fertility Specialists dispensary, recalls ane patient who had frozen her eggs at age twoscore when it seemed that she and her married man would divorce. One year later, at historic period 41, they reconciled, and the couple came back to Jain'south dispensary for IVF after she had had a miscarriage. "Miscarriages at that age are related to chromosonal abnormalities—the egg gives rise to genetically abnormal embryos," said Jain. At that bespeak, he said, the patient decided to use her frozen eggs. "I decided to practice ZIFT (zygote intrafallopian transfer). I put the eggs in her Fallopian tubes. This was a woman who was in her forties and likelihood of pregnancy through whatever standard in vitro fertilization method is poor. She'd already had a miscarriage, which showed eggs were on downwardly side of quality." ZIFT is a laproscopic surgery performed nether general anesthesia. Through ZIFT, the adult female ended up with a healthy babe.

Seeking Single Motherhood

Staceyann Mentum, a lesbian writer, poet, and activist, is working on a documentary called Infant Makes Me with the filmmaker Tiona McClodden about attempting to become a single mother. The documentary, which will begin shooting soon, volition also explore other women's nontraditional paths to become mothers. "Even if I did have a child with a partner, I'd exist making the pick to have a child who volition grow upward without a father," said Mentum, who has started visiting sperm banks to explore her options. "This whole idea of choosing a kid—when y'all go to purchase sperm, yous have Chinese sperm, black sperm, white sperm. You tin pay extra to await at a picture of the donor equally a baby, to see what your baby might expect like."

Mentum, who grew up in Jamaica of African and Chinese ancestry, said that embarking on this quest has also raised hard questions virtually race. "I had this idea that I'd like to have a kid that looks like me," she said. "When you lot have a kid, you lot think, 'My child is going to look like me and my boyfriend.' And so that nosotros all look like a family, if i was with some other blackness woman I would choose black sperm. When you lot don't have that in mind when you lot're going solo, it's an eeny miney mo setup. You get to dispense the race of your kid."

Making Other People's Babies

Rick Dillwood and his wife, Amelia, who have been married for vii years, don't have children themselves, and have no plans to. But there will exist five children who owe their existence to the two of them. Several months ago, Dillwood, a 29-twelvemonth-old grad pupil in Due north Carolina, donated sperm to his friends, a lesbian couple named Melanie and Karen, who used to be his neighbors. Their babe, a girl, is due in November. And before Amelia, who is now 34, met Rick, she had donated eggs. "Then there are four children in the world who share my wife'south genetic material who she has no contact with," said Dillwood. "Those kids can contact her when they're old enough. I think role of the reason that Melanie and Karen approached united states of america is because they realized we were into the idea that nosotros didn't want to be responsible for our biological children."

Earlier Dillwood handed over his sperm, Melanie and Karen drafted a contract stipulating that he knows why he's doing this and what information technology volition pb to. "I take no say in anything well-nigh the kid," said Dillwood. "I'm not responsible financially in any way for the child." Dillwood said he's not telling his parents about his daughter until the so-called 2d family adoption goes through. "A couple years ago, my mom said, 'Exercise yous retrieve you're ever going to have kids?' And I said, 'I don't think.' My parents are pretty traditional, and I could tell that didn't make any logical sense to her. So now I'yard going to tell her that non only am I not going to have kids, but I'm giving kids to someone else."

Dillwood fabricated a ten-minute film about his experience called How to Make a Heartbeat that screened at the Austin Gay and Lesbian Pic Festival last calendar week. His parents, he said, don't know virtually the documentary, either.

The Homeless Fetus

Dan Roughshod, editor of the Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger and the writer of the Cruel Love sex communication column, adopted his son D.J. from a homeless adult female before the kid was even born. Savage has written extensively near D.J.'s adoption in ii books: The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Become Significant and The Commitment: Love, Sex, Spousal relationship and My Family. D.J.'s birth mother, whom Savage calls Melissa in his writing, was an inconsistent presence in his life in his early years; at that place was a period of near a year and a one-half where Roughshod thought she was dead. Only today they see her nearly once a twelvemonth. "She's no longer homeless," said Savage. "She's settled a little more than than she used to be. The affair that's complicated now is that it takes them a little time to warm up to each other. D.J.'s shy and so is his mom."

Savage was quick to clarify reports that labeled Melissa a drug aficionado. "She was using drugs and alcohol in recreational quantities when she got pregnant. The minute she establish out she was pregnant, she stopped."

Nine months after D.J. was born, his begetter showed up. "And then he disappeared and we never heard from him again." Today, Vicious is in touch with his son'due south step-grandmother (his biological gramps's married woman), and says that no one knows where D.J.'s father is; he does know that "D.J. has a half sibling out there somewhere."

Barbarous and his partner Terry were the starting time gay couple to adopt a child at the bureau they used, Open Adoption & Family Services in Portland, Oregon. "Now half the people they work with are gay," he said.

Doree Shafrir has contributed to The New York Observer, The New Yorker, Slate, and The Awl, and is the co-author of Honey, Mom. She is a old editor at Gawker. Her Spider web site is world wide web.doreeshafrir.com.

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Source: https://www.thedailybeast.com/10-ways-to-have-a-baby

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