Scrolling through sperm bank websites from my apartment, everything felt so sterile.
They listed hair, eye color and height, among other characteristics. That’s all well and good, but I wanted to know who these men really were.
Is he a good person? What is his temperament? If my child tracked him down years from now, would I feel good about the biological father that he would meet?
By comparison, making the decision to become a solo mother by choice seemed easy. At 38 in 2020, I knew I wanted to have a baby, so I was out of time to do it the traditional way. A partner and marriage had been elusive, despite my best efforts.
After days of mindlessly scrolling through sperm bank sites, it suddenly occurred to me that there were other options out there.
I pulled out my phone, Googled ‘sperm donor that you know’ – and, over the next several days, I discovered the world of freelance sperm donation. It’s where men offer their genetic material for free to women seeking assistance to become mothers.
I found many groups on Facebook where men were offering their sperm and women were urgently seeking it out.
In those early days, I chatted with dozens of men.
I made a post about myself, explaining I was a professional journalist, grew up helping care for my three younger brothers, and always dreamed of being a mum – and I received about 60 messages from sperm donors.
Usually they would write a very short message, essentially saying, ‘Hi, I’m available to be your sperm donor.’ Sometimes they would be creepy, offering me their ‘seed’ or pressuring me for sex.
I made it clear I was exclusively looking for artificial insemination and had a preference for someone local and willing to be in the child’s life.
One day about six weeks into my search, a man named Ben* contacted me. Instead of commenting on my group post, he reached out to me directly and said that I seemed like a person who would make a good mother. He was moved by my discussion of caring for my three younger brothers.
He seemed to take as much care in picking women to donate to as I tried to apply to my own search for a donor.
Ben was a lawyer and engaged to a woman who supported his decision to donate sperm on a very limited basis, and so far had helped create nine families.
Ben consistently met with me three days a month around my ovulation
This was important to me.
It meant he wasn’t pressuring me for sex, and that he wasn’t going to produce hundreds of half-siblings to my own child. I had learned from speaking with donor-conceived adults that having dozens of siblings who they would never meet was often painful. I wanted to spare my child that experience.
We met for the first time in September 2020, where we talked through our preferences for how Ben’s relationship with the child would work – he didn’t feel comfortable meeting before he or she was 18, but he would accept and respond to letters prior to that.
We also talked through major issues, like what if I died? Would he challenge my family for custody? He would not.
And it was like this that we crafted a donor-recipient contract based on what we’d agreed that day, and decided to move forward with our plans.
From then, Ben consistently met with me three days a month around my ovulation.
I would take the train to his apartment. He would step into the bathroom, produce a sample in a menstrual cup and hand it to me. Then I would duck into the ladies’ room, insert the cup, then wait for the sperm to do the rest.
After 12 cycles it became clear this method wasn’t working, so Ben agreed to help me with IVF.
That process included weeks of hormone injections into my stomach to help my eggs multiply and grow to maturity. 36 hours before the egg retrieval, I injected myself in the butt with a medication that triggers ovulation.
The day of the procedure, I was sedated while they went in with a fine needle to extract the eggs from my ovaries. Ben just had to provide a fresh sperm sample about 30 minutes prior.
The doctors injected a sperm into each egg they retrieved with the hope it would fertilize and then survive five days in the lab.
I did three rounds of IVF with Ben’s help, getting just two genetically healthy embryos through the entire process. Heartbreakingly, I miscarried my first baby.
My second embryo transfer was successful.
I found out I was pregnant with my son in September of 2023, just four days after my little boy was transferred into my womb. I was visiting New York City with my mother and a feeling came over me.
I felt … pregnant. I made it halfway through lunch before excusing myself to the bathroom to take the test.
It was indisputably positive. I rushed back to the table to show my mother, and we spent the rest of the meal celebrating.
I immediately let Ben know. He was very happy for me, but cautious because he knew how much I had struggled after my miscarriage in 2022.
Pregnancy was a dream come true. When my belly began to grow, and I could feel my son moving inside of me, this overwhelming peace came over me.
This little boy was meant to be with me.
The delivery, by contrast, was a nightmare. I was induced at 39 weeks when the baby’s movements started slowing down.
I made it to five centimeters before asking for the epidural, but it only worked on the left half of my body. As I reached eight centimeters and the pain seemed insurmountable, an alarm went off in the room.
Doctors and nurses flooded in and suddenly started injecting medicine into my IV. My doula quickly explained that I had developed preeclampsia, which is a dangerous condition in which the mother’s blood pressure reaches dangerous highs.
‘I’m your Mommy,’ I said. ‘And I love you.’
Then, just as suddenly, I started to feel myself lose consciousness. The medicine they gave me caused my blood pressure to crash, and now the doctors were trying to bring it back up.
Soon after this, they had to perform an emergency C-section, for which I had to be fully sedated because the epidural wasn’t working.
It was hours until I met my son, who had to be suctioned out of my body and revived at birth.
I will never forget the first moment they placed him in my arms, about eight hours after he was born. He looked at me, eyes wide and inquisitive.
‘I’m your Mommy,’ I said. ‘And I love you.’
I had done it. It took four years between searching for a sperm donor via Facebook and the moment I first held my son.
I made sure to let Ben know that the baby had been born and sent him pictures right away. He was happy for me and grateful for the update. I continue to share pictures of my son with him today.
It was very early in my quest to find a donor that I realised the world of freelance sperm was a story I had to tell. So, long before my son was even born, I started writing a memoir that recounts all of this and more.
Titled INCONCEIVABLE, it reflects the very human ache to reproduce and the shifts in society that have led to more unconventional families being formed. It’s a story about how we define what a family is.
My son is now six months old, and the future is full of optimism. I can’t wait for what will come.
This was the right path for me, but I don’t condone it, nor condemn it. Having interviewed dozens of women, I know the expensive reality of buying sperm and getting reproductive health care is forcing more women to turn to this alternative.
I have been telling my son about his origin story since birth – my goal is that he always knows where he came from.
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Our family is as legitimate as any other family, and I want him to feel secure about that.
He will have the option to write to Ben, prior to age 18; and I hope he is interested in meeting Ben once he’s a legal adult. I feel confident that he will find that I chose a good man to help create him, and the comfort that gives me wouldn’t have been possible without pursuing this unusual path to motherhood.
Inconceivable by Valerie Bauman is published by Union Square and is available to buy now
*Name has been changed
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing James.Besanvalle@metro.co.uk.
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