Starting to get pregnant

Finding a donor. 

We started researching all about how to track ovulation and getting pregnant, this was a new area to us and something that I found was not something that is well known. We had to take to trying to conceive Facebook pages which at first we were not accepted into due to being male. We had to privatly message admins of groups to explain we were trans men as a lot of these spaces are women only private groups. Which is understandable but at the same time being a tran male trying to access information and support felt like a battle. Some groups we were not accepting at all or if we were, then had to explain our background when trying to get support because we were faced with many women sadly not accept us because we were men into these groups. 

This is not an area I remember being taught in school, which personally I believe is wrong because everyone should know how the body Anatomy works in order to achieve pregnancy as well as prevent it. Instead as teenagers we told not to have it or about condoms to prevent pregnancy, but nothing about when is a stable consensual relationship how to actually have a healthy pregnancy which I know is such a struggle for many people and for many reasons. Where there is just no medical, profession support or educational, help out there for. 

Anyways that's a whole another issue.  The point is their needs to be more education and awareness about ovulation, how the body and hormones play a role to create life. Then maybe their be more research into fertility, how testestrone does not in fact make someone infertile. There are many people who have fallen pregnant while taking testestrone because they are lead to believe it acts as contraception. 

Once we research how to track ovulation we were able to pin point Ben's cycles and therefore when his high fertile week or few days were. We then went about to find a sperm donor. We took to Facebook pages and sites where people donate there sperm privately. We were very careful as there is unfortunately many sperm donors who are not legit, who are their to prey on those in a vunerable situation for their own gain. We had many say they would help and not reply back, or who demanded money which is illegal. You can however pay for travel, accomodation if needed and any medical checks that are necessary. We did have a lot of discrimination also being trans men looking for a sperm donor and had to block many donors or come off of some pages. 

We choose to use artificial insemination which is where we found a sperm donor who privatly came to our house, gave us a sperm sample in a sterlized container to which we used a syringe to get the sperm into Ben's cervix and womb to achieve pregnancy. (I have done a more detailed post on ovulation, hormonal and different types of donations, if you want to know more.) 

Luckly we actually had a donor message us and met us who offered to help. He was a gay man himself, who was older and in a relationship where they both did not want children. However knew how hard it was as an LGBT+ person to build a family. He wanted to help others like us to create our family. He wanted no money, or any rights in return just a genuine and honest person helping others. He had also had full health, sti and family history checks done, provided us with full background on his family medical history as well as his general up bring. We all met a few times to get to know each other and go through our history as well as his. We knew that he was the right choice for us. So we set up a plan. 

Also we had to ensure we were legally protected before going through with a private donor. This is because when having IVF the clinic cover legal documents in order to ensure those who go through IVF are the legal parents and the sperm donors waver their rights. However with doing things privatly like we did you are not protected by the clinics. There are a few ways legally to get parental rights as the non biological parent however the most secure and non lenghty way was to be legally married before we conceived. If we was not it meant that whilst Ben was carrying and therefore had immediate parental rights I would not as the sperm donor would have these rights due to biology. Even if he wrote a letter and signed his rights away to me that would not necessarily stand up in court if he wanted to get access, or we could then fight for money from him like child maintance. This is not what we or our donor wanted. So he said he would only help couples who were married. 

Which lucky we had got married a few weeks before, Because we were it stripped the donor rights away and legally as Ben's husband I had all rights as the 2nd parent. This meant we did not have to go through adoption or courts for me to have rights. I was able to go straight on the child birth certificate. 

This is a side many people do not think or know about eirther when starting a family and later could cause many problems for them and any future children. So it something I also wanted to highlight in this blog series.