A letter to women struggling to get pregnant
If you’re trying to get pregnant, there is a lot going on. You may become overwhelmed with emotions. Anger and envy over those who you assume became pregnant easily. Frustration and sadness over another negative pregnancy test. Fear and anxiety that you’ll never get pregnant. It may seem like nearly every woman around you is pregnant and you may wonder when you’ll have your turn.
Here’s my letter to you…
My thoughts about donating eggs changed now that I’M a mom
No part of me regrets the decision I made to be an egg donor, but I regret how I went about it. I did not understand the gravity of my decisions; I believed I was mature and now I look back and feel like I was just a kid. And now there is a little boy out there that is my kids’ half-brother that they may never meet.
What Makes a Baby and 5 other books that explain the different ways families are made
Based on how many of you have told us about it, we know a bunch of you are big fans of What Makes a Baby, one of the newer kids books out that explain conception, gestation, and birth to the 3 to 8-year-old crowd. While this book is a good one, there are a whole bevy of books out there that explain the different ways families are formed and exist.
Two women undergo IVF to share the physical experience of making a baby
Allison and her wife both wanted to experience different parts of baby-making and parenthood, so they decided to do partner-assisted in vitro fertilization. Here’s the story of how Alison got pregnant with her wife’s baby
Your OMGI’MPREGNANT stories: the feelings that come with peeing on a stick
In keeping with our day’s theme, I asked our Facebook friends how they reacted when they peed on a stick and found out they were pregnant! Three hours later, there were over 75 reponses… here are a few that had to be shared.
Infertility and a wedding: what if I can’t have children?
Having a baby always felt like a given — I’d get married, have a baby and live happily ever after. That’s the way it works, right? Six pregnancies and seven miscarriages later (one set of twins) we find ourselves facing the very real possibility that I simply can not carry a child to term. Three months seems to be average, though one pregnancy was lost at five months.
Ambivalence: in which I pay $270 a year to avoid making a decision about our leftover embryos
The aforementioned pregnancy with the thousands of dollars and drugs started in a lab, with the creation of five embryos, made from donor sperm and eggs collected from my wonderful wife. Two embryos had 8-cells (the ideal), and were squirted into my uterus, and one of those grew and grew and was born a day before her due date but the day after the Pixies show we had tickets for (thanks kid! It was a good show!). The remaining three were put in the deep freeze in case the first try didn’t work. And there they remain. Three embryos, conceived the same day as my daughter, frozen in time.
How to make a baby: sperm donors, IVF, and mad science experiments
Choosing a sperm donor is a little bit like setting up an Xbox avatar. You begin by deciding on the ethnicity, hair color, and eye color of the fellow whose sperm you’d like to combine with your egg to make your baby. Then you enter that criteria into a sperm-bank search engine, which returns a list of matching anonymous males who passed rigorous genetic tests and filled out detailed questionnaires. Finally, you pore through each donor profile, considering things like his height, weight, build, SAT scores, family medical history, sexual orientation, whether or not he has moles, the shape of his nose and mouth, and in some cases, his baby photo or voice sample.