Egg Donor, part 1: Eugenics meets Marketing

Published May 2, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Choosing an Egg Donor

As I have discussed before, when we initially requested egg donor profiles from the agency, we were working on the assumption that I would be the biological father of our first (singleton) child. So we were initially asked for our criteria, we said all the things people usually say, I guess.

Healthy. Emotionally balanced. Intelligent. Charismatic. Attractive.

But we also added Caucasian, blonde and blue eyed and relatively small-framed. This was to try to make a mix of my genes and the donor’s look a little bit like it might have been a mix of my genes and Matt’s. Of course, mixing two men’s genes to make a baby is still a year or two off. The science is very optimistic, but we aren’t going to wait for that. Perhaps the next generation of gaybys will get that choice. 

We were initially sent a handful of profiles, and we began to sift.

What’s in a Donor Profile?

A donor profile starts with the basics you would expect – age, weight, race, religion (this is America, remember), occupation and marital status. Then it moves to to the slightly more detailed – hair colour, real hair colour, childhood hair colour, and starts to ask things you wouldn’t feel comfortable asking a new friend (or even some old ones) – did you wear braces? Have you ever had plastic surgery? Are you of Jewish descent? What is the exact ethnic make-up of your father? Your mother? How tall are you? How tall is your mother? Your father?

Then the profiles get into the real nitty-gritty. They ask for the full medical history of both sides of the family, including asking about a dozen different health conditions that you really wouldn’t ask in polite company. If any family member is not living, the exact details of their death are asked, and this then also extends to any and all siblings as well.

But then it got really personal. It asked about diet, exercise, sexual partners, menstrual cycle, what type of birth control has been used, have they ever had an abortion, how long do they bleed for, etc. It goes into a lot of raw physiological data and it doesn’t shy away from asking fairly intrusive questions like ‘How many sexual partners have you had?’, even.

Following that, they’re asked to provide the statistics for all their schooling and education. Whether they got A’s or B’s in primary school, what extra curricular activities did they undertake, and whether they went to one school or multiple schools.

It gave us a lot of background data about a lot of blonde Californian women. I wonder if I could re-use the data for peer-group studies, make some generalisations about Californian girls, perhaps.

And into their heads we go…

Then comes the psychological profile. They were given a series of questions about themselves to answer, which were all free-text, so they could express their personality. It starts with things that are actually related to the process  - “Why have you decided to become an egg donor?”, but it also moves quickly on to their characteristics.

To be frank, I’m not sure how I would have answered these questions if I was handed that questionnaire. It’s a bit daunting. Try some of the questions yourself:

“Please describe your personality now, as an adolescent, and as a child:”

“What are your personal goals in life?”

“What brings you the most joy in life?”

“How do you act when you get angry?”

These small samples would give you some idea of the level of depth that these forms went into. We have this profile of data on which to make our decision, and when you’re sent between four and ten of these profiles at a time, it’s a whack to read through, and a really important decision hanging over doing it right. It also asked them to describe their parent’s personalities as well, and any full-blood siblings that they have, too.

Starting from good intentions…

After reading a few of these, I actually put them all down, closed my mail and spent a couple of days delaying making a decision because I actually felt a bit uncomfortable about the process.

We’d started the process making the same statements that I am sure that dozens of different parents before us would have made. We said things like:

“We don’t care as long as they’re healthy”

“We just want a normal, happy child.”

But then there are So. Many. Profiles. to sift through. You have to make a short-list somehow. The breadth of options made us start to filter them based on other criteria that started to feel a lot more like we were straying further and further away from this. I think I realised I was automatically rejecting every candidate who had an academic record that wasn’t meeting my somewhat arbitrary criteria.

And you end up in Eugenics…

When asked to make a simple comparison: Would you use an egg donor whose family has no trace of cancer, or would you use an egg donor whose grandmother had breast cancer. Simple question, simple answer, you choose the first egg donor. Of course. That’s just making the right healthy choices for your babies.

Okay, next question. This egg donor has slightly higher grades than that one. Which? The higher grades of course.

Okay, moving on. This egg donor made a typo in her character profile, versus this one who did not. Which? Well, surely the one with attention-to-detail, right? No?

But when you have 20-40 profiles, you can get pretty arbitrary very quickly. Some of the reasons for rejecting profiles were starting to looking pretty shallow:

She is too Short.

Her grades were only “A” not “A+”.

Her Grandmother died quite young.

Her Brothers all didn’t finish school.

Her father has high blood pressure.

She had to wear braces.

She had a boob job.

Her one regret in life is “Not Being Taller, so I could be a model.”

She did a nonsense degree at University.

She looks drunk in that photo.

She’s doing duckface at the camera in this photo (I personally think that’s the most justified rejection).

These were all reasons I deleted Egg Donor profiles. Yes, by the end of the process, I was THAT shallow. It’s not like I’ve never been drunk, and at least one of my University degrees is blatant nonsense.

I have always thought that Eugenics was a bad thing. Until some very well meaning marketing people trying to sell me eggs starting making me make hard choices about which egg donors I would or would not be interested in contacting to find out about. Suddenly, I found myself right there, making distinctly morally questionable choices when selecting an egg donor of our own.

Boiling it down to basics, out of all those criteria, we still had around 4-5 profiles which we could not find any conceivable reason to reject.

But in the end our reason for selecting the one we chose was a lot more human…

…. more in part 2.

What’s in a name?

Published April 29, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

Don’t expect me to give away any secrets here, before you get excited. I know a lot of people are really keen to hear what names we’ve chosen for our children, but I am adamant that some things must wait until the day they’re born. When we introduce the children with their names, the two things will anchor together in everyone’s heads in a way that giving a name without an associated baby just wouldn’t do. People can hate NAMES, but I don’t think anyone can hate a newborn baby.

Extenuating circumstances have meant that Matt and I have had to decide on names early, because we’ve got paperwork and things to fill out, including plane tickets and court orders, and what-not. So, unlike most parents, we will not be given the luxury of deciding ‘on the day’. Instead, we needed to decide, like… now. That sped up the debate about names somewhat I assure you.

Learning that it was girls, the shock of which should probably be a post of it’s own since it stunned me into silence for about 2 months, we hadn’t yet really had any names that had really stuck. Nothing that had really stood out from the crowd as a contender.

I’m bound to offend a few people by saying this – but Boy’s names felt MUCH easier. We had boy’s names ready to go straight away, long before we even started the process. But as soon as we were told it was going to be girls, I drew a blank.

Looking at my own female role-models, none of the names really stand out for us. In fact, most feminine role-model forenames are sufficiently common that I don’t feel like I would be giving the girls something unique and precious. I would be making them simply the next in a long line with the same name.

And we had our criteria laid out. Well, all right, I’ll be honest. I had criteria and it was carefully laid out. My husband on the other hand had his own criteria, that didn’t really have much to do with mine.

His criteria were pretty simple, whereas mine were more involved. I am sure every parent can empathise with this list:

• Must be easy to spell, and spelt correctly. I don’t want my daughters to have to spell their names out over the phone twenty times a year for the rest of their lives.

• Must be easy to pronounce, and not contain phonetics (so all the Irish names like Aoife, Sioned, Siobhan are already out).

• Must be common enough that everyone has heard it before (so they can pronounce it). That means the name must be in the list of top 200-300 names being given out now.

• Must be uncommon enough that they don’t know anyone else who has that name. That means ruling out all the names in the top 100.

• Should be obviously feminine, as a ‘could be either’ name just creates confusion down the road.

• Must match up well with the family middle names we have already chosen in advance.

• Should be a classic, something which has been in use for at least a few hundred years. With all due respect, I don’t want to name our daughters something that anchor them in this decade. I want them to have a name that worked well 200 years ago, and will hopefully work well in 100 years time.

Very restrictive criteria when you add up all those. Add to that, “Must sound cool and a bit classy”, and “Matt must like the sound of it.”

Equally important to me, there are cultural and racial implications that must be considered. We can’t realistically name a girl child something that will have people automatically make assumptions about them for their entire life. An example of this would be friends-of-friends who both speak Japanese and gave their kids Japanese names. Now when someone reads out their names, they’re looking around the room for the Asian kids and don’t expect the name to belong to the blonde, blue-eyed girl. I know racism is a hot topic, but it’s alive and well, at least where I live, and we will be living in this world, so we have to accept some restrictions on that.

Rules can’t be ignored either – can’t use a name being used by a friend for their kids, and can’t use a name being used by any relative closer than 2nd or 3rd cousin. Because we all know that ends in tears. Oh, and despite some of my friends doing exactly that, it’s really not okay to re-use a pet’s name. Rover was a dumb name for a girl, anyway.

I also wanted the names to act as an anchor to time. I wanted the names to have history, in particular family history. Both Matt and I are ultimately British/Australians, with specific heritage in England (Yorkshire), Scotland and Wales. We wanted some sense of where we came from to be reflected in the names we chose for our children.

Tough call, eh?

Yet, somehow, within the last 48 hours before we had to decide, Matt and I (who rarely agree on anything, let’s be honest), managed to find a pair of names that matched all these criteria, and sound cool, and have the advantage of the fact that neither of us know anyone ever, in all our time on this planet who had those names. Of course, plenty of people exist with these names (they wouldn’t be classics without that). But the important thing is that neither he nor I know anyone who had these names.  You don’t realise how many people you hate until you start to pick a name for a baby!

So we’re now the other side of that decision, and it’s all good. We both really like the names that we’ve chosen, and we’ve committed to them in the form of paperwork, so they can’t actually be changed anyway.

And I’m amazed at how real they now seem in my head, now that they’ve got names. I can actually start to imagine the little people that they’re going to become, and picture the conversations we’re going to have. I’ve even started writing (yes, with a pen and hand-made paper) a diary of sorts for them to read when they have children of their own.

Don’t worry folks, it’s only 94 days between this post and the due date. That’s not long, really 

Our “Seeking Surrogate” Profile

Published February 10, 2014 | By Greg Hodgson-Fopp

At the start of the surrogacy process, before we were matched with Natasha or the Egg Donor, Matt and I had to provide to the agency a piece of writing that somehow summarized us as a couple, and as intended parents.

This document, which really only had to be about a single page of A4 size, had me paralyzed for about 3 months. Seriously, I must have written and rewritten this profile for us about 5 times. I sent it to friends (whose confused silence told me they were out of their depth), I sent it to Matt (he’s rubbish at feedback, by the way) and I even tried to get feedback from the agency we were using.

The Impossible Requirement

The precis for the document was simple: Explain who we are, in an honest way. But also in a way that is likely to attract the kind of surrogate we wanted to meet. But also in a way that is likely to attract the kind of egg donor we wanted to meet. Without overstatement. Or being pushy. Or needy.

Let the reader know you’re really serious and committed but without being too obviously needy. Make sure they know you’d be good parents, but at the same time don’t be too gushy or they’ll think you’re stalker material. Make sure that you show that you have the material means to support the child, but at the same time don’t come across as snobby or materialistic. Make sure they know you’ve got a good job and you’re not going to lose it, but at the same time don’t make them think you won’t have time for the children. Talk about your family in an honest way, but make them kinda seem like a Brady Bunch suburban sitcom family at the same time.

It was a minefield.

Four times the recommended length is good, right?

In the end, I settled on a document that was around four times as long as recommended. I felt that the length alone should convey the message we were hoping to convey about neediness. I also rewrote it about ten times to rephrase the family connections part as well. I wanted people to know that our families were ready to welcome the kids into the world, and were supportive of our life-changing decision, but there was definitely no hiding the fact that we lived across the other side of the world from our folks.

The most important thing I ever wrote

I think part of the reason I was paralyzed by the task was the realization that this might actually be the most important piece of writing I would ever pen. If this document was ultimately successful in making us seem appealing to a great donor and an amazing surrogate, then it would change our lives in ways that a few pages of text should not normally have the power to do.

I wanted to write something that stood out. Good surrogates are hard to find, and I wasn’t really sure how many surrogates were particularly interested in partnering up with gay guys from across the other side of the world. I didn’t want this profile to be sitting in a drawer gathering dust while other couples got picked.

Four months of write and rewrite went into this, so without further ado, I present the most nerve-wracking document I ever wrote.

Here ’tis:

My partner Matthew and I met 15 years ago in our home-town of Adelaide, South Australia. While it may seem impetuous in hindsight, within 24 hours of knowing each other, we’d moved in together and have lived together ever since.

Within a couple of years of living together, we decided that there was a lot more of the world to see than we could find in Australia and moved together to London, in the United Kingdom.

Working and living in London together, we explored everything that Europe had to offer, travelling to see all the major landmarks of the old and new world, exploring the UK, Europe and anywhere we could reach from London’s airports.  Our insatiable curiosity about new places kept us scouring the map for new places to visit, and new people to meet.

After some time in London, Matt’s family in Scotland encouraged us to live up there in Edinburgh, where I began a long period of working on a big project for a large bank. In the time we were there, the travel lessened and our focus shifted more and more towards making more permanent connections, friendships and commitments. Our love of history and architecture steered us to buy a 200 year old cottage in the city. Several of our friends from Adelaide had also moved to Edinburgh and it felt like a nice city we could settle into.

During this time, after our anniversary of 10 years together as an inseparable unit, we decided to celebrate our relationship by having a small civil ceremony with a friends and family. 

After 8 years in Edinburgh, we finally decided to follow our passions on the next step in our lives and bought a ruined barn together in rural France, which we still have. Over the next 2-3 years we built the barn up into a home and followed business opportunities in the local area – starting a travel agency, then taking over managing a bar and turning it around, and finally adding a taxi company to the bar we were managing together.

In 2010, after years of living in such a small village, we craved the city life once again and decided that the incredibly beautiful nearby cities of Switzerland appealed to us, and so I sought work in my old field of finance with the large banks based in Zurich. While we initially intended this to be a dual life, spending some time in Zurich while retaining our home in France, we have ultimately decided that Zurich is where our future lies.

Which brings us to today. We’re living mostly in Zurich, but still return to our converted barn in France once a week or so to make sure our businesses are looked after, and to enjoy the peace of the French Alps as a contrast to the faster pace of the city.

I work in Finance once again, as a team lead of a large and growing group within the bank, and I find my work very fulfilling, albeit demanding. Matt, while still bearing the major burden of looking after our businesses in France, has also recently decided to return to take his studies further.

We started thinking and talking about children about 5 years ago, when we went on a 1000km hike together across the Pyrenees. The hike was a well-known pilgrimage – The Camino de Santiago – with 8 hours or more of walking each day through some of the most beautiful terrain in the world. It gave us finally a chance to spend a lot of time together, talking over the things that you never bother to make time to talk about in the normal course of day to day life.

We both have very strong and very active families, and have always imagined our lives would involve a large number of children in the form of nephews and nieces, second-cousins and so forth.

My parents are originally from the United Kingdom and emigrated as children in the post-WW2 era, while Matt’s parents are both Australians. My father, now retired, worked in telecommunications, while Matt’s parents were both in Academia. His father is a published author in his field, while his mother now works in senior management in social services. Both sides tended towards large families and our childhoods were both filled with Uncles and Aunts.

We’ve also been blessed recently with a nephew (the first), the son of Matt’s younger sister Kelly. We can see the joy that it brings her, and the changes in her that having a child as the centre of her life have made. We’ve seen the happiness and contentment that it has brought her and her husband, and both sets of grandparents.

While I had initially put thoughts of children away from my mind, Matt’s ‘never say never’ attitude and research into surrogacy has made me confront and dissect my feelings on the idea of being a parent, and I am now absolutely certain that this is the right course of action for us, and we feel that the time is right for the two of us to become fathers.

I personally feel, that raising a new human being, through childhood and development to become a healthy, happy adult to enjoy this rich and wonderful world is perhaps the greatest creation I will ever achieve.

We are emotionally stable, both as individuals and as a couple. We’ve been together without pause or crisis for 15 years. We are unquestionably entwined in the eyes of each other and in our families and friends. We both have supportive and accepting parents who would be delighted to be surprise grandparents to a child of ours, and settled siblings who would make amazing aunts and uncles.

We also have wide circles of friends in many cities of the world, in both Australia and Europe with particular groups of friends (many with children) in those cities that we’ve lived in – London, Edinburgh, France and Zurich.

It goes without saying if we’re pursuing this course of action, but we’re also quite financially stable and have been for a number of years.

While we considered adoption, we both feel that a genetic connection to our offspring is an essential component of what makes the relationship so incredibly rewarding and so our first choice is definitely surrogacy.

There it is.

I don’t know whether it was good or bad, but it worked. Maybe if I get a chance, I’ll ask Natasha whether she got to read that, and if she did, what it made her think and feel, and what made her decide that she wanted to help us achieve our dreams.

I guess I won’t ever know if it’s good, but I do know it worked and I don’t have to write another one.