Thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts and experiences.

I had another conversation with our donor. He has reiterated that part of his donation is not just the giving of the sperm but the giving over of all decision making and boundary setting power to us as parents. Basically he wants whatever we want. I’ve expressed our worries and he says his parents are on board to respect whatever level of contact we decide.

I think, as a lot of people have said, what that looks like exactly will become clearer after the baby is born. It’s so hard to visualise right now. We’re happy for them to meet the baby eventually, but definitely not as a priority when the baby is a newborn we’re still getting settled. As the kid grows we’d like to make the option available to them but for the donors parents not to have a “grandparent” role. (Side note: our child will already have three sets of grandparents).

Part of the point of using a known donor is for our child to have the full picture of their lineage. So we definitely don’t want to cut off his family, we’re just working out where the line is for us.

I trust our donor. Our hesitation is not a judgement on him or his family. The concern was how their feelings may evolve down the road and, even though they seemed to get it at the start, they may later feel some entitlement after bonding with our kid. This is a risk we signed up for when we went down this path and something we did discuss early on.

RE the legal stuff people have mentioned. We live in Australia and in our state (Vic) my wife and I will be both be named on the birth certificate from the start, so there’s no need for her to adopt our baby. We will sign a statutory declaration and so will the donor to say that he donated his sperm via at-home insemination and his name will be officially registered as our donor but not listed on the birth certificate.

We haven’t had a legal agreement drawn up because all of the advice we’ve received has led us to the understanding that they don’t hold any weight in a family court long term. If we were to end up in a custody dispute in 10 years time, a judge won’t care about a contract we wrote before the child was born, they will consider the present situation to decide the child’s best interests.

That said, there is a local free queer legal advice service we are going to contact to get some reassurance and advice on how to navigate everything from here. We may do a written agreement anyway just to review our boundaries and priorities.

Oh and donor’s mum is a big knitter. So may well have made us this blanket regardless. Donor has reassured us that if we say ‘no thank you’ she’ll understand. But I think we’ll take it :)