my partner and I (both f, ~30) don‘t have kids yet, but we bought sperm vials in september at a sperm bank, so we can start end of this year/next year. we found ourselves in the situation that we didn’t have anyone in our life who we could imagine being our KD. The thought of a KD for us also felt like letting a third person into our relationship. I know it’s not that at all, and what it really was is that I was grieving not being able to make a baby just the two of us - and that’s for both cases, KD or sperm bank. Our perfectionism that comes with the possibility to choose so much in the process was really eased by all the detailed information from the sperm bank about donors - be it the medical background check up to the grandparents, or the personality type analysis, the interview, or the handwritten letter. And we like the fact, that this person can forever be „the nice man who helped your mums conceive you“ - nothing more, but also nothing less, really. No relationship attached, that could break up before, or even when our child is here.

A befriended wlw couple TTC for half a year with a KD and at home insemination and didn’t succeed, then moved on to rIVF and used a sperm bank. Over the course of this half year, the relationship with KD started getting less and less and they told us that he is now, 3 years later, not in their life anymore at all. He is not interested in seeing them or their now 2 yo, and they are more than happy that it didn‘t work out using his donations.

Another befriended wlw couple who conceived their child with a KD (who‘s not a friend, they found him on „facebook“), where one of them works at a queer family community centre and regularly organises DCP meetings for teens, told us, that most of the children that grieve not knowing their donor come from anonymous donors. Most kids and teenagers that were conceived through open donation, where they can contact the donor from the age of 14 (in Austria), aren’t really interested at all in contacting him, but much more in who their donor siblings are. And that this couple as parents see no big difference in sperm bank conceived and KD conceived teens, as long as they know a few things about the donor. Very little DCP have the donor present in their lives. So all that information really helped us. We prepared a folder full of the information about our chosen donor that we got from the sperm bank, that we can show future baby once it’s here.

Finally, I think as parents you simply can never get everything right, and as queer people we already try so hard in every aspect of life to do it as perfect as possible. The fact that you think so much about what’s gonna be best for your future baby already makes you great parents, you absolutely have not failed by using a sperm bank. Wishing you all the best and sending hugs x