Saturday, January 6, 2007

MOVING ON

Even a donor like me with very specific criteria for embryo recipients can consider a family which doesn't even come close to meeting those criteria. The key for us was honesty, recipients communicating a clear sense of their family's strengths, some other connection between their family and ours, and a polite acknowledgement of the disconnect between our ideal recipient and their reality.

The awesome recipient candidates who had achieved all of these goals sounded wonderful. But ultimately we only wanted to donate to a Jewish lesbian couple, preferably one without children. We regretfully declined their request by letting them know that more Jewish lesbian couples had contacted us. We received a kind and thoughtful acknowledgement in return:

Well, bummer. I was sorta hoping that the lesbian-Jewish-looking-for-donated-embryos demographic was a little smaller LOL. (kidding, kidding!) Well, best of luck and I hope it all works out and your genetic progeny bless and enrich the lives of the couple you have chosen. All the best!


Actually, I thought the demographic of Jewish lesbians looking for embryos was smaller too. But none of the couples that did meet our criteria seemed right. All were in their forties or older, many had medical issues, and all had one or more children and only wanted one more.

There were messy divorces; two bisexual women who had split up then both ended up with men (sorry, not facing discrimination in adoption any more); one woman whose professed method of disciplining her child involved spanking and "threats"; and other couples who didn't seem right. We gave everyone a chance, asked the same questions of all recipients, but after brief email exchanges none of them appealed to us for further consideration.

Then we got an email that was completely different than all the others. I'll tell you about it another day.