COMMON GROUND

The last issue I was trying to resolve with our would-be recipients was how they, as Christians, could foster a sense of Jewish heritage in the genetically Jewish children who might come of my embryo donation.

With great hesitation, I had written them to make some suggestions as to how they might accomplish this. Were they open to my concerns? Jenny and Erin wrote back immediately:

"Of course without hesitation we would let our children know of their bloodline and the history of their ancestors and how they are a part of that history and future."

I stopped reading here. I was struck by the fact that they looked not just to the past, as I had, but forward to ways their child(ren) from this donation might bring their Jewish heritage into the next generation. If this was their perspective, or at least their intent, they were the right recipients for us, despite being Hebraically-impaired.

They went on to specify which activities they thought would work within their own family:

"Reading storybooks about Jewish holidays and history would be no problem at all. I hope that our children are inquisitive about their heritage and we would foster that at an early age. Erin and I are both open to the idea of participating in the occasional Jewish holiday with our children. While we do not have any personal friends here that are Jewish, Erin’s parent’s next door neighbors (who they are fairly close to) are Jewish."

It sounded like these recipients were open and responsive to my concerns. I didn't even mind the standard reference to the only known Jewish person in each Southerner's life: their dentist's third-cousin's mail carrier. At least they had some kind of resource for knowing which end of the Hannukah candle to light.

This was the final hurdle I had put up for myself. The recipients had leaped it gracefully by turning my gaze to the future. I was wasting my time looking sadly into the past.

The rest was details. Jenny and Erin were the right recipients for us and we would give them our embryos.

CASTING THE NET

So many nice, interesting families had contacted us to ask for our spare embryos. None was quite right. Our preferences were so specific: the couple had to be lesbians and we really wanted to find women who were Jewish, like our family. Our hope was to ensure that children in my bloodline continued to see themselves as Jewish since so many of my family members were killed in World War II. Our culture is valuable and I wanted to help it continue into the next generation, not to hide or assimilate one more Jewish baby.

We had been surprised to hear from many more Jewish lesbian couples that we had expected to find. Women had written to us from, among other places, Washington state, Pennsylvania, Maine, California, Florida, Massachussets, Oregon and our own back yard.

We gave everyone a try. We asked a few vital questions to try to find out how healthy the couple was both physically and emotionally. It became apparent in each case that the couples who had contacted us so far were not the right families for our embryos.

It was not going to be easy to find the perfect infertile Jewish lesbians. There just aren't that many couples consisting of two women who both need fertility help. And they had to be Jewish, and wonderful. And find our embryo listing. And want our embryos, especially considering that we used an anonymous sperm donor.

Throwing the embryos at the very first couple to contact us had not worked out. They seemed unable to keep to terms they had originally accepted. Compromise was not their by-word.

Trying to give the embryos to someone who needed them as soon as possible was incompatible with doing everything we could to make sure any kids from these embryos had great parents.

We were going to have to case a wider net. Once we found more lesbian couples we would find the right couple. Even if it took a year, or two, it was worth the wait. Our first mistake had shown us that. As we wrote to more couples we were getting better at quickly discovering who had potential and kindly bidding farewell to couples who did not.

I decided to start writing about our search on the internet. My Blog, or journal, could help people who were thinking about donating their own embryos to consider some of the issues and avoid my mistakes. It would provide potential recipients with a donor's perspective so they could consider the feelings and needs of the people they were asking to help them. And if we were lucky, word of the blog might reach exactly the couple we needed to find: the parents-to-be who were just right for our embryos. I started typing the same day. I'll tell you later where it led.