REVEALING DONORS

The Missus thought I should have the recipients over to our place when they headed North for their transfer of our embryos. I thought it was a bad idea. The only reason I could come up with was that most people don't do it. Why? I didn't know.

And Sonia had a some aces up her sleeve. She was adopted. She always knew she was adopted. She met her birth mother. She donated eggs to friends of ours. She knows their children well. They know she is their donor. They consistently express emotions about this that range from pride to neutrality. Sonia's birth mother even met her biological grandchildren and shared family medical information with the twins' mother. The twins' reaction to meeting their genetic grandmother? Polite boredom.

None of this openness caused anyone to have any confusion about who their real parents were (answer: the people who raised them, whether or not they had a biological tie to their kids).

My only other reservation was that the recipients might become angry if the embryo transfers didn't work or if something was wrong with their kids from my eggs. If they reacted to their disappointment by suing us or revealing our family name to anyone else it would threaten our children's futures. Our kids were not making the decision to participate in embryo donation or to have more siblings living in another family. They might grow up wanting nothing to do with the other kids, though I couldn't see why that might be. Still, they deserve their own right to privacy. If I revealed our name or address to the recipients I was potentially denying my children a future, and very personal, choice.

So we covered these possibilities in the embryo donation contract. None of us is allowed to discuss the embryo donation with the media, except anonymously. Neither can we reveal identifying details about the others to anyone else. We can discuss what we are doing with our friends and family but we cannot tell them the recipients' last names or address. They must do the same for our family.

Legally we were covered. Emotionally I remained uncertain.

THE INTAKE APPOINTMENT

The embryo donation coordinator at our clinic gave us important information we needed to complete the embryo donation contract. She agreed that it was possible to thaw one embryo at a time until a viable embryo was produced. If more embryos needed to be thawed it would not disrupt the recipients' transfer cycle.

She had even more important information for our recipients as they planned their doctor's visit. It was not necessary for Jenny and Erin to take the two-hour flight to our area to have their intake appointment at our clinic. If their doctor sent our fertility clinic the patient files before the appointment, Jenny and Erin could have their intake and work out a treatment plan over the phone. They would only have to come North for the actual embryo transfer procedure, saving them vacation time, effort and money better used for embryo transfer attempts.

Jenny and Erin asked if we thought they should fly up anyway or if they should do the intake over the phone. We assured them that it was not necessary for us to meet them in person, that we would go ahead with the donation based on our communication and negotiations to date. If they wanted to meet our kids and "see what they were getting" before going through with the contract they were welcome to do so.

The phone intake meant that Jenny and Erin could have had an appointment sooner, if they were willing to choose whichever doctor was available first. The doctor we recommended does not do phone intakes because English is not her first language but there was another doctor who, while new, had a great reputation. She was available for a phone apppointment, but no sooner than the in-person visit they had already scheduled.

In the end, Jenny and Erin decided to do their intake over the phone. As soon as the clinic accepted them we would sign over the embryos. We would be doing this without meeting them, and without their meeting us. And it would all happen within one month from the day we first spoke to them on the phone and told them we would donate to them. Jenny and Erin were breaking the world's record for getting and using donated embryos. And it was full speed ahead.

FULL SPEED AHEAD

Now that we had picked Jenny and Erin as our embryo recipients, Sonia and I were eager to finalize the donation. The spare embryos had been sitting in our fertility clinic's freezer for almost two years as we decided what to do with them and we were ready to get them off our hands.

The recipients had spent about the same amount of time trying to start a family. After nine unsuccessful intra-uterine insemination cycles and lots of invasive tests, Jenny and Erin were more than ready to start their family. They, and their doctor, felt that embryo donation was their most feasible option for having a baby. If the lawyer could produce a final contract before their January intake appointment at our fertility clinic, Jenny and Erin might have a baby by the end of the year.

Though our contract did not require that the two families ever meet, Jenny and Erin had expressed interest in getting together when they traveled to our fertility clinic for the initial appointment. We wondered if this might end up being too stressful for them since it would be a four hour round trip from the clinic to our city. But if they were up for it we would be pleased to introduce them to our children. They should meet them before the transfer, we figured, to make sure they knew what they were getting into!

NEXT STEPS

Now that we had agreed to give our spare embryos to Jenny and Erin, what next? As the recipients admitted "we're list-makers!" so the four of us took on the tasks needed to make the donation official.

Erin called the fertility clinic to get the first possible in-take/assessment appointment. At our popular clinic with the best frozen cycle success rates in the country, the next available appointment was almost six weeks away.

Jenny and Erin needed to use that time to transfer their medical records to our clinic, complete necessary testing and plan their trip North.

Six weeks gave me time for my task, working out a contract with the lawyer for the recipients to approve. The four of us had already sketched out the contract terms but we did not know if they were all legal, enforceable or even practicable.

Then there was the issue of the lawyer's reading of embryo donation law. Would there be aspects of her standard contract that we disagreed with? Was it even possible for residents of the recipients' Southern state to become parties to embryo donation?

Jenny and Erin had already contacted the lawyer's office before we even agreed to donate to them or mentioned the lawyer's name to them. As I had maintained with the first couple who contacted us, the good-enough couple we agreed to give our embryos to without really thinking it through, our lawyer is a pioneer in reproductive law. That first couple had balked at the cost of the contract and went back on every other term we had agreed to. By contrast, Jenny and Erin had discovered on their own, independent of our preferences, that our lawyer was the best woman for this job.

But another of my jobs was to straighten out the discrepancy between what the lawyer had told us and the fee they quoted to Jenny and Erin. A few months before, her office quoted me a flat rate of $1000 to prepare the contract.

Now they were asking Jenny and Erin for $350 to start and a balance of at least $1000. It is standard for recipients to pay the legal fees associated with an embryo donation. But I could not, in good conscience, subject the recipients to legal costs that could spiral out of control.

Before we could finish negotiations with our recipients we would have to negotiate with the lawyer...

THE RECIPIENTS CONSIDER MY TERMS

The day after we called Jenny and Erin to tell them we had selected them as our embryo recipients, my wife and I wrote up our suggestions for the donation contract. Would the recipients agree to all the terms, or had we offended them?

I didn't think that any of the terms would be a surprise. We had discussed them all with Jenny and Erin, some in great detail. But chatting about possibilities is different than signing off on a legal contract.

This was their response:

"I'm not sure even how to express the gratitude that we feel. I am sure that "thank you" a million times would not be enough, but I want you to know that we feel honored that you have faith in us regarding the rearing of children from these embryos.

We understand everything that has been discussed thus far, and it has been a comfort knowing that we have a similar vision for the lives of these potential children. That being said, we also know that there are risks involved and that this process (FET) could have the potential to fail at any time. We want you to know that we would do anything possible to ensure that these embryos have the best chance of developing into wonderful, well-adjusted, happy children.

Erin takes very good care of herself and will continue to do so during this whole process...Erin and I have both reviewed this email and the terms you have suggested, and I just want to give you a response on each suggestion individually."

Uh-oh. Which of the individual items didn't work for them? I read on:

"I'm not sure this would have any legal worth but if it would help, you could provide this email to the attorney to show that we are in agreement when adding these stipulations.

1) you need to use these embryos for only one thing: to try to get Erin pregnant.
COMPLETELY AGREE TO

2) if you don't use all three embryos within 10 years you have to give them back to us. You would not have the right to pick your own recipients for your unused embryos. Only my wife and/or I can assign the embryos to anyone else. COMPLETELY AGREE TO

3) you have to notify us of any child(ren) born from these embryos, their gender (and their first names, so our kids can avoid dating them!)
COMPLETELY AGREE TO

4) if you get kids from these embryos and the kids have any health problems whatsoever you have no notify us immediately. We have to do the same with our kids who are your kids' genetic siblings COMPLETELY AGREE TO

5) at least once a year you have to provide us with a picture of your child(ren)'s face(s) and an update on their progress COMPLETELY AGREE TO


6) I agree to be a "knowable" donor: your kid(s) have the right to contact me at age 18 if we have not had direct contact before then. I have the responsibility to keep my address current with you or the lawyer to facilitate this
COMPLETELY AGREE TO

7) you must informing your child(ren) that they were conceived from donor egg and donor sperm and that their donors are of Jewish ancestry and that they have the right to contact me when they turn 18.
COMPLETELY AGREE TO

8) You may thaw and implant more than one embryo only if the first (and/or second) embryo thawed is considered non-viable by the clinic's embryologist. Once you have one viable embryo you may not thaw any more during that cycle. COMPLETELY AGREE TO

9) my family and I have no responsibility if these embryos are not viable or if your kids have any problems. COMPLETELY AGREE TO."

Oh, they agreed to everything. Specifically and individually. We were in complete agreement. They even sent the web address for the state licensing board that had issued Jenny's professional credential and teaching license. This was better than a background check. Giving embryos to someone who worked in a school setting guaranteed that the recipient was of good character, had never been arrested and had not committed malpractice. This was extra-sturdy karmic protection to ensure I was picking the best parents possible for any children that might come from this donation.

The embryos were spoken for and no longer our responsibility. It felt good. Now to get them the embryos.

NEGOTIATING THE CONTRACT

What terms can be included in an open embryo donation contract? Anything the donor(s) and recipient(s) both agree will work for their families. In our case, my wife and I made sure we worked out our concerns with the recipients before hand. By writing emails back and forth and discussing things on the phone we had all arrived at a general framework for the agreement before the actual contract was written.

After sharing our concerns and hopes we then stepped back and trusted our recipients to keep to the spirit of what we had discussed. Only the most important issues made it into the actual draft contract.

The legally binding contract was kept flexible and as minimal as possible. The only things we asked the recipients to commit to were issues that I felt would put me into "karmic debt" if something went wrong.

By "karmic debt" I mean that I did not want to be responsible for causing pain. Thus, I would not help anyone create a child who was needlessly disabled, deceived or a member of a family whose values conflicted with what I consider essentially moral. Parents planning to lie to their children about their conception with donor egg/sperm were out. Heterosexual couples, whose options for starting a family were so broad compared to gay parents, were not the recipients for me. I also ruled out single moms because I know how hard it is to care for an infant when a parent does not have a partner.

Still, I had been convinced to change what I originally considered essential recipient criteria by the wonderful child-centered attitude of the couple I ultimately chose. Though I had at first wanted the children to be raised Jewish, in accordance with their bloodline, Jenny and Erin were magnificent, good-hearted people who had a lot of love to give a child. They would pass along the right values even without the benefit of millennia of Jewish wisdom (and with more humility than I could muster).

Shedding criteria that were not essential did not mean abandoning my core values. I still wanted a child from this donation to have the right to know his or her origins, both ethnically and genetically. I wanted to make sure the clinic could not pressure the recipients to implant multiple embryos at once, causing them to exponentially increase their risk of having disabled twins or triplets. And if the recipients changed their minds, I wanted the unused embryos back so they went to another family who also met my concerns.

Jenny and Erin had been so open and flexible but now we were down to brass tacks. I included as few terms in the proposed contract as I possibly could but I was still asking a lot. As we waited to hear their response, I wondered if I had over-stepped. My wife and I had accepted them, but would they accept us? I really liked these women, and I hoped their answer would be "yes".

HELLO

Now that we had decided to give our embryos to Jenny and Erin we invited them to speak to us on the phone. They admitted to being nervous about this. I could understand that. This was life, actively happening. Nonetheless, they gave us their home and mobile numbers.

To make sure we didn't surprise them, we asked Jenny and Erin for a good time to call them, and that's when we called. They were both very sweet on the phone, and their Southern accents sounded musical to my Northern ears.

We talked to them in detail about every possible medical problem anyone in my family had ever experienced, including dandruff. We wanted to make sure they knew what they were getting into.

At the same time, we covered the basics of what they needed to do for us to sign over the embryos. We had already mentioned most of these things to them and they had said they were open to them, but we wanted to spell it out all at once.

Those requirements were:

1) Use our fertility clinic, since it has the nation's best success rates, and to avoid shipping the fragile embryos.
2) Pay our lawyer to draft the donation contract, as she is a pioneer in fertility law.
3) Tell any children they have that they are genetically Jewish, conceived with donor gametes and have the right, when adults, to meet their egg donor/genetic sibs.
4) Send us a photo, medical update and developmental summary on their kid(s) once a year.
5) Reimburse us for the embryo storage fees.
6) Use the embryos within 10 years.
7) Give back any embryos they do not choose to use.
8) Don't blame us if you don't get pregnant or the kid(s) have problems.

and the biggie:

9) Agree to thaw only one embryo to start. If the embryologist says that one doesn't look viable, thaw a second one, then, if needed, a third. But stop after one viable embryo is produced to reduce the risk of twins or triplets and the huge likelihood of problems from a multiple pregnancy.


We had tried to be as flexible as we could. We did not want to force the recipients to meet capricious demands. But I considered it my responsibility to make sure I did not force a child to endure needless disability due to prematurity or unhappiness from discovering later that they had been lied to about their genetic origins. I also wanted to keep my own children safe by learning about any medical problems that might arise with their genetic siblings. And after spending tens of thousands of dollars to create my own children, I thought it was fair for the recipients to at least pay the fees that allowed the embryos to wait for them in the freezer.

Would the recipients see this as reasonable? We waited to find out.

WARNING SIGNS

The first recipients to contact us sounded ok so we started discussing a possible donation. We were not totally thrilled with this couple, but we were willing to give them a shot. Would they accept just one embryo? Yes they would. Were they willing to use the clinic where the embryos were stored? It has the best pregnancy rate with frozen embryos of all US clinics. No, they did not want to travel.

Based on what came next, I will quote two sentences from their email. Since there is no identifying information linked to this short quote it is not a privacy violation.

Just so you know, we are fine with the one embryo, as we have no desire for twins.

They did not want to use our clinic. Because we had mentioned our clinic's pregnancy statistics as being the best in the country, they wrote back addressing the issue of success statistics for their clinic. There were no statistics for this couple's doctor. He was a solo practitioner because:

[We use the only] doctor in this area [who] will help gay women have babies. The doctors that actually work at [our clinic] are bible beaters, and won't even treat 'single'
women (gay women), but they do let [our doctor] use their facilities.

This was not confidence-inspiring. The couple refused to use the most successful infertility clinic in the US and instead chose to use a clinic so anti-gay and reactionary they would not even treat the infertility of single heterosexual women. A gay family, they also chose to live in the most legislatively gay-hating state in the USA. And they felt compelled to tell us that they had heterosexual friends. Duh, who doesn't? These women were starting to sound like they had severe judgement issues.

Should we even go ahead with this donation? The next thing they wrote changed everything.

NEGOTIATING EMBRYO DONATION CONTRACTS

We decided to give our excess embryos to the first Jewish lesbian couple who contacted us. There were some red flags but they sounded like competent parents. We wanted to get the embryos off our minds, so we started to discuss contract terms with them to see if this could be a match.

The most important thing for us was not to help create an avoidable disability. To this end, and also because we weren't completely thrilled with these recipients, we told them we would donate the embryos to them one at a time. That way the clinic could not pressure them to implant too many and needlessly create twins or triplets. We also suggested that these recipients use our clinic since it has the best pregnancy results with frozen embryos of any clinic in the country, and to avoid shipping the embryos. If the recipients really wanted this to work, we thought they would agree to one short airplane trip just for the embryo transfer. We waited for their response to these terms.

I won't print the recipients email because I do not have permission from them to do so. To paraphrase, the recipients wrote back and said the idea of using our clinic "sounds good in theory" but they thought an out-of-town transfer would be too stressful for them. They agreed to take one embryo at a time and to use our clinic if the first single-embryo transfer failed.

My wife and I were not delighted with this, but we figured giving them one embryo would still leave two to be implanted in our clinic. We could give them one shot under their terms and see what happened. We wrote back that their refusal to use our clinic would not be a deal-breaker. But it was their response to this flexibility that really took us aback.

NEXT TIME: we reconsider

CONTRACTING

Assuming that embryo recipients want to have their own families without much contact with the donor really limited the things I felt I could ask for in an embryo donation contract. I looked on-line at other contracts from completed donations. It seemed that the basics were this: donor is absolved of any responsibility for genetic problems or failure for the embryos to become children. Recipients pay all embryo storage and legal fees associated with the donation. Recipients pay for their own embryo transfer and other medical treatments.

The thing that worries me most about donating my embryos is the possibility that I will contribute to a child's physical or emotional pain if I do not pick the right parents. In an attempt to prevent the worst abuse commonly embraced by embryo recipients, I decided to try to build honesty into any contract I created. I would insist that recipients tell their children the truth about their conception and genetic heritage.

When my wife donated eggs to infertile friends, the medication caused her to over-stimulate and produce 22 viable eggs. Her friends gave half the eggs to anonymous recipients. I am not genetically related to any of the children who may have come from this donation. But I love my wife, I think she is gorgeous and very talented, and I wonder what she passed on to the unknown recipient's kids. The IVF clinic's nurse very subtly let it slip that a pregnancy did result from the anonymous donation. How many kids were born? What do they look like? Did the recipient lie to them about their conception? We will probably never know. And since we do know two other children from this donation who live in the same area, it would be a very good idea if we did know. Inadvertently dating one's half-sibling is not a good idea.

Since I knew it would drive me nuts not to know if children resulted from our embryo donation, we decided to put it into the contract that we had to be notified if it worked. We also included a yearly photo and developmental update on our wish list. And all the parents involved would be negligent if we did not agree to share any medical problems that arose.

Beyond this, I was flexible. However, since my clinic has the best frozen embryo transfer rate in the country, a donor willing to do the procedure there would be at the top of our candidate list, particularly since shipping the embryos could mean non-viable embryos if there was a weather delay, misrouting, poor handling or a host of other problems. And I wanted to limit the number of embryos transferred if possible, since I knew that twins or triplets would be much more likely to be sick or injured.

When I finally got to the point of negotiating a contract, the real fun began...