You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to buy sperm
It’s easier than ever for single women to have children on their own … or so I thought. Then began my $17,000 journey
Why not, you know, take a donation?
Still, I didn’t feel pressure to choose a partner or settle. Rather, I felt lucky to live at this moment in time, when it seemed easier than ever to have a child on my own. I just had to figure out how that actually worked.
My search returned ads for California Cryobank, Seattle Sperm Bank and Fairfax Cryobank. I clicked on the links and found the “donor search” buttons. Pictures of the donors as adorable kids showed up on my screen, along with a few search criteria.
I had no idea what I was looking for, but after an hour of scrolling, I started to think dating was the real gamble. Buying sperm meant I could sort for qualities I’d feel rude asking about on dates – genetics, mental and family health, engineering skills.
Buying sperm seemed so straightforward. Vials cost $1,200 to $2,500 each. Seattle Sperm Bank offered free audio recordings of donors. Fairfax Cryobank offered interviews à la carte for $34. By the end of the week, I was spending more time skimming donor profiles than dating apps, my mind racing with all the things I’d need to consider.
Come off the pill, put on some lippy and flaunt it about a bit?
Yes, yes, we get you want all those choices. To be in control. But that’s what’s costing you the $17,000 for what’s available for free at every dive bar.
Sheesh.
Can’t wait for the follow up columns:
‘Why does no man want to date a single woman with a child?’
‘Why can’t I afford the things my married friends with children can afford?’
‘Why is my child autistic/delinquent/trans?’
‘That’s not the colour I chose’.
It’s Seattle.
Frasier Crane can’t service all of them.
I apologise if I’ve told this before but my despair at reading this required me to restore my good humour for the rest of the day.
A colleague was having difficulty making his wife pregnant. He went to his GP and after a brief consultation was asked to go to the loo and provide a sample. He sat there on the toilet thinking “I thought they gave you some magazines or something” but after some time managed to provide the sample and handed it in to reception. When he got home, he got a phone call from the GP’s surgery; “Thanks very much for your sample, Mr X but could you come back and provide a urine sample…”
Re: “putting it about a bit”…
Maybe she prefers bottled to draft..?
Does the $17,000 represent her life savings or did she have to get another credit card?
The Baron: respect.
Julia,
Each of those columns can be two columns. Rewrite for emphasis:
The state should provide evening and overnight childcare so I can date men.
The state should pay me MOAR so I can have things married couples have.
The state should pay for my child’s sex change.
Etc.
Doubtless the Graun will happily pay their going rate for such.
The problem with the “real life” approach is that, even assuming that Mx. Elliot finds her Prince DNA-Criteria at the bar, she can flutter her eyelids as much as she wants, but she’s not exactly a 20-year old Goth twink (based on the rather weak-ass photo of her available), more like a typical late 40’s feminist.
So unless (God forbid), she approaches Prince DNA-Criteria and risks all the usually male problems of rejection of approach, it’s all for nothing.
What guy is going to risk having sex with a woman without a condom and risk the child support costs of her 18+ year annuity.
Even if he does have sex with her with a condom, there’s always the risk of “Spermjacking” and the same child support costs of her 18+ year annuity (as every NBA player is warned when they join the NBA as a rookie).
Even if she gets the sperm (by hook or by crook), at her age there likelihood of it working first time is slim to none. It’s not like in vitro fertilisation is a kit you can do at home.
So for all of these reasons, the $17,000 might be a better option for her, but even that has risks such as the fact that she may already be effectively infertile and also that such a “geriatric pregnancy” has developmental risks as well, autism being just the most common one.
JG – Even if she gets the sperm (by hook or by crook), at her age there likelihood of it working first time is slim to none
Idk what kind of puling weaksauce spooge they’re selling, mine works every damn time.
BJ – It’s a sticky situation.
None of this changes my view that in an orderly society (which will and should never happen because individual desires rightly take precedence), women would marry someone 10-20 years their senior (thus a degree of financial security) and pop out 3 in quick succession starting ~3 years after onset of sexual maturity?
You can be back in school by 25, in time to start a career before 30, with offspring sufficiently mature to not need constant supervision (ok, MMV…)
What is not to recommend this approach, compared to fighting your way up the ladder only to find you need IVF at 37?
I actually know someone who did this, presenting not yet husband with number 1 son at the age of 15, and subsequently became a pharmacist.
@BiG – Because it is against the Feminist “patriarchy” narrative, for a start, which insists that women spend the years up to 30/35 “finding herself” (i.e. testing every phallus within reaching distance) and from 30/35 onwards trying to find some beta provider to immiserate.
Does this sound like a sustainable approach, nope, but then Feminism is just Communism with tits, so it’s not meant to be sustainable, just to achieve the goal of reducing the populations of the West that refuse to implement Communism and replace them with more pliant, lower-iq types that will enable the implementation of Communism.
Rescue kittens are widely available and cheap.
Grist – reminds me of the time an army doctor handed me a piss cup and asked for a sample…
“No, you fool! Use the toilets!”
With reference to the story from Grist. To be honest, if I were seeing the Doctor about fertility problems and he asked me to provide a sample, that is what I would have done as well.
At some point this just becomes cruelty to animals.
Surely, the world has enough childless cat ladies?
… but a seemingly inexhaustible supply of kitties in need of domestic staff …
Ottokring: I’m beginning to understand why he could afford that apartment.
Zardoz (1974): it is THE FUTURE, and a simpering and flaccid misanthropic “elite” jollies in luxury while the masses are forced to live in filth and violence.
“The Penis, is evil. The Penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots death, and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken!”
Seems they underestimated how pathetic the future would be.
The more I encounter these sorts of stories, the more I conclude that “women really do like sex, really!” is a complete lie. The media is dominated with women going to extraordinary lengths to avoid ever having sex ever at all.
From “put up with it once, get a babby, then kick him out” to “obtain a sample and self-administrate”. Even the main viewer avatar in Dr Who is now an adoptee of a never-relationship single mother. From looking around at representations of society, it’s being hammered in that this is not just normal, but The normal.
I don’t know Steve, it was something else seeing Sean Connery running around in a red furry jockstrap and little else, despite the nonsensical story.
Why do the Elite in Zardoz remind me of Washington Democrats, though?
Hmm…. probably the dementia.
I’d been thinking about it since splitting with a partner a year earlier. I was 37, and had started wondering if continuing on the “traditional” path – meeting someone, getting to know them well enough to decide to have children together, attempting to get pregnant – might cost me the chance to have kids.
That ship has sailed, honey. You need to commit to parenthood somewhere between the ages of 18 and 28, not 38.
The guys who are available to you – the 35 to 50 crowd – have either already done the parenthood thing and have had enough of it, or they haven’t done the parenthood thing and never will. It’s a very select group of men who want to be changing nappies on their 45th birthday, and that select group is very, very small.
It’s sad that at age 37 you still haven’t figured out that women can’t have it all. That there are choices to be made and tradeoffs to accepted. You bought the Feminist Lie and now you’re having to come to grips with the consequences. Good luck with that.
BIG,
“None of this changes my view that in an orderly society (which will and should never happen because individual desires rightly take precedence), women would marry someone 10-20 years their senior (thus a degree of financial security) and pop out 3 in quick succession starting ~3 years after onset of sexual maturity?”
The thing is, that why don’t women do this? Individual desires include things like having children.
I don’t understand a lot of young women. And look, I totally get that a lot of women don’t want children, don’t prioritise children. They want to be the next CEO of a major tech company, or to be a totally committed musician like PJ Harvey.
But the truth is, most don’t. They seem to all kid themselves about their future and fake being interesting with a mix of yooni and travel. Doing a pointless degree and travel mostly means filling up their instagrams with a bunch of well-trodden cliches.
“You can be back in school by 25, in time to start a career before 30, with offspring sufficiently mature to not need constant supervision (ok, MMV…)”
Thing is, most women don’t want a career. They talk endlessly about this. “Oh, if I stop working it’ll get in the way of my career” when most of them are putting in a 9 to 5 at a local company. The women who are programmers nearly always fall behind because they aren’t running side projects, or tinkering with code or reading about the Toyota Production System.
“What is not to recommend this approach, compared to fighting your way up the ladder only to find you need IVF at 37?”
Yeah. I don’t get it. Men will do a lot of getting pissed up and partying in their 20s, but they do seem to spend a lot of it caring about their work. How do most women grow in their 20s?
“I actually know someone who did this, presenting not yet husband with number 1 son at the age of 15, and subsequently became a pharmacist.””
So the whole thing of Germany being the Alabama of Europe is not too far wrong? 😉
Seattle Sperm Bank offered free audio recordings of donors.
Were these recordings taken during the donation process? 🙂
Steve said:
“Zardoz (1974): it is THE FUTURE”
Is that the hilariously bad movie with Sean Connery (trying to get over being typecast as Bond) and a giant floating stone Karl Marx head?
They seem to all kid themselves about their future and fake being interesting with a mix of yooni and travel.
But that can’t be true, can it? Half of school leavers don’t go to uni. Some might hazard, the intelligent half.
Baron Jackfield
Draught, not draft.
RK
Rescue kittens are widely available and cheap.
She already has a pussy…
Maybe it’s just more acceptable to her female friends to say ‘I picked a handsome Nobel winner from a jizz catalogue’ than ‘ I shagged some random bloke who didn’t even wait to finish and never called or texted.’ Her cats won’t care either way, they havw a different moral code.
JG – Sean Connery did Zardoz in his plastic mankini, but passed on The Lord of the Rings because he didn’t understand the script.
As the Reverend Dr. James Brown warned us, cocaine is one hell of a drug.
RichardT – Yarp. I love that stone head. Britain desperately needs a giant floating stone head that vomits loaded revolvers on people.
It’ll win more votes than conscription.
Dennis – The guys who are available to you – the 35 to 50 crowd – have either already done the parenthood thing and have had enough of it
I’ll never understand how people can ever get tired of being a Dad tho. I mean, it is tiring, but rarely dull.
Sure, I enjoyed my time as Dad to a young one, but it gets quite expensive for normal blokes.
Elon though seems to be producing them at a rate of a couple a year, because no matter how expensive the child support his bank account is always deeper.
@Theo…
As the bint in question appears to be a septic I thought it apposite to use the American spelling.
🙂
I have a funny feeling this is the Danielle in question:
http://www.danielliot.com/
If you gander at her LinkedIn account, much becomes clear. Beyond being 38, she’s self-employed, working in a dying industry (journalism), she’s living in NYC.
And if I’ve found the right woman here, I’ll call bullshit on the whole article. There’s no way she’s going to be able to pull off a pregnancy and raising an infant by herself while self-employed in NYC.
This isn’t about finding a sperm donor, it’s about getting the Guardian to pay you by the word.
I have a funny feeling this is the Danielle in question:
That’s the sort of website where I think: very nice hobbies, but what do you do to pay the bills? My website is like that, full of all my personal projects, but none of it provides me with a means of paying bills.