Mark & Nick's Story: the path to fatherhood
A couple shares their experience of becoming fathers using donor eggs from the London Egg Bank & a surrogate
We always knew that we wanted to have children someday, so a few years ago we began the process of finding out more about how we could make that happen. There are so many different options for men – whether it’s finding a surrogate for intrauterine insemination (IUI), or whether it’s using donor eggs from another person and going down the IVF route. It can feel overwhelming at first when you’re unfamiliar with the terms, but you soon become a pro and terms like surrogacy and embryo transfer are quickly second nature.
We decided that the best option for us was to go down the ‘gestational’ surrogate route, where we used frozen donor eggs from one woman to create an embryo and then found a second woman to be the surrogate. This option appealed to us rather than ‘traditional’ surrogacy, as we were able to choose eggs from a wider range of donors and find the best fit for our family.
We came across London Egg Bank when searching online for egg donors and loved that we could access the donor catalogue and browse through the various options. We really wanted someone with a high level of education, as well as sharing certain physical characteristics of ours. The nice thing about the LEB catalogue was that new donors were regularly added, so we could take our time and not feel pressured to choose from a small group.
One night Nick was looking through the catalogue online and found the perfect donor. She had a bachelors degree and all of the physical characteristics we were looking for – it was so exciting to think that this could be ‘the one’! We immediately booked in to use those specific eggs, and felt like we were at the beginning of a whole new journey.
There was a hive of activity over the coming months – we had to undergo semen analysis, we picked a surrogate and began to get to know her and her wonderful family, consulted regularly with London Women’s Clinic and utilised their counselling service. They recommend that everyone has at least one counselling session ahead of treatment, and it’s really good to speak to someone totally separate from real life and talk through any concerns.