There is some irony in being a lesbian searching for sperm. As someone who has spent their entire life avoiding it, cringing at the thought of it and retching at my straight friends’ stories, sperm may as well have been a fungal infection. It’s immature, I know, but also, all bodily fluids are kind of gross.
Thing is, my wife and I would like to lead a fairly conventional life. We imagine a nice house with a garden, a couple of kids knocking about and, of course, a dog. In order to start piecing together our life plan, we have married, improved our credit score and started looking for a donor. After checking with our GP the process in which we would qualify for help through the NHS, and finding out the extortionate costs of private clinics, we decided to try and find a donor on our own. This meant signing up to a website which helps you search for the ideal candidate, filtering men through race, height, age and many other variables which could be a deciding factor in a fairly important decision. All of which, for me, felt a bit weird – like I was on a dating site pretending to be straight.