artificial insemination

It was a Friday, the day the pregnancy test was positive. Day 29 of my cycle, fifteen days after insemination. A drab August day. The rain drizzling down the window panes seemed incongruent with my mood, but I was struggling to identify my mood at all. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t wished for a positive test. It was exactly what we’d been hoping for, of course. And it had happened much sooner than expected. A huge success.

A Separated lesbian couple have both been summoned to testify on behalf of a sperm donor, with whom they had made a written agreement, but who was ordered to pay child support after they split up.
A Kansas judge recently ordered William Marotta, a sperm donor to a lesbian couple, to pay child support after they split up, raising questions of how the law protects sperm donors.
Mr Marotta and the couple he donated to did not use official channels, and instead met up using a website, and wrote up their own agreement.

Our first insemination had taken place in mid-July. It had been a trial run. I was hoping to go on maternity leave around June, when my GCSE and A ‘level students’ exams would be over. So getting pregnant about September time would be ideal. We’d read a lot of books on the topic, some suggesting that it might take a year or more of inseminations before one was successful. Somewhere or other I’d read that each insemination has only a 6% chance of success. But then there were all the variables.

Kansas sperm donor being sued by the state for child support put himself in a precarious legal position by donating to a lesbian couple using artificial insemination at home. Kansas law states that a sperm donor is not the father of a child if a doctor handles the artificial insemination. But the law does not specifically address the donor's rights and obligations when no doctor was involved.

We’d had it pencilled in the diary for three months. Our first insemination. In fact we hadn’t pencilled it in at all: there was just an ominous unmarked weekend on the calendar; a question mark by Days 11 and 13 on my chart; a pair of affectionate parentheses in my diary, embracing nothing.

Whilst defrosting the fridge-freezer yesterday, two things occurred to me. I firstly wondered whether my motivation to complete this magnanimous act was rooted hormones. To some extent, yes of course it was to do with the fact the freezer no longer really closed properly, due to the developing foetus of ice across the front of the top drawer. Nevertheless, was there a hint of the nesting mother there? My second reflection was that when I next defrosted the freezer, I might have a child.

Lesbians who have found a sperm donor are increasingly looking at natural insemination to become pregnant. Has the cost of insemination forced lesbians into a corner?