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Partners
- A woman tried to conceive naturally with her previous partner, but their relationship ended.
- However, she still wanted to have children and heard someone in her family had used a sperm donor.
- She then went to a clinic and chose a donor with blue eyes.
Natalie Amos* tried to conceive naturally with her previous partner for two years, but that relationship ended unexpectedly. She still wanted kids, however.
"I realised that the likelihood of trying to meet someone new and get into a serious relationship and find someone who wanted to be a daddy wasn’t going to happen. I also had experience in my family of someone using a sperm donor and there being a lot of problems with court cases, etc., and I didn’t want to go through that," says the now 54-year-old.
"Basically, it was just a case of wanting to have children but not wanting to have a known father."
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Natalie works as a freelance art director and had just finished up a big project that paid well, so she went ahead and started looking at what her options were.
"I rang a friend who'd had a successful pregnancy with an unknown sperm donor and asked her: 'What did you do?' I did exactly what she did, and I went to the clinic. I arrived there and said I want to get pregnant, and they arranged it all for me. I subsequently heard that there’s a whole different world out there as well, but I wasn’t interested in finding out about that."
Natalie decided on a donor with blue eyes and who was a bit sporty.
"There weren’t any pictures or anything, but he wrote a little blurb about himself, and I remember he described himself as competitive, and I thought: 'Well, I’m bringing kids into the world under different circumstances. You need kids who are going to be a bit more full of shit and competitive'," she laughs.
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The actual process of IVF, however, was not a laughing matter. Natalie was a chemo buddy for her friend who had breast cancer during the time she was trying to get pregnant and says that often going to the chemo sessions was more pleasant than going to the clinic.
"You would have to wait for whatever day in your cycle. Then you would arrive at this clinic, and you'd pull a number, and you'd sit in a waiting room because you couldn't make an appointment because it's based on your cycle. And you sit in the clinic, and almost nobody is friendly. I mean, the nurses were friendly, but everybody would sit there looking stressed because I think being able to conceive is something that people naturally think that they should be able to do.
"And I think it's very stressful when you can't because it's like there's not just societal pressures and judgments, but it's also just unpleasant. It’s not fun, and it’s also very expensive. So every time you go in, you're spending a lot of money on a gamble."
Natalie did three rounds of artificial insemination first, which were unsuccessful, before doing four rounds of IVF. It was incredibly stressful, and she had to stop the procedures at one point due to a cyst that had grown on one of her ovaries.
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Natalie had a problem getting viable eggs, and with her last round of IVF, she only had two viable eggs left. "Even my doctor was amazed that both eggs took. And then I got twins," she says.
Did Natalie ever miss having a partner to share the journey of pregnancy and parenthood with? "It's not really a partner, it's an extra pair of hands," she says she misses. "There's no guarantee that the person you chose is going to step up at any time. I mean, you hope they will."
Natalie luckily had the support of her parents who came to help her for six months before the babies were born, but she had many times where those 'extra pair of hands' would have come in handy.
"If I had been out for the day with the babies, I used to have to do trips. I lived in a double-storey townhouse, and I would have to leave the babies sleeping in the car, take everything in, and then take in one baby and then the other. There were times at the supermarket when people would look at me like I’m Superwoman because I’d have them in a carrier with one on the front and one on the back and carrying my shopping," she laughs.
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Natalie doesn’t regret her decision to have babies on her own at all, even 10 years later. "I'm completely happy with that decision, especially when I hear the dramas. Look, you know, nothing's perfect. I'm going through a process at the moment of explaining [it] to my children," she says.
"There are three things you need to make a baby; an egg, sperm and a womb," says Natalie."And none of those have anything to do with parenting, motherhood or fatherhood. It's quite a difficult concept for most people to kind of get over, you know, get their heads around.
"I think all children would like to have a perfect family. And as I explain to my children all the time, well, I never had a sister. And my mother's father died when she was four. I mean, families are not perfect. Family is not always a mum and a dad and a brother and a sister and whatever. It doesn't always work that way."
*Name has been changed
