Donor Picking

I haven't really written about the process of donor picking yet.  I joke in RL that this it's "flipping through the Ikea catalogue" (even though it's all done online).  We've only just begun to look at donors, and it's surprising, or rather unsurprising, what's important to us and what is kind of unimportant.

Generally, sperm banks only accept donors over a certain height.  They are generally all post-secondary, with good family histories (it goes back 2 generations on maternal and paternal sides).  ALL of them seem to be incredibly remarkable people with big hearts (in Canada you don't get paid to donate sperm).  The sperm is quarantined for 6 months and retested to ensure it's clean, it's screened and DNA tested for things like CF and other "big" diseases.  The morphology (what the sperm look like) is closely inspected, and donors have to have a good sperm-thaw count (i.e., even of the donor has a great sperm count to begin with, it may not defrost well).

All of them have at least one post-sec degree (most of them seem to have at least a Masters).  They're either incredibly talented athletes or musicians or artists or SOMETHING.  It makes me feel like I've been wasting my talents!  A lot of them want to become parents.  We are looking for an ID release donor, as I don't feel that completely cutting off my kids' ability to find their donor later is something that I am comfortable doing.

In any case, soon the great sperm hunt will begin.  Oh the hysteria...