All in NYTimes Sperm Donor Diary
“Whose got your nose!” someone was carrying on in falsetto. I was mid-eye-roll before realizing, to my mortification, that it was I who was emitting these horrible noises. It was I who had her nose.
Arriving at my scheduled “donation time,” a technician guides me to the “collection room,” points out my various “entertainment options,” and hands me a sterile cup for my “specimen.”
Wow, what a nasty little bird, I thought. Imagine, tricking someone else into raising your own biological offspring. That’s just so wrong, so… Suddenly it hit me: I’m the cuckoo bird.
“But … I’m so short!” This, unfortunately, will always be the first phrase out of my mouth after my good friends, Tori and Kelly, asked me to be their sperm donor over a pizza dinner in Lower Manhattan.
"Did your childhood ever feel overly complicated?" I asked Flannery, who has two moms and a known donor.
I’ve had a lifetime to prepare my responses to the gay Mormon line of questioning, but I often find myself at a loss as to how to answer much of what’s posed to me about my known donor arrangement with Tori and Kelly.
As someone with the parental instincts of a fire hydrant, it was hard for me to understand why anyone would voluntarily put themselves through IVF, such an expensive and emotionally exhaustive process.
Being the type of people they are, my parents readily gave their consent when I finally worked up the nerve to broach the subject of sperm donation. “Of course!” my father exclaimed loudly. “I’m supportive of anything that eases the ability of the L.G.B.T. community to have children,” he added, like a politician giving an official statement on the matter.
“So just blow up an air mattress for me!” I declared over another of our meals. “I’m moving in!” Tori’s eyes, already of Disney-character proportions, nearly popped out of her head.
I was always planning to relinquish my parental rights. According to Judge Torres, though, I never had those rights to begin with.
Where else, besides bad daytime television, have you ever heard of doubts surrounding the maternity of a child?
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