how do I choose a sperm donor?

How Did I Choose My Sperm Donor

In my last article, I outlined some ways to choose a sperm donor. In reality few women use just one approach. To give you an idea of how this looks, here’s an overview of the blend I used as a single mom by choice to choose my sperm donor that uniquely matched my personality and priorities.

I definitely consider myself an intuitive person with a healthy dose of woo woo beliefs, with a great appreciation for the opinions and intuition of friends. I was not terribly concerned about my child looking like me physically, though this is a valid consideration for many people.

So here’s how I approached the decision about which donor to choose: First, the WooWoo showed up. Each time I sat down to look at donor profiles, I did my mind/body practices to calm my monkey mind and activate my deeper knowing. I was conscious of staying grounded, soft and open when I looked at each profile. I tried to see beyond the characteristics on the page in order to allow some other knowing to surface. I made a list of what type of spirit I was hoping to attract in a child — bright, confident, spiritually minded, open-hearted.

Then I considered whether I’d date the donor and whether I’d be proud to show my future child the profile. The first sperm bank I used only had baby pictures. However, they did provide audio files of the donors as adults. I found I could get a very strong sense of the person from an audio file—I was immediately intrigued or turned off by many donors, based on the tone of their voice and what they said in their interview.

My second sperm donor, the one who is my son’s donor, was from a sperm bank that provided adult pictures, so it was easier to sense into a general attraction. But they also had many donors with very flippant, sarcastic donor responses—ones that I would have been too embarrassed to show my child so I eliminated those donors.

Finally, I used intuition and my trusted community of friends. Once I had a list of potential donors, I created a document in which I “grabbed” all the profile pictures and a quick overview of the relevant characteristics. Then I set to ranking the donors into my top 5. By being able to see all the pictures next to each other, I was more easily able to sift through how I felt about them in comparison to each other. Ranking forced me to prioritize them based on no discernable criteria.

Then I enlisted my mentor and then my most trusted and intuitive friends to review my ranking and weigh in on their ranking. I talked to each of them about why I liked the various donors and they reflected back to me what they heard as my priorities. In the case of my egg donor, remarkably, every single friend ranked the same donor I had ranked first as their first choice! It was incredibly validating and allowed me to pick her with great confidence.

What techniques can you blend together?

Would you like help picking out a sperm bank? I created the ultimate guide to picking a sperm bank. It explains sperm bank policies, and provides tons of details comparing 7 of the top banks in the US. It will save you tons of time picking out a sperm bank.

If you already have a bank and need to pick out a donor, I can help too. Please email me to set up a consultation.  We can identify your priorities and the archetypes you’d like to use–even mull over profiles together. You don’t have to do this alone.