Pregnancy

After that [the termination] I was sort of in depression. I mean, the doctor called it depression. It was not really that. It was more like a grieving. You know, I had about six months of not going to work and just lost faith in life, actually, for a while. 

And at the same time we were having tests, to check whether one of us had the condition and, but everybody seemed to say, “Oh, you don't have the problem. You know, you're both healthy” and everything. In the end, in fact, it ended up that my husband was diagnosed with the problem. That was a sort of double shock then because of, the shock of losing your baby first, and then you go through knowing that it's one of you has something and that caused it, so it was a very, very difficult time. 

And we were given sort of, well, options really, which wasn't very good. One was to try again, with maybe see if the baby's got it, but have actually no diagnosis to tell us, apart from the scan at twenty weeks, and see if, by chance, they see a tumour or two somewhere. But that was very unreliable, and I know from talking to other people that they've said that we probably may not see anything and then, you know, the baby may be born and you think it's healthy and it's not, so. 

They said, “You can adopt, or you can have donor insemination.” So we sort of looked at the three different things and I said to my husband I didn't want to go for a termination again, and that twenty weeks was really too late and I didn't want that. So then we looked at adoption, but my husband was not feeling very comfortable about it. 

And then we sort of decided that we'd look at donor insemination. First my husband was very, very against it. Personally I wanted to go for a known donor insemination, and I had thought about asking his brother, maybe, or you know, somebody like that we know. But he was not comfortable with it either, so we sort of talked about it and by that time I was still seeing a psychologist - since the termination I had seen a psychologist sort of almost every week. So she helped me a lot through deciding and talking about it. And then in the end in 2002 we finally decided to go ahead. So, and then, we went for it, and then the first time I tried the anonymous donor insemination, I got pregnant, so it was really good.

And the psychologist that I saw sort of every week to start with and then every month, she was telling us that maybe we should look at other ways. So I actually looked at adoption as well, even fostering, but my husband didn't want it. So in the end I thought well let's find out a little bit more about that [donor insemination]. 

We got some brochures, we went on some internet sites to look at it, I read lots of books, probably all the books on the market about it. And just I think probably got familiar, more and more, and sort of less scared about the issue of having an anonymous donor child. My husband was a little bit, not too sure about it, but I think in the end he probably realised that we had to do something, because we couldn't just wait and be sad for the rest of our lives, really. 

And I kept saying to him, “You know, people they lose, for example, an arm or a leg in an accident, they don't stop living. They just continue with what they've got left.” And I said, “If you continue just being sad, saying, 'Oh, I've got a genetic disorder, I can't have children' and do nothing about it, then, you know, it's not going to help you.” I said, “Maybe you should just cope with whatever you have, and, you know, you are lucky at the moment, you are healthy, so...” 

I was trying to sort of make him positive a bit more about the issue, and then we went to the hospital, we had several appointments, we were accepted, because you have to be accepted first. Everything was done, all the papers were done before, but I think I was just waiting for the confirmation that he was happy with it, and I would have waited a little bit more just to make him more comfortable with the idea, and then we just went ahead.

The things that were discussed which were about donor insemination - and it was more my point of view - was that, the right for the child to know who the genetic father is. That didn't really concern my husband too much, in fact, between a known donor and an unknown donor, he wanted an unknown donor because he said to me, you know, “I don't want anybody else to come one day and say, 'Well, she's my daughter anyway' or something like that,” you know. 

He wanted to be sure like he felt like he was the dad 100 per cent. And by not knowing for him it was - for me it was slightly different, and I still would like my baby to know her genetic dad. It's not possible because the law doesn't allow it, but if I could find him, or whatever, I would actually like that. But that was a scary thing for me, to think that one day she's going to say, you know, “What did you do? Why did you have me this way and, and why, you know, why can't I know who my genetic” - genitor, I would say he is, not dad, because in the end I don't think it's really a dad in that context. 

Also I was worried that I was not going to like the baby or that the baby was going to have a big nose or, I don't know, something really strange that I don't recognise at all, or. I was a bit worried about other people saying, “She doesn't look at all like her dad,” which is happening sometimes, now that she's born, but well, we just cope with it. My husband usually says, “Oh well, she just looks a lot more like her mum,” and that's it. But I was worried about all the little things, you know. 

Once she was there, though, everything just disappeared, all my worries, you know. I just loved her straight away from the first instant, and my husband actually fell in love with her from the first instant as well, and he said to me, “Oh she's beautiful.” 

And when a couple of hours after she was born I said to him, “Did you, when you, when she was born, did you have the impression that, how did you feel? That you just said, 'Oh, she's not mine' or something?” He said, “I forgot completely about it. She's mine and that was it.” So, you know, I was very happy at the time, because I realised that we'd made the right decision. 

We've still got a long way to go, and I hope that we'll be able to communicate with her, and tell her that's what happened and, you know, things like that. That we'll be open about it, because I don't want it to be a taboo, but I know sometime it's difficult for men, I think more than for women. Especially when the husband has got the problem. And also choosing the donor as well was another problem. 

Because they gave us that list of five, six donors and then said, “Just pick one.” And it was like “OK” [laughs]. 

But I tried to get a donor which had, which was saying a lot about himself. Because some donors they just say, you know, their sort of ethnic background, their height, their weight and that's it more or less, yeah? And some of the donors they say a bit more and they say what they like, you know, like hobbies, they say the studies they've done. So when we looked at all these donors we choose somebody who was obviously close physically to my husband, but also somebody who was saying a bit more information about himself so that, you know, my daughter can have this information and know a bit more about where she comes from, genetically, than just, you know, her height and so on.