'I was single and desperate for a baby - so I found a free sperm donor on Facebook'
Many women who choose to use donor sperm to fall pregnant prefer to keep it a secret, but not Valerie Bauman – she’s written a book about it.
Inconceivable is part memoir and part investigation into the murky - and expensive - world of becoming a single mother by choice in modern America. The 42-year-old investigative journalist was inspired to chart her motherhood experience from the moment she decided she didn’t need a partner to start a family and would go it alone, leaving readers on a cliffhanger about what becomes of her final viable embryo after spending tens of thousands of dollars on IVF.
On her journey, Valerie recalls inserting menstrual cups full of strangers’ sperm in public toilets, struggling with condescending fertility doctors, and crossing paths with men who find the notion of pregnancy deeply arousing. We’re not talking bog standard ‘preggophiles’ (men who find heavily pregnant women sexually attractive), but men with ‘breeding kinks, who get off on the idea of fertilising multiple woman through unprotected sex.’
Valerie overcomes enormous challenges, including an inpatient stay in a psychiatric ward, an abusive relationship, infertility bombshells, a devastating miscarriage and familial tensions - all while on a brutal, IVF-induced hormonal rollercoaster, where the sound of her biological clock is not so much ticking as booming in the background.
But - spoiler alert - the hours she spent trawling Facebook groups for free sperm, the thousands of dollars she spent on all sorts of medical tests and procedures for her and her future child’s potential fathers, plus legal fees, were worth it. When I speak to her at her home, she isn’t on the call alone – her baby son, Declan, joins us. He was born May 2024, sired by one of the men featured in Inconceivable, a man referred to simply as “The Lawyer”.
Valerie tells Women’s Health that the release of her book is ‘terrifying’, but that her son, legally referred to as a “donor-conceived person” in the US, deserves to know where he came from. She wanted to share the stories of other families and individuals she met on her journey, too.
‘My motivation for taking this unorthodox path is the rights of the donor-conceived person, you know, this child didn't ask to be born, he didn't ask to be born without a father. I think if I'm going to deny my child a father, I need to go into this with eyes wide open and try to give my kid as many answers as possible,’ she says.
‘Most families start with a man and a woman, a mummy and a daddy who have a baby. And that's a challenge that I'm preparing myself for. My goal is to put his feelings first and not make him feel like he has to worry about hurting my feelings. I want him to be able to say, “I'm mad at you, mommy, I wanted [a dad]. I wish I had a daddy”.
‘I want him to feel comfortable sharing that with me. And I'm going to do my best to educate myself to help him navigate those feelings without making him feel like he has to protect my emotions, because it breaks my heart.
‘But if I [became a mother] any other way, he wouldn't be here. There's no wrongful birth. This is the kid I was meant to have. He deserves to be in this world. And I hope that he's glad that I brought him here.’
Daddy issues
Since 2005, donor-conceived people in the UK are legally entitled to find out the identity of their sperm (or egg donor) when they turn eighteen. In the US, this varies from state to state, and depends on the donor’s personal preferences. If obtaining sperm through official “cryobanks”, alongside looks, background and intelligence, donors can also be selected according to the level that they are willing to be involved in a future child’s life.
Some opt to be totally anonymous and have zero contact with the recipient or offspring, others may be open or quasi-open, meaning that they might allow contact after the child reaches adulthood. Some donors - for a huge fee - will only work with one woman, meaning their child won’t have any surprise half siblings. At the other end of the scale, you meet men like Jonathan Jacob Meijer, the subject of Netflix documentary The Man With 1,000 Kids, who donated at fertility clinics across the world and is the biological father of hundreds of children.
Valerie estimates it can cost ‘anywhere from $20,000 to upwards of $40,000’ to undergo fertility treatment in the US. The costs largely depend on the clinic, how many vials of sperm are used, how many rounds of IVF, and the ever-increasing yearly fee for keeping any viable embryos frozen.
Buying sperm through traditional channels is expensive, which can make parenthood an impossible dream for women like Valerie - single mothers by choice - on just one income. So, she turned to Facebook groups where men willingly offer up their semen to help single women and lesbian couples achieve their dreams of motherhood.
Here, she encountered men offering ‘AI’ (artificial insemination, where they ejaculate into a menstrual cup for the woman to manually insert as close to their cervix as possible) and ‘NI’ (natural insemination, aka sexual intercourse), and a third option where the woman would masturbate the donor before inserting his penis for the moment of ejaculation. While cryobank semen is tested for STIs and genetic diseases, taking sperm from strangers online can be risky, with women needing to trust them when they say they have a clean bill of health and no hereditary illnesses.
Unsurprisingly, the group members’ motives for stepping up to help these (often desperate) women ranged from simply wanting to have lots of unprotected sex, to wanting to ensure that they were leaving their genetic legacy on Earth. Plus she had to run the gauntlet with a gaggle of perverts and fetishists, all trying to match up potential donor’s calendars with her ovulation cycle.
Safe hands?
But sexual deviants aren’t just lurking on internet message boards. In Inconceivable, Valerie meets a woman who was conceived using anonymous sperm from a cryobank. She grew up believing that she was French and built a huge part of her identity around that single, tiny piece of information she knew about her biological father. In reality, he was an Iranian sex addict who had donated sperm as a way to make a quick buck during college, lying about his heritage and familial health history. She discovered this, and multiple half-siblings, after uploading her information to a genealogy website.
‘There's no guarantee that going through a sperm bank means you’re going to have a psychologically stable person providing your sperm. [Finding a donor on Facebook] is not the right choice for everybody. But for me, I wanted to meet the person, look them in the eye and get a read on them,’ she says.
The Facebook groups are moderated by members, most often ‘Super Donors’, who have fathered multiple children. In her book, Valerie claims that women who have raised concerns about a member’s behaviour are promptly removed from the group, allowing the problematic man to continue to have access to the other women.
It’s a huge concern that safeguarding women is sacrificed in the name of keeping the reputation of these groups pure, and ensuring that men in the DIY sperm donor community have continual access to women. Similarly, once a woman has fallen pregnant and/or given birth, they leave the group, taking with them any negative experiences that new members ought to be warned about.
Valerie knew that she wanted her child to know who their father is, so she needed to find a “known donor” who would be willing to offer some sort of presence in her child’s life.
‘There's a lot of obstacles to using a known donor. A lot of prospective parents are seeing the benefit of having a known donor, both psychologically for the child, and so they can have answers. But the healthcare system is set up to reward anonymity and make it easier for anonymity, and I think that's unfortunate.
‘I think the rights of donor conceived people are kind of an up-and-coming issue. For so long, donor conception was kept secret, some people didn't even know that they were donor conceived and then were finding out in their 20s and 30s. I think more people are realising it's best to educate kids from birth, talk to them about where they come from, let them know. And, ideally, let them have access to their biological parent.’
One of the main reasons why men are reluctant to act as “known donors” is that in the US, one of the most litigious nations on Earth, they fear a lawsuit later down the line where they are asked to pay child support for their offspring, which could be financially crippling if your sperm has been used to father multiple children.
But legal concerns go both ways. Valerie explains: ‘The women worry that men will come for custody, but anecdotally I have found that to be a lot less common, because these men are helping so many different women, why would they go after that particular donation? Whereas the women can financially benefit from going after men for child support, so I kind of see both sides of it.’
Going it alone
Reading Inconceivable, you are struck by the amount of hurdles Valerie is faced with as she tries to fulfil her simple dream of becoming a mum. As a reader, I was shocked by the number of times she recounts being spoken down to by doctors, messed about by men who want to be fathers without the responsibilities, and the huge amount of financial investment she had to make. What was the toughest part for her?
‘I think I reserved the most frustration for my own body and its failures, really,’ she says. ‘But there were a lot of gatekeepers along the way. There's so many different moments of frustration. The men who have perverse motivations to donate sperm. The doctors who are gatekeepers, who stand in the way of giving you answers or getting you the care that you want and need, and just the health care system itself overall.
‘But as frustrating as some of the men were in my book, I don't hate men, I love men, I'm going to raise one who I hope is a good one.’
Valerie is raising Declan alone, albeit with the support of her family who she has moved closer to. But for a few chapters in Inconceivable, it did seem that her future child would have a loving and stable father figure in his or her life.
She writes of meeting ‘The Man’, a kind and loving army veteran with grown-up children, who despite having undergone a vasectomy offers to look into reversing the procedure so he can expand his family with her. They are blissfully happy living in his sprawling home outside of Washington D.C, and it feels like Valerie has finally found her Happy Ever After.
But the way she describes the heady early days of their relationship will be painfully familiar to anyone who has been love-bombed by a narcissist, as will the eventual outcome a year later after he has done a total U-turn about her dreams of becoming a mum, and turned from a dream partner into a selfish, bullying ogre.
Unsurprisingly, after the break-up Valerie is floored by emotional devastation, uncertainty and heartbreak. She’s wasted a year of her dwindling fertility on a dead end, and the disappointment is partly what leads her to being admitted to a psychiatric unit as she struggles with the prospect of never becoming a parent. Thanks to the support of her mum and female friends, she recovers, and her motherhood mission continues with fresh determination.
She’s not heard from “The Man” since she gave him a copy of her book, but tells WH that she’s thankful to have met him, even if it did all end in tears.
‘I'm glad I met him. It made me believe I can fall in love again, which I had kind of given up on. When it came down to having to really make that choice between becoming a mum or being in a relationship without children, I was able to be absolutely certain that having a child was what I needed to do.
‘Romantic love can come later, but motherhood has a clock attached to it.’
Inconceivable is out now. Buy on Amazon
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