Honestly, the amount of time I spend talking and stressing about sperm is ridiculous, especially for a lesbian!!! Straight people, and especially the majority that don’t have fertility issues, have no idea how good they’ve got it.
My wife and I have both always wanted 3 children. However, making our son cost us around £8000. We both work full time and our jobs pay enough to live on, enough to put a way a bit of money each month, we’re comfortable! But it’s just not cutting it when it comes to saving for a second child. We’re worse off now than when we didn’t have a kid, our outgoings are higher having an extra person to feed and clothe and entertain. We’re running a second car and had to take a loan out to buy that second decent car when my old one broke down suddenly. I worked out that at the rate we can save, we can only do IUI twice a year. And it has a success rate of max 20%. How depressing is that? If we wanted to do IVF, it would take us YEARS to save for it. We really hoped we could have a two year age gap between our first two. And the third? We’ve pretty much had to give up on the idea of a third.
We’re in the UK so we don’t have things like insurance, all of our costs are out of pocket. The NHS won’t help in our area until we have 6 failed IUIs under our belts, that will cost us roughly £18,000. Whereas a straight couple has to try via the conventional method for 1 year and fail to get pregnant. Which is FREE. I get that they can’t automatically help us just because we lack sperm but it’s very frustrating.
I was really hoping to be able to afford to try twice more before the end of the year but the costs just keep adding up and making it less likely. Thanks to Brexit, there’s an extra 20% VAT on all things imported into the UK from Europe. Our sperm is shipped from Denmark due to the UK’s shortage, which means roughly an extra £200 per vial of sperm we ship over (we already pay 20% VAT on the sperm when we buy it as well!!!). (I totally voted against Brexit btw and feel even more justified in doing so now.) It also costs €300 for shipping. My wife’s blood test checks ran out in June so we’ve got to fork out for those to be done before our clinic will do my IUIs. Once we get the sperm shipped to our clinic, they will charge us £400 to store it. Currently they’re still charging £100 per COVID test as a precaution (over-cautious in my opinion), so if they don’t get rid of those by the time we try again, it’ll cost us £200 per cycle as they require 2 each time. So it’s not just the £1000 per vial of sperm and £1500 per IUI cycle. It’s mounting up.
My mum and step dad have been really great through all this. They gave us money to help out before we made our first, that bought my wife’s first properly reliable car (and a bit extra when we couldn’t quite swing it), they bought our travel system for kiddo #1 which was pricey! And they’ve already given us £2000 to make #2 which is gone already after the first attempt and all pre-testing that I needed. They’re going to help out again in a few months by paying for a round of IUI too, which I’m so grateful for. But still I’m not sure we can afford the 2 rounds by the end of the year! I’m now even at the point of considering asking for help from other family members. I’ve literally never asked for money my whole life.
I’m really reluctant to have to do any fertility stuff January - March because of the sporadic but often quite bad snow that we’ve got the last few years. It’s a 60 mile drive to our clinic and I had a car accident due to the snow in 2018 so I have major anxiety about driving in the snow. And my wife has major anxiety about motorway driving after a lorry knocked her off the road shortly after my accident. So driving around that time is not ideal. But can we afford the tries we’re hoping for before that? I don’t know.
The next stress is our sperm donor’s stock is running out. Every time I look it’s gone down, and in fact since I last looked, it’s gone down by about 30 vials. There’s only 60ish left total, 23 left of the MOT20 that we buy. The other vials are an extra €400 as they’re MOT30. We’re buying 2 vials for our 2 attempts, but will have to keep a check on them and buy more if we can if it gets crazy low. We really want to use the same donor if we can, so our kids can at least be genetic half siblings. Our donor has no quotas left for UK, which means that there are 10 families that have bought sperm from him in this country. That’s not counting how many from Europe where they don’t have a cap in most countries. So the remaining sperm could sell out FAST with that many people using it!
With the sperm stock being so low, we’ve decided only 2 more IUI attempts and then it’s time for IVF. We’re hoping to avoid having to do something so invasive but we can’t afford to keep trying IUI if the sperm is going to run out. We can’t afford to buy that many vials. The only hope we have of doing IVF is taking out a loan. This stresses me out further since we already have a loan for our car and our outgoings are high. When I’m off on maternity leave, most of that time I’ll only be paid statutory maternity pay which is about £150 a week. It’s good that we get paid, I know a lot of countries don’t get that, but with that much of a pay cut, we’ll be living pay check to pay check, and if we take out loans, I don’t know if we’ll even be able to get by.
If I could live my life without ever having to hear about straight people getting knocked up by accident, that would be great, thanks! It’s so hard to not have access to sperm. Also, if people would stop telling us that there’s ‘no good time to have a kid’ and that everyone thinks they won’t be able to afford it (when they’re clearly not thinking about the fact that we’re concerned about the cost of MAKING a child, not keeping one alive).
All I want is another child, my body knows it’s time, I’m yearning for a baby that doesn’t even exist yet. Waiting is killing me, and not knowing how much time it will take is the worst. And the ultimate agony is knowing that we can’t just keep trying. It feels like we’re in the process of trying since our first failed IUI in May, but each month there’s no chance of success. Every month when I start getting PMS symptoms, the very same symptoms as you might get in early pregnancy, I get sad because I know it’s just PMS. There’s no chance of a baby.
