Sperm Selected

Shopping online for your baby’s dad

“I know women who chose a donor for his height, or to get a different race from their own, or because he looks like their existing children. I have friends who bought each donor à la carte, trying a different one each time. Like my path to parenthood, I found my donor through the process of elimination.

I rejected businessmen, who made me picture cheap loafers. Musicians made me think of flakiness and pot. Baptists were too credulous. I wanted an “open” donor, one my child could contact later, so there was no Dickensian mystery at the center of his or her life. I didn’t want one who was married or had children of his own. (‘So conceited!’ one friend summed up.) I wanted one with reported pregnancies; my eggs were both aging and untried. And, with my Masters in poetry, I wanted logic: mathematicians, scientists, engineers.”

— Awl pal Lizzie Skurnick’s story of how she chose her sperm donor is sweet and funny and won’t make you feel terrible about everything, unlike so much other stuff you see on the Internet these days.