It took ten years of hope and heartbreak, a trip to Ukraine and $100k for Nadene Ghouri to become a mother. Now she faces a new challenge: finding an egg donor in New Zealand – a search that has led her to Facebook forums.
"Two rounds of IVF. If it doesn’t work, we stop at that.”
And with those words to my husband my journey of assisted conception began. It didn’t work in those first two rounds. And no, we didn’t stop there.
In fact we didn’t stop for a decade. Ten years of heartbreak and miscarriage; more failed rounds of IVF than I care to remember; and so much money I deliberately stopped counting after 100k.
If you’re wincing at that figure, I understand. So am I. At the start of our quest, I couldn't have comprehended paying out such huge sums nor re-mortgaging our house. But that’s what we did.
Because the harder you try the stronger the desire to keep going. The self-administered hormone jabs three times a day, gritting my teeth and fighting tears while sticking a needle into already sore and bruised stomach tissue. Or enduring the mental toll of a six-week IVF course with raging PMT symptoms one day, my body tricked into thinking it’s in the menopause the next. IVF is brutal – I would not wish it on my worst enemy. But with each new round the goal is tantalisingly in sight, the dream of a baby to hold. And then – the heartbreak of another failed pregnancy test. And steeling oneself to go again.
Because of my experience I empathised deeply with the women in our Sunday story The Gift of Life and the lengths they were prepared to go to fulfil their dreams of having a child. Sarah*, who said the silver lining of a miscarriage was that she learned how to grieve, struck a particular chord. It took me a long time to accept that each failed round of IVF is effectively an early miscarriage. Embryos are five days old when implanted and it’s two weeks from that when a pregnancy test is taken.
The shortage of sperm and eggs
It may sound crazy that the women in our story, and hundreds of others like them, would compromise their own safety to search for sperm donors online. But the harsh reality of a three-year wait for clinic-approved sperm and the eye-watering cost of private treatment leaves no alternative for many.
And it’s not only sperm donors who are in short supply.
Across Aotearoa there are scores of Facebook groups and apps connecting single women, Rainbow families and heterosexual couples with sperm donors, egg donors and surrogates. The wait for clinic approved sperm is almost as long for donated eggs. And willing surrogates are rare.
There's no merit to the claim that sex is more effective than artificial insemination. (Source: Sunday)
Every day there are fresh posts by those desperately wanting to become mothers (and fathers), willing to violate their privacy by sharing intimate and painful infertility stories, in the quest to find a stranger who might help them.
Any new post by a woman offering to donate eggs or be a surrogate typically has 20 or more replies within minutes of appearing. To say it’s competitive doesn’t come close.
My own story could not have reached its happy conclusion without such a stranger, my angel. Viktoria is the Ukrainian surrogate who carried my child for me after my broken body and heart could take no more.
The legally grey hinterland of surrogacy in the UK (where I lived at the time) was terrifying, so my choice was to go somewhere with a solid legal framework for commercial surrogacy – and that turned out to be Ukraine.
Choosing the right surrogate
As a journalist I’d read all I could find about commercial surrogacy, the pitfalls the potential risks of a surrogate being coerced – and I realised there are many positive stories that rarely get told. We were offered three profiles of potential surrogates by the clinic. All of them sounded like lovely people but I was struck by Viktoria’s smiling eyes. All the same, as my husband and I flew to Kyiv to meet her, we were on high alert for any red flags. The meeting was in the clinic office. As I walked in Viktoria wrapped me in the most enormous bear hug and whispered ”you’ve made a good decision, it’s going to be okay”. I looked into those eyes, even warmer in person, and believed her. She told us she’d found being pregnant with her own two daughters easy. She laughed as she recalled a story from when she was ten years old. There was an old lady with no children in her village and Viktoria remembers telling her mother "when I grow up I will have a baby for that lady”. She explained she always knew this was something she would do.
We flew home and a few weeks later received the news that Viktoria was pregnant – with my baby. Instead of being happy I was plunged into grief. I felt like a complete failure and was insanely jealous of Viktoria. That was made worse by unkind or judgmental comments from some of the first few people we told. After that I shut down and rarely spoke about the situation. It was a very lonely "pregnancy".
But Viktoria and I communicated via WhatsApp, and after we flew over for a couple of scans, it got easier. It remained a strange process but made easier because she and I genuinely bonded.
I’ll never forget the day of our final eight-month scan. I held Viktoria’s hand as my son turned his face towards us on a 3D scanner. Everyone in the room cried. I realised that, although this was far from the story I would have chosen, it was a beautiful privilege to be in that room at that moment with Viktoria and our amazing all-female Ukrainian medical team. Afterwards Viktoria and I went for lunch. Big fat snowflakes fell around us as we stood in the centre of Kyiv hugging and laughing and crying until our toes turned numb with cold.
My son Gilbert is now three. But we joke that he’s really ten because he’s from a set of embryos created seven years before his birth. A frozen embryo time traveler. It blows my mind.
While Gilbert is biologically the son of my husband and me, what surrogacy has in common with gamete (egg and sperm) donation is that both involve the aid of a person – often a stranger – who is essential to the creation of a child’s life but won’t necessarily play any kind of role in it. Some of the potential risks of that were highlighted on the Sunday program. If parented with sensitivity and transparency, donor conceived children can and do grow up to be proud of their conception stories – research proves that. But as Bec Hamilton from Donor Conceived Aotearoa New Zealand told Sunday, “That won’t happen by crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.”
Viktoria remains a close friend and my toddler already knows the special role she played in creating our family. I read him specialist story books like The Very Kind Koala, about a koala with a broken pouch who finds a kind koala who loans hers. There are similar story books for children born via donor conception and for all kinds of modern families.
Frozen embryos trapped in Ukraine
We very much want Gilbert to have a sibling. Viktoria had agreed to carry a second child for us, but then Russia invaded Ukraine. I was able, at least in part, to pay back her ultimate gift by assisting her and her daughters to flee Ukraine for Ireland. Gilbert and I visited her there last year, which was beyond special.
We’ve since been lucky enough to find a potential surrogate here in New Zealand, another wonderful woman who, with her own family complete, is driven to help others . But no part of this journey is ever simple. In our latest setback I’m left reeling to discover that our existing embryos do not meet current New Zealand legislation (which is stricter than that of most countries) and I may not be able to import them here – a situation made even more complicated by the current situation in Ukraine where our embryos are stored.
A decade of repeated IVF has plunged my body into early menopause therefore my only option is to create new embryos using an egg donor. I was shocked when a leading fertility clinic told me the waiting list for eggs could be years-long. The only suggestion they could make was to look for someone online.
Sperm donors exposed for trying to manipulate women into sex
As demand for sperm has skyrocketed to a point where fertility clinics simply cannot keep up, donations are moving out of the medical field and into the hands of DIY donors, creating an environment some say is ripe for exploitation.
September 17, 2023
28:46
My partner offered up that he would be willing to donate sperm to another couple in return for an egg donation if they could match us with someone else on their waiting list. We’d feel much more comfortable going through this process with someone who, like us, has already been through a clinic-led counselling process. It could be a win/win. But we were told a firm no. The clinic doesn’t offer matching services. But if they won’t do that, then what’s the alternative?
So here we are. Having just produced a Sunday story about the risk and desperate hope of online fertility forums, I find myself posting on them.
SHARE ME