A Highly Informative Day

This afternoon, we received both our tentative schedule for the IVF cycle from the fertility clinic, and a draft of our donor / recipient agreement from the attorney.

I also turned in a couple of consent forms to the fertility clinic, so that the social worker is now allowed to actually tell people that we're not crazy, rather than having to keep that highly sensitive information to herself.

I've added the tentative schedule to our "How to Make a Baby" agenda in the sidebar. Of course, all those dates are iffy, depending on how we each respond to our respective medication protocols, but it looks like we'll be "getting started" (I take my first meds) in just over a week (!) and we should be doing the actual baby-making the first week of March.

In the meantime, we need to finalize the donor/recipient agreement, and order up some sperm (need to make a final decision about a donor, first, I guess!)

The agreement shouldn't be a big deal; I've looked over the draft and it's pretty much what we asked for. I just want to tweak a couple of small things.

One is that it says the agreement is good for two retrievals or six months, and I want it to cover all six possible retrievals.

The other thing, which we may or may not be able to change, is that in the first "hereafter known as . . . " paragraph, it says that Shrike is "The Donor" and I am "The Intended Mother."

I've asked the attorney if we can change that to refer to me as "The Recipient," since the whole freakin' point of the document is to establish that we are both the intended mothers!

Other than that, it's pretty much good to go. Here's the gist:

The sole purpose of this agreement is to enable Recipient and the Donor to have a child by means of in vitro fertilization using eggs donated by Donor and semen from an anonymous donor. . . .

The Recipient desires to have a child or children considered legally hers and the Donor’s and intends to be implanted with the donated eggs fertilized with the donor sperm and then carried to birth. . . .

Donor also desires to have a parental relationship with any Child born pursuant to this agreement. Further, she believes and intends that the Child is morally and legally that of both the Recipient and herself, the Donor. . . .

Donor wishes to utilize her unfertilized eggs and together with the Recipient intends to fertilize the eggs with the sperm of the anonymous donor and have the resulting embryo(s) implanted into the Recipient’s womb. The Recipient proposes and desires to gestate the resulting embryo(s) to term, and together with the Donor intends to accept all parental rights, claims and responsibilities for the child/children thus conceived and born. It is absolutely the Recipient' and Donor’s decision together whether to gestate these embryos to term. . . .

Both Parties agree that upon retrieval, both the Donor and the Recipient shall have equal ownership of all eggs retrieved and embryos created, including any embryos cryopreserved for later use by the Parties. Donor agrees that Recipient shall enter her name as the Mother on the birth certificate of any Child born from donated eggs. The Recipient agrees that the Donor shall share equal parental rights to any Child born as a result of the egg donation, and the Parties will each sign documents before and/or after birth, and will take all necessary steps to fulfill the intention of the parties to make the Donor and the Recipient exclusively both the actual and legal parents of the Child. . . .