If you’re a male couple, your sperm-related issues are primarily focused on which partner should provide the sperm.
After all, only one man in a male couple can be the sperm contributor to one egg. Similarly, if you are a female couple, you’ll be deciding which of you will be inseminated. Admittedly, technology is changing rapidly, and at some point gene splicing may progress to the point where DNA from two men could be combined and used to fertilize one egg, or DNA from two women could be spliced and then fertilized by one sperm. But for now this is not an option.
Sometimes the choice of a male couple of whose sperm to use is an easy one — one of you may really want to use yours and the other doesn’t care. Or maybe there is a family history of health issues, addiction, or mental illness on one side so you use the other. It is also possible to take sperm samples from both partners, mixing the semen together so you and your partner each have an equal chance of being the biological father. However, doctors typically don’t like this approach and I don’t recommend it either, as it’s a bit more complicated medically, ethically, and legally.
In cases where both of you want to be a biological father, you can “take turns.” Essentially, when you get a batch of eggs from your donor (usually around ten or twenty are harvested), you can fertilize half of the eggs with one partner’s sperm and half of the eggs with the other partner’s. Then you take a fertilized egg from one of you and put it in the surrogate, freezing the rest of the embryos for later use. After you have your first child, you can have another, this time using an embryo from the other father. Or, if you want twins (much more on twins later), you can use one embryo from each of you, transferring them at the same time. If one takes but the other doesn’t, you can go back when you are ready and use an embryo from the other dad.
In cases where there will be two moms who both want to be genetic parents the idea is the same, although the logistics are different. You can use the donated sperm to inseminate one of you first, and then for a second child you can inseminate the other.
Advocate.com, by Kim Bergman, May 1, 2019
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Source: Time for Families
