"Love Makes a Family" Blog Series: Eloise Edington Founder of FertilityHelpHub.com
Celebrating the unique ways families are made and the journey of love that brings them together
Eloise Edington, the Founder and Director of FertilityHelpHub.com, shares her & her husband’s journey to parenthood with the use of donor sperm. After walking the path of infertility, feeling at times “confused, overwhelmed and lonely”, Eloise and her husband set out to created a community for those still on that journey and a voice for families grown with the generosity of donation. Here is a little Q & A with Eloise to understand better the path to parenthood using donor sperm.
Q: What emotional challenges if any did you or your husband have with using donor sperm?
A: We found It really difficult to pick a donor as a 'back-up', not knowing whether we would be using this frozen sperm or not, it was dependent on my husband's operation outcome. We spent an agonizing month going back and forth between profiles, across different sperm banks in America and then narrowed it down to two. We went with my preferred...it was painfully hard trying to match up my husbands' looks and personality with a stranger - a bittersweet experience and what I can only image is a totally different one to choosing a donor when you're not trying to replace genetics. We've realized it really doesn't matter, you love your children the way they arrive and whether they have brown or blue eyes - it is so insignificant in the end! As if it were fate, we found out the donor we had picked and whose vials of sperm had been shipped to our clinic (at great expense), had just had a child with genetic tumors, so we needed to pick again... We went with my husband's preferred donor and that's who is now the biological donor to our three children.
Q: If you could talk to you “childless self” knowing what you know now, what would you say to her?
A: Take a massive deep breath and you honestly don't know how quickly your situation may change. Explore other options, if that's for you - you can work through it with support. I remember one of the IVF nurses at our clinic saying to me 'you want a baby right? So you gotta do what you gotta do'.
Q: How will you explain to your little one how they came to be?
A: The narrative has already started - I even posted about it on IG today. We are telling them from as soon as they can start talking (now!), in simple terms and by using incredibly helpful books like 'You Were Made For Me' to guide us. We want them to grow up always knowing, rather than finding out through someone else or being told later in life, when they might feel like we have been deceitful.
Q: What bit of advice would your husband give to any men out there struggling with this reality?
A: It's OK to not be OK. Men often feel like they need to suffer in silence - my husband did and looking back now he is delighted that I am addressing this as part of Fertility Help Hub, because support (in whatever form) is vital. Just because you don't have perfect sperm, doesn't make you any less of a man.
Eloise Edington, Founder/Director of Fertility Help Hub