Helping the Stork: The Choices and Challenges of Donor Insemination

This book was a wonderful tool for my husband and I when we were exploring DI as an option. This is the one book that truly addresses our unique infertility situation. None of the other infertility books spend more than a page talking about using donor sperm. This was wonderful!

This book was an ENORMOUS help to my husband and me. I agree with some of the other reviewers that it is focused more on the emotional aspects and couples dealing with male infertility and may not be such a great help to single mothers and lesbian couples. But there ARE those of us out here in that category of couples with male factor infertility. My husband and I had already tried unsuccessfully to conceive through ICSI and could not afford more attempts. Donor insemination was our only other option besides adoption. This book focused on EXACTLY what we needed. What are the pros and cons, tell or don't tell others, tell or don't tell the child (I felt they were pro-telling, but discussed the positives and negatives of each choice), known donor or anonymous? These were some of the many issues we were concerned with. I didn't need a biology lesson to learn how it's done - I had other books on infertility to explain that. I didn't need a cost rundown - it varies so much, my clinic could answer those questions. After FOUR years of agonizing over whether or not to do this, this book FINALLY helped us make our decision and decide how we would handle all of the ensuing choices. I felt the authors did a great job of presenting all sides of the issue in an honest and fair way. I highly recommend it to other couples in our situation.

This book is the best for anyone considering using donor sperm to create their family. Most infertility books usually only have one chapter regarding donor insemination and then it's only to talk about the medical procedure. Helping the Stork has become my resource manual for using donor insemination.

If there was only one thing I could say about the book Helping the Stork it would be "Why did it take so long for this book to be written?" Carol Frost Vercollone and Heidi and Robert Moss have written an excellent guide for those thinking about using donor insemination to build their families, and also for those who already have their famlies through DI. This book was written for others to explore the issues surrounding donor insemination and to help them come to their own decisions about this common but not openly talked about form of family building. The added bonus is that it is also written for families, friends and health professionals to help in their understanding of the concerns and the issues that DI families face. The authors, from their own personal experience with DI and through counselling others want to provide reassurance that DI can be a wonderfully positive way to build families. This book has an easy to read style and is filled with numerous personal anecdotes from others who have either gone through DI or have some knowledge of it. I felt this was the best part of the book, the connection with others, their advice, fears, thoughts and honesty which can only come from people directly involved with this process. For those of you thinking you are alone in using DI, this book can certainly offer some comfort in the personal stories of others and the authors obvious intimate knowledge of this topic. The book goes through the various steps of DI, the decision making, issues of privacey and disclosure, and how to go about initiating the DI process. The authors are careful to try to cover issues concerning all individuals who may be using DI, including married couples, lesbians and single women. Also valuable in the book is the resource list and the bibliography. I'd like to share this passage from the book which I felt was it's strongest message. "Our goal, both in writing this book and in our counselling, is to change social attitudes toward DI so much that if you do tell, you can feel more confident that your child will ultimately view this news positively, not negatively. It may never be OK that there was so little donor information provided or that your family began with such suffering for the parents, but you'll certainly get across just how wanted your child was." Helping the Stork has been a long awaited for book that will hopefully do just that.