DIY artificial insemination: How to get pregnant with a racquetball
Image: Flickr, Jordy Clarke
When Nellie Mead and Teresa Espinosa conceived their daughter, they
did it without sex, a fertility clinic or medical supervision. Instead,
Espinosa injected a friend's sperm into a menstrual cup she bought at a
drugstore. She then inserted the cup into Mead's vagina in their Spring
Hill, Florida, home. Aliena was born in July.
“I was shocked when it worked,” says Mead, 25, who had thought her
only options were “to have sex with a guy and that wasn’t happening” or
“to save thousands of dollars to buy sperm.” That was until she
uncovered a trove of at-home artificial insemination advice online. Mead
devoured YouTube testimonials, where a search for “home insemination”
yields more than 11,000 results (though some are clips of impregnating
livestock).
Single women, lesbian couples and straight couples with fertility
troubles are increasingly experimenting at home with store-bought goods,
in an effort to skirt expensive fertility procedures like intrauterine
insemination (IUI) and in vitro fertilization (IVF). At-home
inseminators enlist friends or acquaintances to donate sperm, or procure
free donor samples from dating-style portals like the Known Donor
Registry, Pollen Tree and Pride Angel. Some go a more orthodox route and
purchase sperm from FDA-regulated banks, which can cost from about $500 to $1500
per cycle. In addition to saving money, many at-home inseminators say
they prefer bedrooms to treatment rooms, because they can personalize
the conception experience, imbue it with romance, and reduce stress.
Legal experts warn, however, that inseminating at home can compromise a
couple’s legal rights.
Embracing the DIY ethos, Mead and Espinosa assembled a kit of
store-bought tools over the 10 months they tried to conceive. Items
included an ovulation predictor kit, various sized syringes (1
milliliter was the winner), menstrual cups intended to catch period
blood, prenatal vitamins and herbs like Evening Primrose and
Chasteberry, and Robitussin cough syrup to loosen cervical mucus and
whisk sperm on their course.
Mead, who shaves the sides of her head and wears baseball caps,
documented their attempts in a series of “pregnant stud updates” on
YouTube, with Espinosa at her side. Their video announcing Mead’s
pregnancy was watched more than 100,000 times, and now they’re selling a
version of their kit on eBay.
The trend wouldn’t have taken off without the Internet. Tabitha
Freeman, a research associate at Cambridge University, studies the
growth of Internet-abetted artificial insemination and is examining
1,000 users of Pride Angel, which aims to match sperm and egg donors
with recipients, most frequently in the UK, U.S. and India. She
estimates that roughly 70% of the nearly 500 sperm recipients in her
study wish to inseminate at home. A third of all sperm orders at the
Cryos International Sperm Bank based in Denmark are intended for at-home
insemination, and that number increases each year, according to
managing director, Ole Schou.
The main reason couples bypass assisted reproductive technologies to inseminate at home is cost.
The average out-of-pocket price for fertility treatments exceeds $5,000
and in vitro fertilization tops $19,000, according to a second mortgages on their homes. A Barclay’s phone operator pled guilty
to stealing more than 4,000 pounds from his employer to underwrite his
wife’s in vitro fertilization. In many cases, insurance policies won’t
cover assisted reproductive technologies for individuals who haven’t
been diagnosed with fertility problems, and often they won’t subsidize
assistance at all.
“As lesbians a lot of us want kids and we already know that shit’s
too expensive,” Mead says. It’s exactly why sites like Pride Angel,
which counts more than 4,800 users willing to give sperm for free, are
growing. “The cost of fertility treatment is high. This is more
accessible, more direct and it cuts out the middleman. You go straight
to the donor,” says Freeman.
Still, plenty of fertility specialists believe that insemination —
particularly more invasive strains like IUI, in which washed sperm are
placed in the uterus to fertilize an egg, and IVF, when an embryo is
created outside the womb, then implanted in the uterus — belongs in a
medical setting, where they first originated. Dr. Eric Surrey, a
reproductive endocrinologist at the Colorado Center for Reproductive
Medicine told Slate
he understands the desire for couples to “have as pleasant an
environment as possible” when trying to conceive, but that “insemination
is a medical procedure, and like anything else in medicine, it requires
training.”
The Pipers conceived in their donor’s guest bedroom in Boston. A
nurse practitioner in Belfast, Maine, Lindsey Piper performed IUI on her
wife, Allison Piper, and believes that method is “easier than putting
in an IUD.” IUI requires sperm to be washed, or vetted for strong
swimmers and rid of a substance called prostaglandin, which can cause
cramping. Piper washed the sperm herself — she performs IUIs at the
feminist health center where she works, and says there each treatment
costs $300. She used a speculum and a four-inch syringe fitted with a
thin catheter measuring 10 centimeters.
“They were in the bedroom doing their thing,” she says of Brian and
Mike, the gay couple who donated sperm, “and Brian would holler
upstairs, ‘yoo-hoo!’ and that’s how we’d know the sample was ready. One
of us would come down and get it.” Piper recently taught a group of
home-birth midwives an at-home IUI technique, and also tutored her
neighbor, who she says conceived on the first try. One study found that
IUI was nearly three times
more effective than Intracervical Insemination, which Mead and Espinoza
used, for women using frozen donor sperm. Piper says it makes no
difference statistically for a woman with normal fertility.
Heterosexual couples with fertility challenges are also employing gadgets to get pregnant at home.
(Infertility is vaguely diagnosed as a year of trying to conceive
without success.) The creators of a new product called The Stork believe
it can be more effective than sex, and call their device the first
over-the-counter conception assistance device aiming to “bridge the gap
between infertility and expensive treatments.” The $79.99 kit designed
for one-time use has sold 30,000 units at CVS and Drugstore.com since
the FDA approved it in July. It was modeled after Gulf War veteran and
engineer Steve Bollinger’s own infertility hack — he split a racquetball
in two, ejaculated into half and inserted it into his wife’s vagina.
The couple conceived two kids this way.
The Stork’s forbear may have been a rubber ball, but it mimics the
decades-old medical practice of cervical cap insemination. The
difference is that it attaches a string, much like a tampon for easy
removal (after a prescribed 6 hours), and it is sold over the counter
for at-home use. It’s comfortable enough that women “have run half
marathons with these things,” Bollinger says.
“We’re not utopia or a magic bullet,” he adds. “But we get sperm and
egg closer, which is the only thing medicine has really done in the last
50 years.”
While The Stork’s success rate is still being researched — doctors
are recommending it to fertility patients who want to join the study —
Bollinger claims it has “very similar results to IUI, which costs
between $1,000 and $5,000 per attempt in a doctor’s office.” In theory,
such a device could boost fertility in couples by giving sperm a head
start, which is helpful if there is a decreased amount of healthy ones,
or if the vaginal tract is inhospitable due to stress or other causes.
Medical professionals warn that inseminating at home can pose health
risks, like tissue damage, uterine perforation, infection, or the
contraction of sexually transmitted diseases, but perhaps the greatest
threats are legal. Many of the legal protections that protect parents
who conceive by medically-supervised artificial insemination do not
cover couples who artificially inseminate at home. This means that
donors to at-home inseminators can legally claim parenthood and that,
for lesbian couples or straight couples using a sperm donor, the
non-carrying partner still must navigate a tricky path toward adoption.
Reproductive law specialist Melissa Brisman says she would
“absolutely not” endorse at-home insemination because most states
require it to occur under the supervision of a licensed medical
professional in order to fully terminate a donor’s parental rights.
“It’s one thing to be more comfortable, and to have things feel better.
It’s another if that sacrifices your legal rights,” she says. “When
there are no medical personnel, you’ll have a problem terminating the
donor’s parental rights.”
While the law favors doctors’ offices, Brisman estimates that
"hundreds of couples in each state are currently inseminating at home."
She has retained 20 pregnant lesbian couples in the last two years who
have done so and want to legally refute a donor’s parental rights and
navigate adoption proceedings for the non-carrying partner.
Often, women using friends’ donor sperm forgo contracts all together.
Mead refused to draw up papers (“we knew him, it would have been
awkward”), but hopes their email exchange, which included record of a
$150 payment to the donor, would hold up in a Florida court. For the
Pipers, a conversation about intent and goals was assurance enough.
“They have white couches and white carpets and everything matches.
They’re fine and don’t want kids,” Lindsey Piper says.
Brisman wouldn’t advise this route. “Clients have a hard time taking
the emotion out of it, because it’s a baby,” Brisman says. “But it’s 5
to 10 years down the road that I’m worried about. When the kid is five
and the couple gets divorced.”
“Macgyvering” conception feels like a natural act to men and women
raised on the Internet, Bollinger says, rather than a question of ethics
or the law. Birth control methods teach men and women that they are
gods of their own reproduction. At-home insemination advocates see the
practice as simpatico with the home-birth movement — women forgoing
hospitals in favor of laboring at home. “Since birthing left the woman
realm and became a medical thing, women have been quick to outsource
fertility to clinics,” Piper says. While she doesn’t recommend
non-medical professionals undergo IUI without education, she says that
the technology is accessible.
Meanwhile, Lindsey Piper is now pregnant with the couple’s second
child. After driving the four hours to Boston, Allison inseminated
Lindsey with Mike’s sperm, which she transported in a pickled carrot
jar. It worked on the second try.
Lesbians inseminating their partners report feeling more empowered
and connected by emptying the syringe themselves rather than watching or
waiting outside while a doctor in a lab coat does it. Mead says
inseminating at home was the best way to form a family that she could
imagine. “I loved that Teresa was part of the entire process, just like a
heterosexual couple,” Mead says. “She can really say she got me
pregnant.”
Source: The New Republic