Out in Perth – “Winding Road To Motherhood” by Kelly Pilgrim-Byrne

Kelly and Sam’s journey to building a family has been a long, hard fought road for them both. Throughout the process they have remained committed to their goals, to each other and to supporting others in their own journeys.

We are nothing if not persistent. My partner Sam and I have a beautiful 21-month-old daughter named Charlotte, but motherhood didn’t come easily for us and it was only after 4 years of assisted reproductive technologies and some fairly major changes of direction that she was finally conceived and born.

We have now been together for 17 ½ years, although quite early into our relationship and when we were still in our twenties, we both knew we wanted children, however it wasn’t until the beginning of 2002 that we were legally able to access a Perth fertility clinic for assistance (following ground-breaking law reform in WA). At the beginning of the journey, we had decided on an unknown donor because the law wasn’t clear at that stage whether or not we would be protected as the child’s parents. So, after registering with Concept Fertility Clinic and putting our names down for an unknown donor, we waited 18 months before one became available. In the early days after the law reform which allowed lesbians to access fertility treatment not many donors granted permission for their donations to be directed to a lesbian couple, hence the long wait.

We finally received the phone call from the clinic when I was 34 and Sam was 35 and we began the process of donor insemination in September 2003. We had decided that I would carry our child because I had a stronger desire to be pregnant and had closer links to my family for support.

Month after month we fronted up to the clinic before work for ultrasounds, blood tests and IUI inseminations. In fact, we kept trying this method for a year until late 2004 when we faced the reality that I probably had fertility issues and we would need to consider invasive and expensive IVF treatment. A few months before this, we had a change of heart in terms of our selection of donor. I particularly had been giving thought to our future child and wondering if they would be disappointed to not be able to trace their biological heritage (at this stage, donor release was not available). We thought long and hard and decided that we couldn’t possibly make that decision for a person who did not yet exist and so we felt we should change to a known donor so that if the resultant child wanted a relationship with their donor dad, they had the option of doing so.

We rang a friend of ours to ask if he would consider being our known donor and he went away to give it serious consideration. In due course he came back to us and agreed to our request. The difficulty was that he was based in Tasmania and he had to fly to WA so that he could donate for us. We feel privileged to have him as Charlotte’s donor dad and now that Charlotte is here, we travel to Tasmania once a year to spend time with him and his extended family.

So, with new donor sperm, in October 2004 I started my first IVF cycle and whilst Sam learned to give me injections, I did my best to learn how to manage my hormone-induced emotion overload and rapid weight gain, caused by oestrogen and progesterone drug regimes.

To add to the stress of IVF, a looming state election saw the Opposition publicly declare that they would wind back law reform and again deny access to IVF for lesbians. We were devastated and chose to appear in the West Australian in an attempt to shine the spotlight on the Opposition’s plans. The public backlash to the Liberal Party plans was considerable and in the end they did not pursue their very cruel agenda. We have since appeared in The West a further two times, the last time being December 2007 when Charlotte was 3 months old. We believe firmly in the positive effects real stories can have on social change. That said, we declined a request to appear again when Charlotte turned a year old – we’re not aiming for our very own series of gay 7-Up!

Between October 2004 and late 2006, I underwent 6 fresh IVF cycles and although I managed to achieve pregnancy 6 times, each time the pregnancy did not progress past 6 weeks. Assumptions were made that severe endometriosis and advancing age were the causes. The final time this happened, I had made the decision that emotionally and physically I couldn’t take any more and so we changed tack and Sam began the IVF process around October 2006. We ultimately decided that what was truly important to us was to create our family and after 3 years of trying neither of us any longer cared how this happened.

To our great delight after Sam’s first fresh IVF egg pickup, we discovered that the quality of Sam’s eggs, although she was older than me, was excellent. We did one fresh transfer which was unsuccessful and the following month did a frozen embryo transfer which was also unsuccessful. By this point, we started to worry that she too had fertility problems, so when we received the joyous news that she was indeed pregnant after the second frozen embryo transfer in January 2007, there were tears aplenty!

At the 18-week scan, they found that there was a problem with low fluid in the uterus and the specialist signed Sam off work for the remainder of the pregnancy and by the end of the pregnancy, the fluid had returned to a normal level.

Our daughter was born in September 2009 and our lives changed in the most extraordinary ways. She was and is everything and more than we had ever hoped for and now, nearly 2 years on, we can’t imagine a life without her. She has changed our hearts forever and she is a truly special little girl.

Despite having to remortgage our house twice to pay the $50,000+ it took to create her, we have decided to do it all again and since October last year I have done 3 fresh IVF cycles. The plan was for me to try one last time and see if Sam could carry my eggs. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to produce any eggs in these three cycles, so it may be that my reproductive days have come to an end. We will try one more time next month and if not successful, we will use Sam’s frozen eggs that we have in storage and hope that she is pregnant sooner rather than later.

I am more concerned about us being older parents (we’re 40 and 41 respectively) than I am being same-sex parents. We have received nothing but positive comments from people and we are 100% open about our family to everyone.

We have a blog that we’ve been keeping since well before Charlotte was conceived. If anyone reading this would like more information or just to connect with lesbians who have been through IVF, our email address can be found here:http://themuriels.blogspot.com

[Link: Original Article]

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Out In Perth - “Rainbow Families: Getting Started”

First published on 11 May 2009 in Out in Perth.

One of the most noticeable changes in the community in recent years is the increasingly high profile of GLBT families. There’s a diverse range of ways in which people are building families, and a vast range of issues and challenges involved. Over coming months, OUTinPerth will be catching up with people in our community to share some of the stories of the families they’re building and the issues they’re facing. This month, Marnie Woodley shares the story of how she, her partner Leonie and their friend Josh have approached starting a family.

‘My partner Leonie and I have been together for 7 years. We decided to have a baby and after much consideration, we asked my best gay male friend to be our known donor with a view to him playing an active parenting role in the child’s life. We gave him a year to think about it - and thankfully he said yes. We agreed to use a clinic to protect my parental rights (as the non-bio/non-birth mother) and to protect him from any financial obligation from Centrelink.

‘We talked LOTS and wrote up a five page parenting contract outlining everything we could think of regarding our co-parenting arrangement and had it notarised. Legally Josh will be a donor and as such, will have no legal rights or responsibilities regardless of the contract. However we wanted to make sure we all had similar expectations and we figured it would be a good back up if our relationship ever broke down so badly we ended up in court.

‘We completed the compulsory counselling through the clinic and Leonie and Josh completed all the tests and screening required by the clinic. There is a six month mandatory ‘cooling off’ period in WA if you use a known donor so we started our first IUI cycle in December 2005. Leonie fell pregnant our third round of IUI and had an early miscarriage at 6.5 weeks. We did another 9 rounds of IUI and had 5 more early miscarriages. We then decided to have a break from TTC.

‘Six months later (and a new fertility specialist) we looked into IVF. Over the next 8 months Leonie did 4 full IVF cycles and we got nowhere. Josh moved overseas for a job opportunity, we sold our investment property to fund our treatment and Leonie and I started to look at other options before our relationship disintegrated.

‘Originally we’d agreed that Lone would carry our first child and I would have our second, both with Josh as our donor/dad. We finally agreed on this after months of ‘debating’ about it because I really only wanted one child and therefore I obviously wanted to have the opportunity to be pregnant. But after watching Leonie go through so much and seeing how much she wanted to be pregnant, I realised I didn’t want it like she did. In fact, I had really taken on my role as non-bio/non-birth parent and I couldn’t imagine it any other way. After Leonie’s fourth IVF cycle we were starting to get desperate and we realised the end result was what was important, not how we got there.

‘So we suggested to our specialist that we use my eggs to get Leonie pregnant. I am 8 years younger than Leonie (29/37) and we figured that maybe it was an egg issue. No one could actually tell us why she couldn’t stay pregnant, which was so frustrating because we kept weighing up our options not knowing what was the problem in the first place. Our specialist didn’t know if using my eggs would make a difference but he supported us and we planned my egg pick up. After a cancelled cycle due to low response to the drugs, I finally had surgery on my 29th birthday. We ended up with 6 embryos (we’d only had 2 at most with Leonie) and the very first fresh transfer 5 days after my birthday worked. As I write, Leonie is now 31 weeks pregnant.

‘It’s been a very high risk pregnancy and we have spent most of it terrified that something would go wrong but we are feeling better as more time goes by. Josh has given up his job overseas and returned home ready for our baby to arrive in June. The three of us are very close after everything we’ve been through. Leonie and I came very close to separating from the stress of infertility - it does horrendous things to even the strongest relationship. We adore Josh - he has been such a support and held everything together when we were falling apart. We feel utterly grateful to have each other and be sharing this together.

‘We have also been blessed with some amazing friends and family members – we feel very lucky. We also made new friends through this process. We met Kelly and Sam Pilgrim-Byrne through a GLCS parenting forum, who also went through a very difficult journey to conceive their daughter Charlotte. They were just so supportive and helped us to pick up the pieces every time something went wrong, and we now consider them two of our dearest friends.

‘Our situation is very different to most of the people we people we know. The majority of our lesbian friends with children used anonymous donors through the clinic or had children in previous straight relationships. Some of our gay male friends would love to have children but don’t have the opportunity to do so due to the legal situation and a lack of willing co-parents/surrogates/egg donors. We had other friends offer before we asked Josh and I feel a lot of regret that our decision to ask Josh could ultimately end their opportunity to have children, as parenting options for gay men are still greatly limited.

‘Our precious baby is now due in less than nine weeks and we are starting to feel confident that we will finally have a baby to take home with us. We are well and truly organised and prepared. Nursery decorated, baby clothes and linen washed, birthing classes finished and hospital bag mostly packed. We are just so excited about meeting our baby, and finally putting all our plans and dreams of the last few years into practise at last.’

[Link: Original Article]

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