Michelle Emblenton, a biochemist at inviTRA, tells us about the appropriate situations for intrauterine insemination with donor sperm:
Artificial insemination, also known as intrauterine insemination, is a fairly simple assisted reproduction technique, whereby the artificial insemination is performed with donor sperm. Some of the main reasons for choosing artificial insemination with donor sperm as your assisted reproduction technique are, for example:
Single women who choose to become single mothers without a partner. In this case, donor sperm will be needed.
Also, in same-sex female couples, a donor sperm sample will be required in order to achieve pregnancy.
If there is a risk of genetic diseases from the father, you can also consider using donor sperm. However, you can also think first about doing IVF with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, so there are other options available in this case.In cases of very severe male infertility, such as azoospermia or indeed just a very low sperm count or poor sperm morphology or motility.
Sometimes, when other assisted reproduction techniques have failed, such as IVF cycles using your partner sperm, you may want to try using donor sperm and go back to an artificial insemination, which is a simpler technique but with donor sperm.
In the past, this technique was commonly used for, for example, men who are seropositive for HIV, but nowadays we have the technique of sperm washing, in which the sperm sample can be prepared so it doesn't have any traces of the viral particle. So being HIV positive is not necessarily an indication for doing donor sperm artificial insemination.
In our society today, the idea of what constitutes a family is constantly changing, evolving and adapting, and it is true that there are several women who get to the ages of 35 to 40 and haven't found themselves within the stable relationship they wanted to become mothers, and so look at the idea of becoming mothers themselves as a single mother, in which case they will turn to using donor sperm. And this is a good treatment in these cases.
In the case of homosexual women, they can also use intrauterine insemination with donor sperm to try to become mothers. And the legal aspects of this do vary between country to country, state to state. For example, in Spain, the couple does not have to be in a married relationship in order for them both to become mothers. If when the treatment is done in a correctly licensed fertility clinic, both women will sign the consent forms and, as a result, both women will be recognized as the legal mothers. In the United Kingdom, the women, as long as they are in a civil partnership or a marriage, they will both be considered as the legal mothers. In the United States laws can vary depending on where your donor firm comes from and also from state to state, so it is recommendable to take legal advice to make sure that you are both the mothers of the children.
