Genesis Fertility Clinic Blog
searching: “insemination”
October 16, 2011
Doing the wrong thing
Saturday’s Vancouver Sun ran a story about traditional surrogacy gone terribly wrong. (Traditional surrogacy means that the surrogate mother conceived using her own eggs and the intended father’s sperm by insemination – at home in this case.)
After reading it, I blurted “what were they thinking?” The case illustrates the necessity for the reproductive laws in Canada to be implemented.
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December 12, 2010Warning about fresh semen donation
Health Canada has issued a warning about fresh semen donation services that have started in Canada and around the world. The reason for the warning is that the companies providing this semen are unregulated and unaccredited. Fresh semen should NOT be used to inseminate a woman from a unknown source.
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October 18, 2010One versus two inseminations
Patients will sometimes ask me whether two inseminations are better than one. The short answer is “no” and a meta-analysis (analysis of all of the currently published “good” studies on a topic) published in September 2010 supports this answer.
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July 5, 2010Home inseminations
Two patients in one day is not a pattern. It might just be a fluke, but it does make me wonder. Today two of my patients had a positive pregnancy test who had been trying to conceive with a known donor at home for at least a year. Single women, women whose husband’s have poor or no sperm, and lesbians will sometimes use sperm from men the know, at home, to conceive. We call the men “known donors.”
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August 1, 2009Happy Pride!
It’s Gay Pride weekend in Vancouver. Well, at a fertility clinic we really don’t have a big party this weekend but we do stop and think about all the families – gay or straight – we’ve helped to create. We were the first clinic in BC, indeed western Canada, to help gay couples conceive. Since we opened our doors 14 years ago we’ve helped lots of gay couples have children. Mostly we help lesbians as we just don’t get many requests from gay male couples as the process is much more complicated because they require a someone to donate use of their uterus and eggs. Sometimes both the uterus and eggs come from the same woman and sometimes it comes from two separate women. Plus Health Canada requires the gay partner whose sperm we are using to have it quarantined in a lab in Toronto for 6 months before we can use it. So, it’s not an simple process but it’s doable.
Helping lesbians is less complex as sperm is easier to obtain. We get it from a few different (reputable!) sperm banks. After the lesbian couple has some basic fertility testing and a counseling session we get going – putting sperm into the uterus (insemination) at the time of ovulation. For more info click here.
To all those families we’ve helped grow we hope you enjoy the weekend with your little ones a foot. For those we haven’t helped… come on over!
Dr. Beth Taylor, MD, FRCSC
Reproductive Endocrinology & Infertility