Editor’s note: This story contains graphic descriptions of miscarriage and related medical procedures.
I swipe, and I swipe, and I swipe. Along the way, I take screenshots of profiles that astound me.
Several profiles of men over 65 assure me their swimmers will knock me up in an instant.
Other guys demand natural insemination (a.k.a. sex) right off the bat.
Then come countless shirtless mirror selfies along with the usual “Im tall, intellighent [sic], good looking, really good jeans” self-descriptions affixed to dudes with decidedly average genes.
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You’ve probably guessed by now that I haven’t been swiping on Tinder or Bumble. I’m done with all that, folks.
This app is called Just a Baby.
It’s exactly what it sounds like. I’m swiping for the sperm, not for the man who will produce it — although it’ll be great if he’s nice, too.
And there are nice guys on this app. Nice, normal guys doing a decidedly abnormal thing: offering up their genetic material to women like me. All in the middle of a pandemic.
“I don’t know if I want to try again,” my then-boyfriend said about a year ago, and I understood.
We were two miscarriages deep, and I was still bleeding when he said it.
Miscarriage is awful. It hurts physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, psychically — what other “-allys” can I throw in there to help people understand? You can’t really know unless you’ve had one, and even then, you can’t know how it was for someone else.
My second miscarriage was a ruptured ectopic that required emergency surgery. I asked my surgeon if he would consider taking a nap before operating on me because he looked tired. Adequate rest is so important for good performance.
He told me that if he took a nap, I would die.
Fair enough.
As we spoke, my shoulders jolted around like a dying soldier in an old war movie. That’s a real thing, did you know that? Internal bleeding irritates a nerve that causes the shoulders to jump in painful spasms. About a quarter of the blood in my body pooled in my abdominal cavity before they cut me open and suctioned it out, taking my left tube and my eight-week-old embryo with it.
I awoke from surgery mid-monologue, staring up at my audience, a semicircle of surgical masked faces (a sign of things to come?). I’d prioritized travel and adventure, I told them, and I’d waited too long, and now I’d never have a family. I told them this as if they could change it. Hazy from anesthesia, my wires were crossed — I felt if I convinced them I knew my sins, they might put my baby back in. Despite the assurances of some Ohio politicians, reimplanting an ectopic pregnancy isn’t possible, whether the woman’s a sinner or not.
A nurse patted my hand, asked how old I was, told me she’d had two after 38.
I know my then-boyfriend was somewhere in the background while all of this was taking place, but I don’t know whether he was trying to be a good partner or not. For months, the miscarriages had enveloped me in a fog all my own, so thick I couldn’t see him.
“I don’t know if I want to try again.”
His sperm was obviously trying to kill me. I didn’t really want to try again either, except that I did. I did want to try again.
The miscarriages and my newly diagnosed endometriosis pushed us in equal and opposite directions on the baby issue. I’d been on the fence when he first suggested we try for a child. After feeling them grow inside me and losing them in literal bloodbaths, it’s like I could feel that they had wanted to be born. That’s not a commentary on when life begins or any political issue. I’m a feminist, and I want to be in charge of my own body — it’s just that my body wants to make babies. I can’t be the only woman whose eggs are screaming at her to get going, to bring them to life. At age 38, I was running out of time.
I respected my ex’s insight into his own wants and needs. I never pushed him to try again. But I felt I’d been unfairly recast. See, at first, I was the brave woman making sacrifices for something we both wanted. Now, I was the deranged fool who wants a baby even though her partner’s not sure and her body might not be able to do it.
My former boyfriend and I hung on for nine months after the ectopic and then broke up. I called it, but he should have. Why do I always have to do the hard things?
I felt sorry for myself. What worse fate is there than to be a single woman my age who wants a baby?
Then I stopped feeling sorry for myself. There are worse fates, lots of them, and one of them is to be a man of any age who’s single and wants a baby.
Women can do it alone, or mostly alone.
Sperm, depending on how you get it, is cheap or free. A womb is not.
So I stopped feeling sorry for myself, and I got to work.
If you can call swiping work. I think it’s fun. Especially now.
My worst fears about parenting weren’t really about parenting — they were about the other parent.
The Bay Area is a great place for variety swiping. You’ve got the tech bros, of course, but if you adjust your settings closer to the coast, you might find some sun-kissed surfer dudes. The East Bay produces scrappy non-tech businessmen. The North Bay for some reason yields lots of older guys who, in their mid-sixties or so, are starting to feel like they missed out by not populating the universe with their offspring. Actually, those guys are everywhere.
I haven’t even put a picture on my profile, but just about everyone I swipe right on has already swiped right on me. Actually, in that way, it is like dating apps. Men seem to be aiming for quantity while we ladies aim for quality.
What does one even look for in a sperm donor? To answer that would be to try to answer the age-old nature-nurture question. If philosophers and psychologists have been arguing it for millennia, we’re not going to solve it here.
I figured I’d know him when I saw him.
And I did.
I swiped left on someone and, as a new contender popped up, so did the realization, just like that: “Oh! There he is.”
Covid-19 has been a hindrance to dating, but when you’re swiping for sperm, a little distance can be a good thing.
My other option, a sperm bank, would have been too much distance for me. I opted for the app because I want my child to know the source of the other half of their genetics. I hope the donor will want time and a relationship with the child. In my view, the more invested, loving parties who take an interest in my child’s welfare and development, the better.
I considered co-parenting — a shared arrangement in which the parents have never had a romantic tie but have and care for a child together — but I realized that I want to be the primary caregiver and the only one with legal control. I’ve seen too many situations where children sustain damages as they’re tugged between two feuding adults. I know I won’t be a perfect parent, but I do believe my priorities are in order. I will put the child first. I can’t guarantee that for anyone else.
The first time I spoke with my would-be donor on the phone, I tried to feel him out before voicing my own perspectives. What are his motivations? What kind of arrangement does he want? As his thoughts tumbled out of his mouth, bounced off a satellite, and reached my ears, a sense of peace bloomed in my chest, and my most persistent anxieties about parenting slipped away.
No more arguing with a partner about circumcision and vaccine schedules. No more worries about trying to balance a partner’s needs with my child’s. No innocent soul looking to and fro while angry parents filet each other alive. No worries about mismatched missions, changing values, cheating, or other deceptions. My worst fears about parenting weren’t really about parenting — they were about the other parent.
The first time my donor and I met in person, it was for some nice socially distanced kayaking. It was a perfect first meeting, symbolic of our shared love for the ocean and indicative of the types of adventures we both want for this future child. Shouting across the water to each other, we parroted the same things we’d said on our phone calls. Why we were doing this. What we wanted for this possible child. Why neither of us were likely to pursue a romantic relationship in the future.
The second time we met, I showed up, masked, at his door. He handed me his sample, and I handed him a deep red pomegranate — his favorite fruit, I’d learned. One more serendipitous, happy accident in the series of serendipitous, happy accidents that brought us together. An exchange of seeds for seeds.
Then I ran off to my van to syringe his sample into myself.
It was there in my van, parked on a shady South Bay street, alone, windows covered, legs raised, trying in vain to give myself a very unsexy orgasm, that I had the thought:
Can semen give you Covid-19?
His swimmers had been tested for motility and mobility and STDs before the pandemic, but to my knowledge, he hadn’t been tested for Covid-19.
Like so many other pandemic-related questions, a quick Google search suggests that the answer is still unclear.
If you’re a researcher who wants to untangle whether Covid-19 can be passed through semen in the absence of saliva, single mothers by choice might be a new and exciting cohort for study. We’re syringing ourselves full of the stuff without so much as an introductory kiss.
As for me, I abandoned my attempt at an orgasm. I lay still on the floor of my van, butt raised on a cushion, legs propped against a seat back, waiting for the sperm and possibly Covid-19 to swim up and take hold in my body.
