I grew up heavily closeted in a small, conservative village, and from a young age I assumed that I would grow up, find a husband, and have children. I still have my 13-year-old diary in which I set out my life plan, which involved being married, qualified, and a parent age 27. Even then I liked to have everything organised as far in advance as possible.
At university, I was fascinated by family law, in particular the then still relatively recent Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008, and the fact that legally, a family didn’t have to look like the nuclear examples I’d seen growing up, that two women in a civil partnership (marriage was then still not an option) could both be the mother of a child born through artificial reproduction. Even then, it took me until well into my final year, having written a dissertation on the possibility of same-sex marriage, to come out to myself as bisexual, and even longer for me to come out to family and friends. When I began dating my now-wife, at the back of my mind was the lingering concern that this meant that my plans of marriage and motherhood might no longer be on the table, but I was too happy in my new found self to allow this to haunt me for long.
Fast forward a few years, and although my 13-year-old life plan had faced a few bumps along the way, I was married, qualified, working a career I love, and my wife and I began talking seriously about having children. We considered adoption but agreed we wanted to try the biological route first, so we booked an appointment with the GP to discuss our options. We then spent a happy few evenings trawling through the various sperm donor registries, filtering potential donors by everything from hair colour to qualification level, trying to picture the baby that each set of anonymous physical features would produce.
Our GP was possibly even more excited than we were when we walked through the door. He ran us through the fertility options offered by the NHS, sent me (as the carrying partner) for numerous blood tests, and prepared the request for funding. Perhaps we should have seen the warning signs when the form asked for ‘reason for infertility,’ but the GP laughed, shrugged, and added ‘same-sex couple.’ “To me,” he said, “it’s no different than if one of you was a cis man who can’t produce sperm.”
So we sent off the forms, sat through the blood tests, panicked at the implication that we might be parents within the year, and waited. And waited. There was a long period of silence, but we thought this wasn’t a life or death matter, the NHS had greater priorities.
It was sometime later that I got a phone call from the GP, sounding defeated. He explained that our request for fertility treatment had been rejected, because under Bristol’s rules we had to undergo 10 rounds of treatment at a private clinic before we could be considered. He had written to the head of the Trust to appeal this without success, the rules were clear. Two years trying to conceive for opposite-sex couples, 10 rounds of private treatment for same-sex. He apologised repeatedly, and genuinely recommended that we move to Wales, where we would be eligible for treatment from the start, or travel abroad where private treatment was cheaper.
I don’t know how to describe how I felt afterwards. It was a quiet few days while we processed this. We did the calculations- at the cheapest clinics, one round of IUI would cost us at least £2,000. While we were privileged enough to be financially stable enough to plan for a child, we knew that wouldn’t survive over £20,000 worth of treatments. We looked at the savings we had put away for a house deposit and knew we couldn’t use them only to end up with a child and no financial security net. So instead we grieved, and I began to look at the rules more closely. I found that the guidance for providing fertility treatment to same sex couples varies from Trust to Trust. Some areas have no restrictions, others have restrictions similar to Bristol The NICE guidelines recommend treatment if a person in my age group hasn’t conceived after 12 cycles of AI where six or more are by IUI – that is to say, after six rounds of private treatment.
I think I might have given up at this point, and either committed to spending a very large amount of money or torn up that battered and bruised little life plan, if I hadn’t had the support of my firm’s LGBTQ+ network, OC Pride. As a member of the committee I’d always been proud that Osborne Clarke went out of their way to encourage all staff to be themselves, and I felt the full power of that support and encouragement when I needed it. There were no magical solutions, of course, but there was advice and suggestions and above all the peace that comes from having a friendly face to acknowledge and affirm my anger and sadness.
Buoyed by this support, we wrote to our MP, on the basis that the rules imposed a financial penalty on same-sex couples who wanted to conceive safely in a regulated clinic, let alone any same-sex couple who have fertility issues. She arranged a meeting and, somewhat to our surprise, told us that she was aware of the issue and that others had raised this before. While she said she would raise it, our best bet was a court application, which she and her office would be happy to support. It was more than we expected, but it also meant that we were now looking at the likely costs and stress of a potential court case, when all we wanted was to worry about the costs and stress of a new baby.
Time went on. I saved, somewhat ashamed, into a fertility fund. We attended fertility fairs, awful, soulless places that sell hope and pictures of smiling babies while talking about success percentage rates. We continued looking abroad. We tried to work out the highest success rate to cost ratio while trawling through fine print to establish the hidden costs. We began to talk, again, about adoption.
In the end, we became desperate and got lucky. We started looking at ‘co-parenting’ sites; sites where, theoretically, people who need donors can meet people who want to donate, although in reality they felt more like a personal ads section. We spoke to a friend and mentioned this off hand, explaining that we were considering finding a known donor. He spoke to his friend, a non-binary queer mutual acquaintance, and things ended up working out a lot less shadily than I’d anticipated. There were more blood tests, deliveries of pots and syringes, instructional manuals, and a pre-conception agreement. Once we established we were all on the same page we began at home insemination, and I became pregnant soon after.
Like I say, we were lucky. We know and trust our donor. We have established good lines of communication and made sure to attend counselling to ensure we were all on the same page. We made sure everything was clean and safe, and our donor and their family have been supportive throughout the pregnancy. But if I could, I would not have done it this way. I would have had the security and the stress and the worry of the doctors’ office, the reassurance of the white rooms of the clinic, the knowledge that we were playing by the rules, that we were doing what everyone else did.
Since we found our donor, another couple from Bristol have done what we did not and started a petition to have the ‘gay tax’ on fertility removed. I hope they’re successful, and in the meantime I and my wife will decorate the nursery and count our blessings and hope for a kind and open world for our child. And I will tell my 13-year-old self that while things won’t turn out as she imagined, her plan still managed to work out.
Jess Carter-Syme is a property disputes lawyer at Osborne Clarke
