Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to Start to Finish Motherhood, a.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Podcast for those thinking or already single mothers by choice.
[00:00:10] Speaker C: Just looking for practical advice for navigating life's relationships. When you decide to have children on your own, it doesn't mean that you're completely alone. I'm Aisha Jenkins and I'm partnering with you every step of your journey.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: When I began my journey and was selecting sperm, I entered my criteria for race and height. I sat down with this long list. I entered in my criteria, I got six sperm donors. Then when I selected from those six sperm donors that were OpenID, I got two donors returned to me. That was back in 2013, in 2025, almost a year to the date, I did the same search again and then using the same sperm bank and the same criteria, and this time around, I got 12 donors, and all 12 donors were open ID donors. So there has been an enhancement to either the way that the bank is sourcing sperm donors or more donors are choosing to be open ID donors. But I also see that the sperm bank that I used has merged with another sperm bank, so that could play around with the number of open IV donors. Now, up to this point in my parenting journey, I have still never been mistaken for the nanny. My children have always been assumed to be my children. When we're out in public, both of my children look black. They identify as black, though some black SMCs said that they look racially ambiguous.
My children might have a different experience if I'm not with them.
So I won't know until they're old enough to tell me that I don't think so. But I don't think that I care enough to respond to those assumptions about how my children look. And that is something that I still hold the line on today. But you'd be surprised how many people feel comfortable commenting about a child's look, a child's appearance. Appearance. Their height, their weight, their hair, their eyes. And I'm just astounded that they are not able to talk about children without talking about physical features. Right. So when I see somebody's children, I'm like, oh my gosh. Like, you are so smart. I love having conversations with you. Or you are such a big girl. Look at you, you know, playing that game or playing with the phone.
It challenges some people to not focus on physical appearance and to talk about the things that the children do well. So, yeah, I still hold the line on that. And now I am having more of these conversations with my children and they are making adjustments to that way of interacting with the World. I have not received rude comments about my SMC choice, my sperm donor choice or anything. At least not to my face.
So whatever I'm doing, let me hopefully continue to do it so I don't have to deal with nosy people's comments.
And let's see, I probably say that I'm so deep into parenting my two children and running from school events, doctor's appointments, birthday parties, extracurricular activities. So there right now is less of a focus on my being a single mother by choice and just more of a focus of me trying to survive the rat race that is parenting. And so that's my update for this episode. But I'm excited to take this step way, way, way back into time. And so won't you join me?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: First, I will say, when I sat down to do donor choosing, I did talk it through with one of my sisters. And she was just like, oh, what fun. You get to pick your kids features and all that other stuff. So it's just like, okay, I got in the headspace, like, I'm gonna do this. And so I sat down and entered in my criteria. And then I got back like six donors. My criteria was I wanted someone who was black. I wanted someone who was like 5, 10 or taller. I wanted someone with brown eyes. You get to pick all of these different options. And so when I did my search, it came back with six donors. And then it was even less because I said, okay, from these donors. Let me pick open id because that's when the kid gets to potentially meet the donor at 18.
And so then it was two.
[00:04:47] Speaker D: Two options out of six. That must have been quite shocking. Can you tell the listeners what you did next?
[00:04:54] Speaker B: So I did another search, changed the criteria, and again it came up with a single digit number. And so then I was just like, okay, let me start from scratch. Let me just see how many total. And they were like 550 or 554. I remember that number because it stood out in my head. I was like, wait a minute. Everyone using donor sperm can't be choosing from only 554 donors. What does that mean? My fertility clinic said, here's a bank that we use. Go with that bank. And I'm like, okay, cool. This must be what everybody's doing. Um, so I did my search. I was just like, wait a minute. Everybody really is just picking from 554 donors? Mm. That was my job.
So that was pretty much my criteria. I will say that I could not find of the two black donors, what I was looking for because I was also trying to limit the number of siblings. I also wanted a donor that had a low number of pregnancies or none. And so I was okay being the first pregnancy for a donor. So I went back and redid my search because I knew that I had dated black men, I had dated Southeast Asian men. So I knew that if I couldn't find black, there's a spectrum to choose from. And I started going from the blackest and on down. But I knew that I just could not do white. And so I ended up choosing a donor that was dark brown. I knew that dark brown mixed with my dark brown and kinky curly hair would give me a child with brown skin and hair I can braid.
And that was important to me.
[00:06:27] Speaker D: How did you handle any rude comments or judgments from others regarding your choice of using a donor?
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I have heard women get rude comments, and I will be honest. I haven't gotten really rude comments. I think I might walk around with resting bitch face. But I will say, when my oldest daughter was six months, I had started dating a guy. Once I shared that I used a donor and he'd gotten to meet my daughter, he was just like, oh, there's no way that anybody who would see us all three together would assume that I was her father, that we could make that baby.
Which was because who said you were going to be around that long one? I'm not looking for a father for my kid. I'm not trying to pass my child off as somebody else's kid. So the audacity of that assumption. I am a little bit sensitive about being judged for my choice. I did have that in mind when I chose the. The donor that I chose because I wanted to make sure my daughter looked like she belonged to me. I did not want to be assumed to be the nanny. I didn't want any of the extra drama on top of being a single mother by choice.
[00:07:43] Speaker D: That makes a lot of sense, especially considering the challenges of being a single mother by choice. How do you feel about embracing the SMC path?
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Fully?
[00:07:52] Speaker B: It's just fully embrace the SMC path. And yeah, so some of us envision finding a partner later in life, but who knows what that partner is going to look like? Who knows who that partner's going to be?
Just fully embrace the here and the now, then just move forward. But make the best decision from your experience. Why are the numbers of black donors so low?
So why are they so low? I think they're low for the same reason that black moms are more likely to die in childbirth, right? The same reason that black households have the lowest levels of wealth.
Institutional racism. Unconscious bias. Lack of diversity in the rooms where donor recruitment decisions are made. The large cardio banks are not necessarily recruiting where black people are. I will tell you just from my own professional experience, when I talk about HBCUs, historically black colleges or universities, white people don't know what HBCU stands for. So if these are the same people that are in the rooms making the decisions about where to recruit today, if HBCU is not part of their lexicon, they're going to say let's go to Penn State or let's go to UC Berkeley or something like that. There's the other aspect of it with the Tuskegee Experiment, right? Even if you were to go on a college campus and you were to get a group of black people, how many of them would not be aware of the historical significance of the Tuskegee Experiment? And people coming at you with needles, wanting your goods, right? And it's like, how do I know that you're just taking something out of me and not putting something into me?
[00:09:27] Speaker A: Right?
[00:09:28] Speaker B: So yes, I get it.
[00:09:35] Speaker C: Thanks for listening To Start to Finish Motherhood with Aisha if you want to keep the conversation going, follow Start to Finish Motherhood on Instagram. Email me at Aisha at Start to Finish.
If you love this episode, please share it with anyone who's thinking of becoming a single mother by choice. Anyone who's already parenting as a single mother by choice and just looking for advice on navigating it all. Or a friend or family member who's looking to support someone else's single mother by choice journey. Until next time.
[00:10:04] Speaker A: Bye now.
