Yesterday, I ran the first part of an interview with Sherron Mills, founder and CEO of Pacific Reproductive Services. Here is Part II.
I asked Mills what advice she would offer those considering parenthood. She first cautions, “There’s not enough knowledge out there in the general population about how soon fertility begins to decline in women. It actually starts declining about age 29, or in some people, 27. Some women are infertile by the time they’re 33, and usually by the time they’re 35, there’s a 50% chance women will be subfertile. That doesn’t mean infertile—it means they can get pregnant, but they might need the help of fertility drugs. If you are at all able to start having children when you’re younger than 35, then do that.”
Despite this advice, Mills recognizes that social change has made starting early more difficult. “65% of our clients are over 35 years old, which is sort of amazing. What’s happened with us culturally is women are getting more educated, they’re wanting to get their careers going, so by the time they’re about 35, they’ve completed their education, they’ve got their careers going and they feel like they’re ready to have children. They’re financially able and that kind of thing, but their bodies have passed the time when it’s a prime time to start to have kids.”
“Becoming pregnant is more likely to be a process than an event,” she says. “A lot of people come to us with the expectation that they’re going to try one insemination and get pregnant. In fact, the statistics are that it takes an average of six to eight cycles to get pregnant using frozen donor sperm even with intrauterine insemination. And taking it home and doing vaginal insemination, the success rates are even lower, around 8% per cycle. I would recommend doing a higher tech insemination that gives you 12-15% per cycle.”
She also suggests the simple task of taking a vitamin. “I would also recommend taking a vitamin with some folic acid in it. You don’t have to go to prenatal vitamins—they’re a little high in iron—so you could take a Centrum vitamin or something like that that has about 4 mg of folic acid. When you get pregnant, they’ll double the folic acid in a prenatal vitamin to about 8 mg.”
In terms of choosing a clinic or a sperm bank, Mills recommends asking “‘Are you going to be supportive of me and my partner?’ Not just tolerant, but supportive. Find out about their staff to make sure they’re not homophobic. We have run into some homophobia with some fertility clinics even here in San Francisco. You don’t expect that, but it can happen. It might be that they have an overall policy that they’re happy to work with gay people, but there might be homophobic people in their institution.”
Pregnancy success rates are also key, and these are partly dependent on the experience of the medical professionals. “If you’re going to your ob/gyn to have your insemination, you want to know if they do this a lot and if this is something they have an interest in, or is this something where they say ‘Oh, I can do this for you.’ They can do it, but if people aren’t really focused on it, they’re not going to get the timing right,” she warns. “They might not even take a look at the sperm you get. They might just thaw the vial out and put it in you without even looking at it to make sure the sperm are swimming well and you’ve got a good sperm count and that kind of thing.
“The other thing is, if you’re going to a fertility clinic, ask them if they have a tank to store the sperm in. Ask them if they do sperm counts on the stuff that they get to make sure that they’re good. You should also find out if your doctors know how to wash sperm, because that’s something that most gynocologists don’t do, but most fertility clinics absolutely do, because they’ve got to do that to prepare for in vitro anyway.” (Frozen sperm must be washed before going into a woman’s uterus, she explains, because proteins in the seminal plasma can cause severe cramping or even shock. “We wash about 30-40% of our specimens before they’re frozen so we can ship them to doctors that don’t do the washes,” she adds.)
Mills also suggests asking sperm banks what their supply of willing-to-be-known donors is, if this is something you desire.
Mills is clearly passionate about her work and the personal connections she makes with many of her clients. “Some of the moms keep in touch with us. Some I see occasionally in the Bay Area. One of them is one of the moms of the first child that we ever had who is now about 22, maybe even 23. I hear about her and she’s doing great and really smart and finishing up college by now, I believe. Some of our kids have already met their donors, some of our kids are becoming 18, 19. We’ve had requests to meet a couple of others and they’re out of the country right now, but when they return or if the child wants to travel to where they are, we’re working on that. We make the connections with the donors and put them in touch with each other. That’s really fun.”
Mills is also a mother herself. Although her son is now 19, she has years of experience balancing the demands of running her clinic with being a mom. “I wasn’t the birth mother,” she says. “I actually came into a relationship with his biological mother when he was about five months old and we’ve been raising him together ever since. [Work-life balance] is so demanding. I don’t get home most evenings until about 7:00. We had an arrangement that she would do the early evening stuff and I would get home at 7:00 and we would have dinner together. Sometimes I’d get home earlier, but often I would work until pretty late because there’s much you have to do to keep it going. It wasn’t because I liked to stay there by any means. Usually I would be the one to put him to bed and read stories to him. The weekends it was all just sharing everything. But I think it’s hard. I think it’s the hardest thing in the world to find a balance between work and family. The only thing I can say is try not to let your work be overwhelming so you can have some balance and some good quality time with your kids when they’re young, because they grow up so fast.”
Thanks to Mills and those who have followed her example, more of us now have the opportunity to try.
As always, Mombian does not provide medical advice. Visitors are reminded that only they themselves can decide if such advice is right for them. Any medical information offered on this site should be discussed and verified with one’s own medical professionals.
