Our Best Home Insemination Tips

Home insemination is a popular choice for women who would rather go through artificial insemination in the comfort of their own homes. It suits women who would prefer not to conceive in a clinical atmosphere and feel more relaxed in familiar surroundings. Here are six things to think about before you go ahead with the insemination.

Where to Find a Donor

If you are comfortable asking someone you know, then you have the advantage of knowing the person well. However you can also find donor’s from the Co-parenting website. Another method of obtaining sperm is by purchasing it from a company such as Cryos in Demark or visiting one of the many fertility clinics in the UK.

Sperm from a Clinic

Sperm which has come from a fertility clinic will have already been tested for quality and sperm count. A company like Cyros deliver it to you by courier. Your donor will be anonymous.

Get your Donor Tested if you are not using sperm from a Clinic

Donor testing is very important, especially if you are using sperm from someone you don’t know that well. It’s not enough to know that they are fit and healthy. You need to be sure that their sperm is also up to the job. This means that they should have a good sperm count, it should move easily (sperm motility) and there should be no sperm defects.

You can have sperm tested at a fertility clinic. The doctors can also carry out other tests on the donor to ensure that they are not carriers of genetic illnesses and they don’t have any sexually transmitted diseases. Definitely worth the expense!

Find out when you ovulate

There are a few ways of telling when you are ovulating. If you have regular periods you could try the calendar method – Count from the first day of your period until the first day of your next one. This is your cycle, it might not be 28 days but once you know it you can then roughly pinpoint the day of ovulation. If you have a 28 day cycle then you should ovulate between day 12 and day 16, so by using donor sperm on these days, will give you a good chance of getting pregnant.

You could also take your temperature using a special basal body temperature thermometer – Once you have ovulated, your temperature rises as much as half a degree. Keeping a chart over a few months will help you to get to know the pattern of ovulation and help you to plan your home insemination.

Another method is to buy an over the counter ovulation predictor kit. You urinate on a stick, which measures the amount of Luteinizing Hormone (LH) in your urine. When you are ovulating there is a higher level of this hormone in your body. The results on the stick will tell you if you are about to ovulate.

Get the right kit

You don’t need much for a home insemination. The sperm should be collected in a sterilised specimen pot and it will need to injected using a needless syringe or even better an oral medicine syringe.

Get into position

Make sure you are in a comfortable position. It is best to lie on your side and raise your hips slightly with a pillow. Insert the syringe as far as you can and release the sperm gently. Then you must stay in the same position for about half an hour.

Artificial insemination is said to be half again as successful as a natural insemination by having sexual intercourse, which means you may need to try on numerous occasions, but artificial insemination does work, just read the Daily Mirror article about Penelope Cruz’s sister, Monica and there a hundreds of other success stories just like hers.