[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Ayesha, and I'm a former host of Mocha's single mothers by choice, or smcs like you. As an SMC, I decided to become a mother knowing I'd be the sole care provider and parent of my children. At least at the outset, the mocha stood for black. So I'm using the word black, and I'll be discussing being a single mother by choice from a black woman's lens, you'll connect with all the interesting and fun things about this non traditional path like this, discussing which sperm to use and some hard truths about fertility and the realities of dating. As a single mother who doesn't have a co parent to rely on occasionally, and what it's actually like to parent as an SMC. This is the black single Mothers by Choice podcast.
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. So 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, 510 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, two.
[00:01:39] Speaker B: Options out of six. That must have been quite shocking. Can you tell the listeners what you did next?
[00:01:45] Speaker A: So I did another search, change 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 there 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. So I did my search. I was just like, wait a minute. Everybody really is just picking from 554 donors? That was my shock. 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, they're the 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.
[00:03:19] Speaker B: How did you handle any rude comments or judgments from others regarding your choice of using a donor?
[00:03:25] Speaker A: 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 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.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: 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? Fully.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: It's just fully embraced the SMC path. And, yeah, 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 is 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 carrier 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 so it's like, how do I know that you're just taking something out of me and not putting something into me, right? So yes, I get it. Well, Pod, thank you so much for taking the time to listen. If you like what you heard, please share this podcast with your girlfriends and I'd love to hear your thoughts about the topics covered in this episode. So email
[email protected] and if you found value in the topics covered, consider making a donation using the link in the show notes below. Till next time, Pod. Bye now.
