Hi - I’m Erin, I live in Austin, Texas, and I started my journey to becoming a single mother by choice (SMBC) in 2020, a month before I turned 35. I’m a writer, so there’s infinitely more detail about each step in the linked posts.

I started by doing a bunch of tests — some blood tests, some imaging tests — all of which came back normal (hooray). I chose a donor and ordered sperm from a bank (which by the way, is really expensive) and did my first intrauterine insemination (IUI) in July 2021. It did not work, but I wasn’t worried because it only has a success rate of 10-20%. I did three total rounds of IUI and got increasingly dejected, then switched to IVF, which was not as bad as I thought it would be.

Before starting IVF, I switched insurance providers because one of my jobs offered fertility coverage. However, finding a fertility clinic in Austin and generally dealing with insurance was the worst part of this entire process. I ended up at Aspire Fertility — I LOVED them and becoming a patient there removed about 80% of the stress I was experiencing.

IVF is broken into multiple parts, including ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval, genetic testing, and embryo transfer. Ovarian stimulation is the part with all the shots, which are also really expensive. With insurance, the total cost of IVF for me was about $7,000 (that includes genetic testing, which is not covered by insurance). If I had done self-pay without insurance, the meds alone would have been around $4,000.

I did one extremely successful round of IVF — we retrieved 32 eggs, which turned into 10 healthy embryos. (This is an insanely high number.) I chose to transfer a male embryo for reasons. After a few weeks of prep, I did a frozen embryo transfer (FET) and my first transfer was successful. I had an exceptionally cute baby in early 2023.

Overall, my fertility journey — time between first consultation and getting pregnant — took almost exactly two years including long breaks, surfaced a lot of feelings, and cost around $14,000.

You can also listen to me tell my story at the beloved Austin event Hyde Park Storytelling below. I was late third trimester at that point so I was a little out of breath.

If you are also considering the SMBC path, here are couple of resources I recommend:

Single Greatest Choice podcast
Run by Katie, another Austinite, this podcast was one of the first things I found that made me feel less alone. It has grown over the years and she covers topics from financial preparation to legal considerations to personal experiences.
Inside a ‘Liberating’ Millennial Revolution: Single Mothers by Choice
In this article for The Barbed Wire, I interviewed SMBCs about their choice and what life was like now.
Sperm Bank Traffic Light Chart
The US Donor Conceived Council put this together - it’s a guide of sperm bank practices to consider when choosing your sperm bank.