Long-time Choice Mom support Patricia Mendell, who works with single women in the New York City area who are building families on their own, has announced a new monthly support group to help families (single and coupled) create healthy families using egg, sperm and embryo donation, as well as surrogacy.

I just returned from Orlando, where hundreds of specialists in reproductive medicine gathered for their annual convention -- largely focused on helping women get pregnant with up-to-date research and technology. Here is some of what I learned, and people I talked to.

Thanks to Danielle for bringing this list of storybooks to my attention for those of us who have used alternative methods to bring our children into the world.

I am a Choice Mom of twin girls who are now 6. I did artificial insemination in the U.S. with sperm that could not cross the border into Canada. This is my story of making contact with half siblings.

How do we celebrate Father's Day?

A San Francisco Choice Mom wrote to me recently, asking how to address the half-sibling topic with her son. She's been in contact with two lesbian couples on the East Coast who have sons from the same donor.

This has come up so frequently lately that I want to focus our attention again on responses to these topics: What do we tell our children, and others, about how they were conceived? About why they don't have a dad?

As we develop more (largely FREE!) e-books and other special guides for the Choice Mom community, I thought this would be a good place to list everything so far available. This list will grow, so keep checking back.

Here it is...the end of the month when we focused on Conscious Conversations, and it took me weeks to get to THIS conversation with you. Isn't that the trickiness of our lives? How to make time for what matters, when the minutia of everyday gets in our way.

It's finally here! The Choice Mom Guide to Donor Sperm. Click here for the e-book, available as a complimentary guidebook for anyone who is choosing or has chosen sperm donation to build their family.

I heard from Fiona H. in Australia about the House of Parliament's decisions there about regulating the donor industry.

A woman on the Choice Mom discussion board asked what she could do to better guarantee her child's genetic health from an anonymous donor.

At the recent ASRM convention for those in the fertility industry, Choice Mom friend and therapist Andrea Braverman led a discussion titled "Wrinkled Parents: Medical, Ethical, and Psychological Issues of Parenting at an Older Age."

There is a national discussion starting in the Australian Parliament about how to regulate and legislate donor conception practices across federal and state lines.

Several years ago I got a call from the long-time co-founder of California Cryobank (CCB), gently and intelligently "checking me out" as an educational partner in his attempt to help his colleagues in the sperm bank industry understand why some policies needed to change. Since then...

As I've mentioned, one news source that I follow faithfully is BioNews, which publishes information about fertility and genetics out of the United Kingdom. Here are some of their latest reports of interest to the Choice Mom community.

A woman with two young children wrote to say that a half-sibling of her kids was traveling to the U.S. from another country and wanted to meet, since the children shared the same sperm donor. The mother didn't feel prepared to talk to her kids about how they were connected, yet didn't want to miss the opportunity to meet.

ONLY TEN COPIES LEFT IN PRINT! Years ago I collaborated with Wendy and Ryan Kramer, the mother-and-son co-founders of Donor Sibling Registry, on some new tools for families created by donor conception. This was one of them.

Are you struggling (alone) with the weight of deciding whether to persevere with costly fertility treatments? There are mental health counselors who specialize in the fertility industry who are here to help you. This is great, detailed advice from one of them.

submitted by Lori
Will you ever have to prove your donor child doesn’t have a father? When I gave birth to my daughter via anonymous donor IUI in 1999, I hoped that the information regarding her father would be left blank on her birth certificate.

I lived in New York City 18 years, so it's always a little odd for me to fly in and out of town for a weekend workshop, as I've done the last two visits. But we do pack a lot of information-sharing and support into these events, and the NYC event held in July 2010 was quite dense with resources. Here is some of what we shared.

A few years ago a producer for noted conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly called to test me for a potential debate with his boss about why Choice Moms dislike men. Maybe it's because I was pretty easy-going in my responses, but I was never booked for the show. In his recent remarks about Choice Motherhood, however, I see he still has a bug up his

We recently read about Diana's decision NOT to become a Choice Mom. Here is Part 2 of her story, when she decides to move into the Trying stage after all.

While in London I had the pleasure of meeting a woman at the Choice Mom gathering who told me about how she had decided some time ago that she definitely would not become a single mom -- partly after reading my "Choosing Single Motherhood" book. 18 months later, however, she's back on the path. I asked her to share her story about the thinking process.

Thanks to the generosity of Choice Mom Emily, I've been able to spend a wonderful 10-day holiday in London with my kids and parents. While here I met in Coram's Field with 14 women, including Moms, Thinkers and Tryers from Belfast, Dublin, Belgium and many others in the United Kingdom. I also met with a large group of Ph.D. students in Cambridge, who were interested in the Choice Mom story.

I've been asked by some to offer comment on the study about donor-conceived kids that was released in May 2010 by the Commission on Parenthood's Future, in conjunction with the Institute of American Values.

submitted by Christy
My daughter is 2.5 years old. She is a little girl who doesn't need to ask a lot of questions, doesn't seem to need a lot of prep information, and simply adjusts at the time to whatever is happening around her. She doesn't yet ask why she doesn't have a dad, or who her donor is. But other kids are now starting to do so.

It is more important to start your donor search with selection of the right sperm bank, before identifying donor characteristics. Arm yourself with this checklist of questions to begin the process.

Egg and sperm donor banks must adhere to certain safety standards, related to infectious disease testing. However, the donors themselves are not required to have genetic testing. That's why it's important for you to know the standards of the bank you want to work with -- and know what questions to ask.

One advantage of sperm donor conception is that you are looking at your eggs and a donor's sperm much more scientifically than if you were conceiving with a man you fell in love with. That means you have tools at your disposal to prevent potential medical problems for your child. Your sperm bank might have evaluated your donor’s family history, but have you had yours evaluated as well?

I've long been fascinated with genetics. Partly because since my one sibling is adopted, I've always been mindful and curious about the nature vs. nurture questions. Now Wendy Kramer at Donor Sibling Registry is announcing an exciting new research project that will help explore some of these issues.

At a Choice Mom networking event in 2008, I had the pleasure of meeting Anne Catherine Hundhausen. Since then, she has told her Choice Mom journey in a highly recommended documentary, about the grays of the donor conception process for her. Here's her personal story.

Some time ago a librarian wrote to me asking that I send my various books for Choice Moms and donor-conceived families to the Library of Congress for cataloging. This stemmed out of her discovery that there are very few books about donor conception available. She compiled this list, however, of everything she had found to that point.

Long-time Choice Moms adviser Patricia Mendell has created her own website that features articles and information of benefit to families conceived by donor conception.

Someone recently posted on one of the Choice Mom blogs that a friend of hers was intending to have sex with a stranger in order to get pregnant, and not tell the man. Not surprisingly, this made the friend uncomfortable.

There are three things Choice Moms report in hindsight are their biggest regrets. What do you think they are?

A majority of families using donor conception do not report births after the fact. This has a tremendous impact on the industry. The numbers of offspring born to a sperm donor, and even to egg donors, are generally vastly under-reported. If there is a genetic abnormality that surfaces in later years, families cannot be notified.

I have talked to many experts -- including donor-conceived adults -- about the pros, cons, strengths and weaknesses of anonymous and open-identity donor conception as the method to building a family. Listen in:

Long-time Choice Mom support Patricia Mendell hosts a monthly conversation to help families learn how to talk about non-traditional family-building with their kids. Dates: February 24, April 21, May 26.

We're building an audio library featuring the best of our Choosing Single Motherhood radio show and Choice Chat podcasts. You can order the first of this collection, "Choice Moms Answer the Tough Questions: Do I Have a Dad?" (formerly a CD product, available here for immediate $7 download).

Have you wondered what offspring conceived from donor sperm think about as they get older?