Choice Mom Resources

I have updated our list of support network coordinators in various cities, to help women find each other at a local level. If there is not a coordinator listed in your area, please offer to be a liaison via Comments or to info @ ChoiceMoms.org and I'll add you to the list.

Returning sponsor European Sperm Bank of the USA is enabling me to spend the time creating five more podcasts this year for the Choice Mom community. What do you want to hear?

There are many women who visit this website looking for information about home insemination. It is one of the most popular search terms at ChoiceMoms.org. Now, in one 20-page package, is the best information for this community.

Our storybook created by Choice Moms, featuring artwork by Choice Kids, is called "I Felt You Flutter in My Heart."

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.

Our Choice Mom-friendly fertility clinic in the Los Angeles area, C.A.R.E. Fertility, has created this Fertility Ties resource for helping U.S. women nationwide find a fertility clinic, egg donor agency, fertility pharmacy, and much more in their area.

Thanks to the success of my book "Choosing Single Motherhood: The Thinking Woman's Guide," I often get requests to talk with women about their particular concerns.

If this is of interest to you, please make contact and we'll arrange a time that works.

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.

Two women from our 2010 Austin event have emerged to keep the conversations happening and the resources shared in that part of the U.S. Here's the story of one of them.

One of the most exciting developments I see for Choice Moms in the coming years is the opening up of the relatively new embryo donation frontier for those women whose own eggs aren't working. New players in the field are working with single women.

There are alternatives to the "traditional" IUI route for Choice Moms. Here are some great resources.

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?

When it was time to start finding coordinators to help Choice Moms do the work we do with the community, the first person I thought of was Kali, who has quietly been offering suggestions and moderation help for several years. Now you, too, can meet her as she steps out of the shadows to help manage our vast East Coast resources.

I met Jessica at our Raleigh event. She had driven in from Atlanta with Cyndi. They met after I let them know both were traveling from the same area, so they made contact, drove together, became friends, and will now co-moderate our Atlanta conversations.

Choice Mom Valerie offered up these questions to ask any prospective adoption agency before considering them for your single-parent adoption...

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.

When I hosted the first Choice Mom networking event, in San Francisco in 2007, one of the sponsors was a new egg-freezing company. The concept was in its earliest stages.

Click below for the complimentary Choice Mom Guide to Donor Sperm, for anyone who is choosing or has chosen sperm donation to build their family.

I'd like to refresh this "blog of blogs" and encourage anyone who is writing about her Choice Mom journey to include a link to it in the Comments field below.

Madeline Feingold is a therapist on our Top 20 list of Choice Mom-friendly counselors, associated with Alta Bates IVF in San Francisco. She offered insight on the actual words a parent can use, starting at a young age, to talk to their child about being donor-conceived.

We've been busy assembling new fertility resources for our large community in the Trying: Fertility stage. Use this link to our new page of medications involved in fertility treatment.

We have a new fertility team in the Choice Mom network. I'm happy to introduce Dr. Rudy Quintero, who runs his own clinic in the Los Angeles area. His team is starting us off with some tools about ovulation detection.

This new-and-improved website has been in operation now for nearly a year. I'd like to share some interesting new data about where we tend to be living, the stages we are in, and what we prefer to read on this website.

One of my favorite websites is CreatingaFamily.com, run by Dawn Davenport. Like me, she's developed a comprehensive resource for her community as a labor of love. Hers is specifically designed for anyone building families through adoption, egg and sperm donation, surrogacy. Here are highlights:

This list was offered by Carrie Crompton at Cultural Care Au Pair, who is offering a great $500 discount to the Choice Mom community.

Here it is! For a limited time, the special new baby for our Choice Mom community. Our Choice of ChoiceMoms.org tips from 2010, featuring everything from Organization to Building a Support Network, Q&A to Commentary.

My favorite part of this website and the Choice Mom networking events are the opportunities to learn the stories of others in our community. Here is a compilation of some of the best stories of 2010.

It's a very lonely road to take care of yourself and a premature child (or two). Let's collect our wisdom here about places to turn, stories to share, insight to offer.

I've been reminded in the last week just how fragile life is. A Choice Mom friend unexpectedly lost her younger sister last week -- a mother of three -- in a tragic accident. And a neighbor couple are BOTH battling cancer, one of them terminal, with 7- and 9-year old daughters at home.

It is hard for singles to find proactive friends in the adoption world. This list will help you find the right ones. We don't recommend anyone as Choice Mom-friendly unless they are also open to the LGBT community.

The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is a great resource for information about foster care adoption. Here are some of the numbers they offered in National Adoption Month (November 2010) about the kids waiting in foster care for adoptive homes.

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.

When embarking on parenthood, we often become ready to explore new pathways to health, including acupuncture, energy healing and natural health care. These practitioners have actively worked on behalf of the Choice Mom community.

When you are feeling isolated, angry, depressed or confused about the Choice Mom path, the discussion boards have become a good place to vent and share. But sometimes we need someone who not only understands the Thinking to Being stages, but is specifically trained to talk with us about our emotions.

I am frequently asked by reporters how big the Choice Mom community is. While there is no census-taking data that reveals the answer, I can use our discussion boards as a way to gauge growth -- and the types of things we are most interested in talking about.

We tend to know how to set and achieve goals. But sometimes we need a nudge, or we're feeling low, and our competence as strong-minded women prevents us from seeking help. I'm always looking for ways to help us find the insights we need.

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.

When you are preparing to deliver a child on your own, finding the right pre- and post-partum doula can be vital to a Choice Mom. Listen to this podcast about finding the right one for you. Read more about doulas on this website. And recommend yours here in the comments field.

These mental health therapists have an interest in working with single women about grief, fertility, adoption, and other aspects of the Choice Mom journey. They have been recommended by Choice Moms.

This service is designed to recommend estate planners who have a special connection with the Choice Mom community, either through commendation by a Choice Mom client, or sponsorship of Choice Mom workshops or other educational resources (signified here with direct website links).

A woman who is preparing to write about the Choice Motherhood lifestyle in a community that doesn't think single parenting is such a good thing asked me to offer some resources. I realized that many of you might benefit from some of it, in your own conversations with others.

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.

There is nothing that prompts more questions on Choice Mom discussion boards than when a single woman is purposely trying to conceive. We quickly learn how little we know about something we've been taught can be so easy. The Choice Mom Guide to Fertility gathers the most common questions and answers them, with the help of 15 fertility specialists we interviewed specifically for this book.

In National Adoption Month I want to share some of the stories of single women who have become mothers because of adoption.

After I became a mother to Sophia back in 1999, I ended up unexpectedly creating a less stressful and healthier lifestyle. Partly this was because I didn't have time to work 60-hour work weeks -- and didn't want to. But also because I wanted to instill better habits in my child so she would eventually live a healthy lifestyle.

Adoptive Families continues to be one of the best sources available for women on the adoption path. Here are some great articles they've just announced about helping to educate your child's classmates and teachers about adoption.

I am talking to sponsors about adding to our Choice Chat podcast library in 2013, and perhaps adding a webinar series. We currently have more than 42,000 downloads of 46 shows. Here's what's available.

There is no 1-2-3 formula to deciding whether the Choice Motherhood lifestyle is right for you. But there are a lot of ways to try to figure it out. This is a good place to start.

There are many things I like about Stacey MacGlashan's Choice Mom memoir "Just you and me, kid." One of them is the wonderful, honest detail she offers about the delivery process.

"Even the most independent or progressive among us didn't play house without at least going through the motions of assigning someone the dad role...Our childhood fairy tale fantasies involved Prince Charming and happily ever after, not donor number 5931...and a brief encounter with a syringe."

I am happy to announce that Choice Moms® is launching a growing library of regional resource guides for the Choice Mom community. The first guide is now available, with its ongoing collection of insights and tips offered by experts and single women specifically from the New York City area.

Here are notes from the networking event we held in Austin in March 2010.

It's hard for self-sufficient women to ask for help -- or even acknowledge to ourselves that we need it. But we do. Even more than we care to admit, because we tend to be so hard on ourselves. This month I'm thinking about the kinds of support Choice Moms need, and how we can get and give it as a community.

A woman on the Alternatives to Marriage Project Facebook page wrote that she was denied coverage for fertility treatments because she isn't married. She's on the Choice Mom path. Let's weigh in on which insurance companies do a better job of coverage.

It is confusing to join the Choice Mom community as someone who is attempting to conceive and discover all these terms and abbreviations you've never encountered before. Here's a quick cheat sheet of the most common ones:

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.

There were a lot of new and pending parents at the San Francisco event in May 2010. Here are some of the great resources that were suggested by attendees.

There are several great options for creating your own storybooks for your adopted or donor conceived child. Here are some of them.

We love reading stories with our kids about non-traditional families. And we actively seek information about alternative family-building for ourselves. Here are recommendations.

This is a wonderful list of resources from Nurse Practitioners for any woman who is trying to conceive, from keeping track of period dates to taking an "Am I Pregnant?" quiz...to baby name sites...to prenatal care info...

A woman who currently lives in a European country that doesn't allow people to use donated egg or sperm asked the Choice Mom board for suggestions about where she might go for treatment options.

submitted by Deirdre Fishel
I began filming "Sperm Donor X," a 54-minute documentary, when I was 40 and found myself at a precipice. I wanted to have a biological child, yet doing it alone with donor sperm felt bizarre and terrifying. I had no idea how my story would end and I wanted to find other women facing the same turning point.

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:

Here are some favorite resources about the adoption process. Feel free to recommend your own in the Comments field.

Here is good reading material to keep you company as you journey through the Trying and Waiting stages of Choice Motherhood:

There are a lot of amazing women writing specifically about the single mother journey. Here are a few of my favorites:

There have been several documentaries made about the Choice Mom lifestyle. Here are clips from a few of them:

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?

It's hard to find baby books that don't have the obligatory "how I met your dad" and two-sided family tree chart to fill in. But there are options. Here are some of them.

It is important to understand the success rates of an IVF center before you invest. There are wide discrepancies. Here is a compilation of resources to help you understand the IVF process, as recommended from Choice Moms.