Watching someone you love struggle with infertility can be heart-wrenching. We want to help, but there often isn’t much we can do other than offer moral support. Sometimes, though, a situation presents itself where a person can be more than just a listening ear and is able to offer the couple a life-changing gift during their infertility journey.
Adam Zayden, 25, watched his sister Jade, 29, and her wife, Eefje, 30, suffer for years as the pair tried to conceive but were unable to find a suitable sperm donor to help grow their family. Zayden jumped in and offered his sperm and is now the biological father to his nephew.
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The women struggled to find a donor.
Jade and Eefje are based in Amsterdam and insurance doesn’t cover artificial insemination, South West News Source reported via the New York Post. The couple didn’t want to conceive a child through sexual intercourse, so finding a donor proved difficult. The women were only interested in a donor who would allow them to use his sperm to inseminate themselves.
The couple thought they'd found the perfect candidate.
But once he found out he wouldn’t be conceiving with the mother through intercourse, he backed out.
“He literally turned around and said he wanted to do things the ‘natural’ way,” Zayden told SWNS. “He wanted to sleep with my sister-in-law — which was never in the realm of what they wanted.”
Jade added, it was an “emotional rollercoaster.”
“You’re opening yourself up in the most vulnerable of times,” she said. “You’re welcoming, essentially, strangers, into your life. You’re then dependent on strangers to help fulfill one of your biggest dreams.”
Jade's brother thought donating his sperm was the right thing to do.
He told SWNS his sister and her wife tried to conceive for three painful years. He realized one day that he could change their lives.
“They’d become so frustrated with the donor process — it just felt like the right, and ‘easy’ thing to do. This whole process has made me so much closer to my sister and her partner.”
It took some time, but the family finally conceived.
Zayden told SWNS he provided sperm to his sister-in-law for months in the hopes of conceiving.
“Every night during that one-week period, Jade would take the dog out for a walk,” he recalled to SWNS. “I’d go upstairs, do my thing, and hand Eefje the sperm.”
Eefje finally had a positive pregnancy test in June 2022 and gave birth to a baby boy in March 2023.
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They are now a happy family.
Zayden said the baby boy knows him as an uncle, not a father.
“I am his uncle, but I’m known as ‘bibi,’” he said, adding that he’s “a very happy, jolly kid.”
Jade told the news outlet that having her brother as the donor made her very happy. “It was great having someone you really know and trust, because it’s such an emotional time,” she shared.
