Known Donor Insemination Agreements - HELP!!

[charlotterocks]

Hello all,
We are on our way to using a known donor and need a Known Donor Insemination Agreement. We contacted a lawyer in our area (California) and she charges $325 an hour! We cannot afford that at the moment. We were hoping to create our own agreement, based on a Nolo Press sample donor agreement. I am thinking we can just create our own (escpecially since legally, the document is only important for establishing eveyone's intention at time of insemination.) Would anyone be willing to share their agreement with me? If it is from California, that is best, but I would like to see any example, even from another state. Even if we do end up seeing the lawyer, if we have our own document that she just needs to ammend, it will hopefully be cheaper than if she creates the whole thing. I realy appreciate any help I can get. Thanks so much!!!

[megincl]

I don't have one to share, but we had one done by our lawyer. She charged a flat fee, as opposed to an hourly fee. I think the whole thing cost $500. I know it seems like a CRAZY amount of money, but given all the craziness that could happen, you want a really solid document that could stand up in court if necessary. I know how terribly hard it is to involve all kind of legal mess in the known donor relationship, but I think that ultimately it just makes things safer for your family. In a way, the challenges that we encountered having the "legal conversations" with our known donor helped us all to be more open and honest about our relationship, and ultimately about our ongoing partnership over the years.

good luck!
megin

[megan sacha]

I totally agree with Megin. We don't have a lot of money, but we shelled out over $600...(the total could be about $1,000) to pay for our lawyer and his too. I think it's totally worth it to protect your family. I don't have my contract (WA State) except in a PDF which includes everyone's names and therefore I can't share.

[witt]

here's a link that might be useful

http://www.hrc.org/Template.cfm?Sect...ay.cfm&Content

I did a google using: known and donor and agreement and lesbian and sample

we downloaded one over six years ago from the net, was similar to this. The laws have changed here and we are very well protected now.

I think if the law is not on your side, it's really just gonna show intention but won't give you any formal protection in law should the donor decide to get contact or access. You really should get some legal advice from somewhere. I don't know US law only New Zealand stuff re lesbian families

[Diane B]

Yes, yes to the previous poster. Don't kid yourself about the actual legal protection such a document will provide. My understanding is that it doesn't provide legal protection in the same way as a will or power of attorney. It does demonstrates your intention, but if the donor decides to challenge for custody or visitation rights or whatever, a donor agreement will not necessarily prevent that.

Surely there's an attorney around that would charge a bit less - ask you friends - and do investigate additional steps to take, such as having your donor reliquish rights once the child is born, and other issues in your state with the birth certificate.