Which clinic tests genetically + open donation?

Thank you so much for sharing your experiences. It all sounds really good. Which clinic did you go to in Spain?

No, open or anonymous donation, I'm open to both.

It is important to me to make a good choice, which in the best case means I would have an extended donor profile (education, hobbies etc), genetic testing of the donor and PGT-A and of course a photo of the child or at least a biometric matching of the faces.

The idea of someone else making a decision that affects our whole life based on just a few pieces of data is still very difficult for me.

I actually found Denmark very interesting, but due to the lack of genetic testing and the frequent comments that the egg quality is no longer as good, the country is unfortunately out of the question.

Does your older daughter look "Spanish" in any way or is it impossible to tell?

In any case, your story encourages me that I can trust the choice of clinic after all, thank you 😊

No, she doesn't look "Spanish" at all My husband and I are both blonde and have blue-grey and blue-green eyes respectively. I have dark blonde hair myself. The big one has a honey blonde, like daddy, and blue-grey eyes. As I said, they can both easily pass as my children. You have to choose in Spain so that it can't come out by chance if you don't want to tell the children.

We went to the Clinica Tambre in Madrid. They are quite good professionally, but I think they are rather expensive. You can no longer see the prices transparently on the website, which I find a bit strange. They did a good job professionally, but the communication sometimes left a lot to be desired. Exceptions were the German doctor and in the meantime I had a German coordinator. Things went smoothly there. I think we Germans sometimes need a different mentality, more thorough, more precise, I don't know. So the tip I would give you is to see if there is German staff, not just German-speaking staff. That really makes a difference.

Isn't it possible to get information about hobbies etc. in the Czech Republic? No photos, but such information? In Spain, unfortunately, you don't get anything, but they usually select biometrically.

Biometric selection is not used in CZ. At least I'm not aware of it, my clinic doesn't do it.

We received a lot of information about this. At the beginning, I also really wanted a country that offered photos, but the more information I got, the more I was prepared to give up.

Spain was out of the question for me, despite the blatant expertise, because you simply don't find out anything and in a process where you are already so "at the mercy" and feel like you have nothing under control, it didn't feel good for me. The decisive factor was that they didn't even tell me the age of the donor until after the pregnancy had occurred.

However, I believe that Spain is one of the leaders in diagnostics, especially in difficult cases.

We ended up in CZ and were able to find out a lot about the donor: Height, weight, blood type, age, hobbies, hair color, eye color, education/occupation, whether she has children of her own, whether she has donated before,....

We were also able to express wishes in this regard.

My daughter (2) looks like the perfect mix of me and my husband. No one would ever think that we had "messed up". At baby swimming, one mom said to me: "It's amazing how much she looks like you.... Does she even have anything of daddy's? 😄 I had to laugh inside. Especially as she's a little copy of him.

At my clinic, they just look at the pool of women who are ready to donate and choose the best possible match. You get the parameters and can say yes or no. We actually rejected the 1st suggestion and accepted the 2nd.

My son is not yet 2 weeks old, but he looks a lot like his dad and his sister. But with such small babies it's still hard to say.

But in the end I have to say: no matter what the outcome would have been... the child would always have fitted into the extended family. My parents are black-haired with dark eyes, as is my brother. He looks almost Turkish. My sister and I, on the other hand, are blonde with light eyes. So even with your own genetic children, you never know. It skips generations. With my husband, everyone is either blonde or red. So either way, there would always have been an explanation. But it wasn't necessary.

And you love them like crazy as soon as they arrive anyway 😍

Conby good to hear that you can't see the Spanish influence 😄.

That sounds like a really good selection and really good matching on your part. 😊.currently this is one of my biggest concerns after I heard a doctor say in a YouTube interview that if the father has a hooked nose and the mother doesn't, he would still take a woman with a hooked nose as a donor because the father would have one. That somehow made me feel very insecure.

Yes, I absolutely agree with you, we Germans probably have different expectations when it comes to the quality of work and the way we work 😅. Of course, I would like that for the work itself. As far as communication, etc. (soft factors) are concerned, my previous experience in KiWu clinics is that I don't really care, I can cope with that.

Fliege no in CZ unfortunately they don't select biometrically, I had already asked there.

Yes, it's kind of a process... basically EVERYTHING (genetic tests, biometric matching, photos, open / anonymous donation etc) would be possible in principle, but no clinic seems to offer everything, so unfortunately there is probably no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution.
And yes, I feel at the mercy of this process anyway, as you say. It's really a discovery phase where you're prepared to make sacrifices.
I'm really pleased that it worked out well for you 😊. And with your variety of visual options, that's really great.

I am very grateful that you are sharing your stories and it really encourages me to continue on this path despite the unknown parameters, as something wonderful can come out of it 😊.

I've now made an appointment with Claudia to choose a clinic and I'm very excited to see which clinic matches our wishes and whether she can find the "jack of all trades" after all 😀.

Just to clear up any preconceptions here: I was also undergoing treatment in Spain and communication was sometimes mediocre during our first two attempts. Then the coordinator switched to a Spanish employee and to English communication with our consent. Since then, everything has worked more smoothly than ever before, I had prescriptions and all feedback on the same day, all questions were always clarified immediately. The quality is beyond question anyway. Perhaps "we Germans" shouldn't hold ourselves to such high standards. In no German clinic (and I've been treated in two before) has the process ever run as smoothly and successfully as in Spain. These are prejudices and clichés, it has to be said.

Good luck to everyone!

Dear Brombeere, thank you for sharing this experience. I really didn't mean to throw prejudices around, sorry for that. My experience was simply that the German coordinator and doctor were exactly the same as you just reported with the Spanish one. And with the Spanish, but German-speaking ones, it was very slow, I sometimes had to wait several days for feedback, which was sometimes incomplete, so I had to ask again. It was just my experience, but I'm glad you had a different experience! LG