Building Your Family

The Complete Guide to Donor Conception

By: Lisa Schuman LCSW, Leondires MD

Narrated by: Lisa Schuman LCSW, Leondires MD

Building Your Family is the first all-inclusive guide by experts to cover both the medical and emotional aspects of becoming a parent through donor conception.

Once shrouded in secrecy, the modern family, built with the assistance of gamete (egg or sperm) donation, is coming out of the shadows. As more people see friends, family members and celebrities use donor conception to build their families, the process has become much more mainstream and accepted. Donor sperm programs and egg banks have grown enormously in the past decade and the news is full of politicians, athletes and entertainers like Elton John, Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Camille Guaty, Pete Buttigieg, and Natalie Imbruglia, who used donor gametes to have their children.

Authors, Lisa Schuman, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist and Dr. Mark Leondires, have decades of experience working with patients as well as their own personal stories of fertility treatment and non-genetic parenthood.

Together they walk listeners through the medical and genetic aspects of donor conception, common ethical dilemmas, managing relationships with friends and family members, ways to tell donor-conceived children about their origins, and strategies to cope with the difficulties of fertility treatment.

In a compassionate and authoritative narrative, they help stressed out parents-to-be find their way forward with confidence and joy.

Important valuable information

This was a very well written book that was incredibly useful and brought to light a lot of scenarios and situations that I would’ve never considered. I hope the authors know how important this work was. While some of this knowledge is probably common place it is vital nonetheless. I hope they know that they’ve done a purely good service to the world by writing this. I want to thank them personally and I hope my own process through surrogacy goes well. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for helping families everywhere.