Test Tubes“Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income.” — Dave Barry

As mentioned before, Jeanine and I want to have children… or at a minimum a child. We’re on our fifth try this year with the artificial insemination process. I promised Jeanine that I wouldn’t reveal too many personal things about this experience out of respect for her privacy.

I have written a few posts on this topic found at Donor XY and Baby Race. If you’re interested, here is a link to other fertility stories. It shows what extraordinary lengths people will travel in order to conceive. As active participants, we’re beginning to understand the emotional toll.

I did ask her if I could post about it in terms of money. Money is actually the easy part. I can tell you this; we’ve never spent $8,000 so fast and with such little concern about where it’s going as with this experience. To be honest, I had to ask Jeanine to add it all up the other day because I said I wanted to write about it and didn’t have any idea about our expenditures to date. There’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to know. I know that’s so un-Suze Orman of me.

So far, the charges were for sperm, sperm washing, doctor visits, tests and lab expenses, and now we’re using a fertility specialist with the high cost of fertility treatments. We planned a certain amount this year in our budget… thinking that we might need to use about $25,000 from savings. If we graduate to in vitro fertilization, then we’ll soon need to revise the budget. This runs about $10,000 - $12,000 a try. I had no idea. Believe me.

Women and couples can spend $50,000 trying to get pregnant without even batting an eye. This is like spending money for the kid’s first year of college before he or she even sees the light of day. But we want a child and for some reason the dollars spent seem irrelevant in the big scheme of things.

I saw this quote on the plane last night in the American Way magazine. Mark McClanahan, a financial planner, wrote, “Rich people plan for generations; poor people plan for Saturday night.” We’re all about planning for generations and hope that parenthood will enrich us in more ways than one.