S5:E31 - Fertility Counselling & Donor Conception — What Solo Mums Actually Need to Know

Every woman going through donor conception at a fertility clinic in Australia is required to attend implications counselling. And almost every one of them turns up expecting to be assessed, judged, and told whether they're worthy enough to be a mum.

Narelle Dickinson has been working in this space for 30 years. She finds that deeply sad.

Narelle is a reproductive psychologist, fertility counsellor, and the director of Lotus Health and Psychology in Brisbane. She specialises in the prenatal and perinatal field, works in the surrogacy space, supports families through birth trauma and pregnancy loss, and has spent 25 years doing donor conception counselling — watching the landscape shift from almost exclusively heterosexual couples to a community that now includes far more single women choosing this path as a first option, not a last resort.

In this episode she explains what implications counselling actually is, what it's actually for, and how to get the most out of it rather than treating it as a tick-box exercise. She talks about what changes when you're using a known or recruited donor rather than a clinic donor. She explains why people who are using an unregulated recruited donor without going through a clinic should consider seeing a counsellor anyway — and what a donor who refuses to sit in a counselling room should tell you. She talks about the unexpected emotional waves that can come after a positive test, after the baby arrives, and years later when your child starts asking harder questions.

And she closes with something worth carrying: the goal of donor conception counselling isn't getting you pregnant. It's helping you build a family. Those are very different things.

Narelle and her team offer telehealth across Australia. If you're looking for an implications counsellor, make sure you're using an ANZICA-accredited practitioner — the Australia and New Zealand Infertility Counselors Association — whose reports will be accepted by any clinic.

Find Narelle at:

Website - lotushp.com.au.

Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/lotushealthandpsychology/

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/LotusHealthPsychology/

In this episode:

• Why the reproductive psychologist field has shifted — from heterosexual couples to increasingly single women choosing this as a first option

• What women expect implications counselling to be — and why that expectation is almost always wrong

• What implications counselling actually does: it's not an assessment, it's preparation for the next 20, 30, 50 years

• How the session is different for a solo mum than for a couple, and why it should be

• The importance of singing from the same songbook — how everyone around your child needs to be using the same language and the same story

• What to expect if you're using a clinic-recruited ID release donor — disclosure, donor siblings, future contact

• What changes if you're using a known donor — role, naming, extended family expectations, what the donor's parents think is happening

• Why going to implications counselling even if you're using a recruited donor outside a clinic is one of the most important things you can do

• The red flag that matters most: a donor who won't sit in front of a health professional

• How the unregulated space works, what family limits mean and don't mean, and why the issue isn't the rules — it's the enforcement

• When to reach back out for counselling: during a hard IVF cycle, after a positive test you can't quite believe, in the newborn phase, and when your child starts asking questions that don't have easy answers

• The "I should be grateful" trap — why women who've been through fertility treatment often feel they have no right to struggle

• Disclosure as your child grows: keeping the channel open, making sure they know they're allowed to ask, and understanding when the story stops being yours and starts being theirs

• How to find an ANZICA-accredited fertility counsellor — and whether you can use someone interstate for your clinic

Key Takeaways

• Implications counselling is not an assessment of your worthiness as a parent — it's preparation for the decades ahead

• If you're using a recruited donor outside a clinic, you can still access a fertility counsellor — and you probably should

• The first red flag with any recruited donor: unwillingness to sit in a counselling room and answer questions in front of a professional

• Family limits apply to informal home insemination too — the issue is that nobody is enforcing them

• The urgency to get pregnant is real, but it can't override the need to make good decisions — you aren't just choosing sperm, you're choosing your child's genetic origin and medical history

• "You don't need a partner, but you do need a village" — and if you don't have one, now is the time to start building it

• The donor conversation doesn't end when your child is told — it evolves at every stage, and you can go back to a counsellor at any of those stages

• Make sure your fertility counsellor is ANZICA-accredited — their reports are accepted by all clinics in Australia

• Telehealth means you don't need to be in the same state as your counsellor

This episode is brought to you by City Fertility

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