“Will I feel it as mine? Will she/he resemble me?” These are two of the most frequent questions at the consulting room when we tell a patient that she is going to need and egg or sperm donor to have a child.

This is a very natural reaction; I call it “genetic mourning”. Faced with the first question, I always tell my patients: “Whose is it going to be? When you feel the baby’s heart beating inside you, you’re not going to have any doubts, you are giving him life”. And so it is: when they reflect, they imagine their pregnancy and childbirth and, from that moment on, the vast majority accept treatment with enthusiasm and gratitude towards their donor.

This stage of “genetic mourning” can last more or less according to each person, and it always ends with the second question: “Who will be my donor?” In Spain, donors are anonymous; in my post on allocation I explain how doctors carefully choose the most suitable ones for our patients. We realised that prospective parents always want to know about their donor’s physical features, but also about their way of being, their hobbies and their interests… So we asked them directly if it was important to them that their donor’s personality was similar to theirs and the answer was a resounding “of course.”  Nearly all of us want our children to look like us IN ALL ASPECTS.

So we’ve launched the “personality matching”, a new programme that allows us to learn about the hereditary personality traits of our donors and our patients. In this way, we seek for each person the donor that physically resembles them the most, but who also has the same temperament. Personality is the sum of temperament and character: temperament is hereditary and character is formed according to environment, education and experience.

We have designed a test with 40 questions that help us know about each person’s attitude (introversion or extroversion), how they analyse or perceive information (sensory or intuitive) how they make decisions (logical or emotional) and how they interact with the outside world (perception or judgment). All our donors and those who are starting with us an In vitro Fertilisation treatment with egg or sperm donor or an Artificial Insemination with donor sperm are already taking the test.

Do you want to know what your temperament is? I invite you to take our test: it’s a lot of fun and will help you get to know yourself a little better.