Single People and Same-Sex Couples

By Nick Peplow·Founder and editor

Last reviewed 27 September 2026· How this site is researched

The eligibility rules on this page are mostly not medical. They exist because fertility funding was built around a heterosexual couple who had been trying for a year, and everyone else is fitted to that model in different ways, so it pays to know how your funder does it. A single woman with entirely normal test results is not infertile by any clinical definition, and yet she needs the same treatment as someone who is, which means a system designed to identify disease has to find another way to decide whether she qualifies.

How funders define infertility for you

Funded treatment almost always requires a diagnosis of infertility, and the standard way to reach one is a period of trying without success. If you are single, or in a female same-sex couple, there is no version of trying that does not already involve a clinic and a payment.

So the requirement gets rewritten as a number of unsuccessful donor insemination cycles, self-funded, before anyone will count you as infertile. How many varies enormously. Depending on where you are, it may be a handful of cycles or as many as twelve, it may be satisfied by insemination at home in some places and only by clinic cycles in others, and in a few systems the requirement does not exist at all. Some areas have dropped it in the last few years, specifically because it was criticised as discriminatory. Others have kept it.

Put in money terms, the effect is that people who cannot conceive without help are asked to pay for several rounds of help before help is funded. That is a real cost, and it has been widely criticised by regulators and professional bodies, which is why a growing number of areas have dropped the rule. Knowing your own area's version lets you plan for it.

What to do with that, practically. Read your own funder's criteria yourself rather than taking a verbal answer, because the detail decides it: whether home inseminations count, whether they must be at a licensed clinic, whether the cycles must be medicated, and how they must be documented. If they have to be evidenced, keep the paperwork from the first one, not the fourth. Ask too what happens to the count if you move between areas, because the answer is sometimes that it resets.

Donor sperm covers what the insemination cycles themselves involve.

Reciprocal IVF, for female couples

Reciprocal IVF, also called shared motherhood, is IVF in which one partner provides the eggs and the other carries the pregnancy. Eggs are collected from the first partner, fertilised with donor sperm, and an embryo is transferred to the second.

Couples choose it for different reasons. Sometimes it is medical, where one partner has the better ovarian reserve and the other a healthier uterus or a safer obstetric history. Sometimes it is about age, since the odds track the age of whoever provides the eggs rather than whoever carries. Often it is simply that both partners want a physical part in it, which is a perfectly good reason.

Two things before you plan around it. It costs more than donor insemination, because it is a full IVF cycle with a collection and a transfer. And in some jurisdictions the paperwork treats one partner as an egg donor to the other, which brings in donation consent forms, screening requirements and sometimes a legal step that would not otherwise apply. That is administrative rather than obstructive, but it has to be done in the right order and before treatment starts.

A known donor, or a clinic donor

This is the decision with the longest tail, and the one where the consequences are legal rather than clinical. Donor conception covers the wider picture; what matters for eligibility is the route.

A known donor, a friend or an acquaintance, can be attractive. You know who they are, your child will know who they are from the start, and there is no matching list and no waiting. The risk is parenthood. In many jurisdictions, conception arranged privately outside a licensed clinic leaves the donor as a legal parent, with the financial obligations and the parental rights that go with that, and no written agreement between friends reliably changes it. Courts have decided these cases both ways and the intentions of the adults at the time did not always decide the outcome.

The clinic route is slower and it costs more, and what you gain is a clear legal position. Donating through a licensed clinic is, in most regulated systems, the mechanism by which the donor is not a legal parent and the intended parent or parents are. It also brings screening for infectious disease and for genetic conditions, quarantine of the sample, a cap on how many families one donor may create, and a record so that a donor-conceived person can later find out what the law in that country allows them to find out.

If you want to use someone you know, the route that keeps both things is to take that person through a licensed clinic as a known donor. Most clinics will do it. It costs what a clinic costs and takes a little longer, and it gives you a settled legal position from the start.

Legal parenthood for the non-carrying partner

For a couple, the second question after conception is who is recognised as the child's parent. The rules vary by country and sometimes by state or region, and the pattern is that where and how you conceive changes the answer. Conception at a licensed clinic with the right consent forms signed before treatment is commonly the cleanest route to both partners being recognised from birth. Conception outside that framework may leave the non-carrying partner needing an adoption or a court order afterwards.

That is a legal question and I am not the person to answer it for your situation. What I would do is ask the clinic, in writing and before the first cycle, exactly which forms establish parenthood in that jurisdiction, when they must be signed, and what the position is if you later treat at a different clinic or in a different country. Marriage or civil partnership status often changes the answer too.

Single men and surrogacy

For single men and male same-sex couples, the route needs a surrogate as well as an egg donor, and it is the most heavily regulated thing on this site. Whether surrogacy can be compensated, who is on the birth certificate and when, whether foreign nationals may take part, and whether the arrangement is enforceable all differ by country, and some countries that permitted it a decade ago do not now. This is a specialist legal matter before it is a medical one, and that order is the whole point.