The Underground Market of Sperm Donors

On www.trentdonor.com [2], a twentysomething 6-foot-1 blond from Northern California poses to accentuate his square jaw, wide smile, and puppy-dog-brown eyes. He politely promises to respond within three days, although he can take up to a week during heavy donation months. And he’s not talking about a clothing drive. This young stud is giving away his sperm for free, except shipping costs, because, he says, he has “a spirit of volunteering to the community,” and along with the summers he has spent building orphanages and schools with his church in China and Mexico, he believes that “sperm donation is one more way he can help those in his community who may be in need.”

Those “in need” are single women, lesbian couples, and married couples challenged by male infertility who can’t afford the expense—or in some countries, who don’t have the “right” social status—for traditional sperm banks. Trent is an independent contractor in a growing online gray market of free sperm donors. This market now includes Craigslist ads, Yahoo groups with names like Free Sperm Donors or Spermdonorneed, and websites like DIY Baby, the Free Fertility Clinic, and Feelingbroody.com, a site in the United Kingdom that acts as a matchmaker between free donors and women desiring to become pregnant. Trent offers a background check and regular STD checks, but only because he chooses to. Unlike official sperm banks, the underground ones are entirely unregulated. A woman could get a self-proclaimed altruist such as Trent, a savvy entrepreneur, a seed-spreading egomaniac, or even someone just looking for free sex.

Big sperm clinics evolved in order to give women more control by making the process of getting a sperm donor less secretive and safer, and also to offer the highest-quality product. Today, that means genetically sound, disease-free sperm that has been quarantined for six months. That’s just the minimum to meet FDA mandates. Donors also pass psychological health checks, background checks, and tout their Ivy League degrees or resemblance to A-list celebrities [3]. Dr. Cappy Rothman, the medical director of the California Cryobank, told me that his customers will walk away knowing more about their donor than he does about his wife of 40 years.

The problem is that with less secrecy and more established legal standards, sperm donation has also become an expensive and exclusive process. Vials of sperm cost up to $500 each, and an insemination through a private doctor’s office can run more than $1,000 for each pregnancy attempt, depending upon one’s insurance. Single women and lesbian couples now make up 50 percent of the business of sperm banks like the California Cryobank, which sells on average 30,000 vials of sperm a year. In the United Kingdom, clinics that are part of the national health care system will not inseminate a single woman in her 20s, nor will they offer any background information about a donor. Unlike in the United States, the concept of an "Open Identity" donor who would give the child the opportunity to meet his or her biological father at 18 does not exist in the United Kingdom. And for donors, says Rothman, “It’s now harder to get accepted to our bank than it is to get into Harvard. We only accept nine out every 1,000 applications.”

This has led to the booming gray market. Since free sperm donors are the Wild West of sperm donation, there are no official statistics on how many there are. Based on an extensive web search, most of the donors are based in the United States and England, but some come from as far away as Bahrain. There has been no official legal crackdown on free sperm donors because technically it’s not illegal, but the FDA does have mandated requirement that sperm donors must meet. “If it was a sperm bank not meeting the mandate, no one would be arrested and thrown in jail for a civil suit, but the bank would be shut down,” says Dr. Rothman.

He also speculates that many gray-market donors are those who were rejected from larger clinics because they didn’t pass the rigorous physical and psychological standards. Also, a woman or couple who uses a gray-market donor doesn’t have the legal protection offered by a regular clinic that the donor will not come after their offspring years later seeking paternity rights. “In most states, these donors have access to the child that you can’t contract away,” says Rothman. “Based on the American Parenting Act, if the insemination is carried out by a physician, the donor signs a contract releasing them from all paternal rights and obligations if a child is conceived using their sperm.”

What drives the men to donate? The commercialization of sperm banking is what drove Ted (not his real name), a 51-year-old former commercial donor and self-declared sperm donation advocate, to start donating on the Yahoo Group “Free Sperm Donors.” “It shouldn’t be about money,” he said. “Blood isn’t about money. Livers aren’t about money. No payments should be exchanged just because you’re transferring human cells back and forth.”

Ted believes that since more serious money can be made from the commercial sperm banks, donors, especially cash-strapped college students, are given more financial incentive. With the possibility of making thousands of dollars to donate, there is also more incentive for them to leave out vital details in donor interviews and exaggerate their profiles.

Dr. Rothman of the California Crybank notes, however, that Ted may also be donating through the gray market because he is too old to be accepted at commercial sperm banks, which typically only accept men between the ages of 21 and 38.

“There is an intrinsic danger in men over 40 because like women’s eggs their sperm is more at risk for chromosomal abnormalities,” said Rothman. “He’s putting the public at risk and blaming sperm banks for being financially motivated.”

Angus McClelland, runs a website called freespermdonor.com [4] out of Bahrain and advertises “artificial or natural insemination.” There are no photos on the site, only a phone number and ad copy that says, “I can provide free accommodation if you can travel and cover your living costs. It is your choice the degree of my involvement at a later date, and we can do this anonymously on your part if you require. No tricks, no hidden agenda. What you see is what you get—FREE SPERM. If you’re interested and can travel then drop me an email. I will provide regular donations until you conceive. Come alone or bring your partner.”

When I contacted him pretending to be an interested buyer and asking why he donates, he wrote back a professional note, explaining, “I do what I do to help women who can't afford to go to a clinic, can’t get free fertility treatment or don’t conform to the requirements of society, for whatever reason, and who wish to know who the father of their child is rather than having a 1-night stand. I don't do this for money or fame or notoriety.”

Some of the donors will send a frozen sample, but others will agree to a procreative sex rendezvous, which obviously throws into question whether this new fringe of donation is about male prostitution, masked in the language of volunteerism and female empowerment. “I’ve had contact from a couple of men who said they wanted to help women,” says Sarah Rowlands, a 23-year-old secretary in London who set up a free sperm donor group on Facebook. “I then go to check their profile and there’s a naked picture of the guy and he’s clearly just looking for sex.”

Of course, creating a child and choosing to become a mother does not always happen under perfect circumstances. If every child was procreated out of the realm of genetic or disease risk, or every pregnancy was the result of the perfect relationship and perfect financial health, then the world might be a much smaller place. But how much should a government regulate the process, and who should ultimately decide what makes a person fit enough to donate or whether a woman is in the right place in her life to choose to have a child? There are very real risks to any person venturing into this gray market that should not be ignored, which therefore places an onus on women themselves to make safe and smart decisions.