The Underground Market of Sperm Donors

Photograph of winking man by Stockbyte/Getty Images.

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On www.trentdonor.com, 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. 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.