Drawbacks of sperm donation

Sperm donors can be found online , or through someone you know personally. Well, first of all you know who they are. You might have known them a long time, or they might even be a family member. It might be someone you work with, a member of your club, an old friend or a relative. They may have offered to become a donor knowing that you are having difficulty conceiving, or you may have had to ask them and they have agreed. It will be easier to ask them questions about their medical history and their previous relationships.

In , as a Probate and Family Court judge in Boston, I began hearing a case filed by a self-represented woman who requested an order that a sperm facility disclose the identity of the father of her two young daughters. She gave as her primary reason that the children suffered from health issues and needed a complete medical history from their father. After multiple hearings and several trips between the Probate and Family Court and the Massachusetts Appeals Court, the complaint was dismissed in The first decision of the Appeals Court can be found here. When we focus on the friend, relative, or child who may have ties to sperm donation, we avoid seeing certain realities, or if we glimpse them, we often keep quiet in order not to offend. I know wonderful women who are kind and loving mothers to their children conceived through sperm donation. But the impact of a billion-dollar gamete industry reaches well beyond them.

Before technology gave us the option of doing IVF-ICSI, the only choice for couples with severe sperm problems was to use a sperm donor. Even today, there are times when donor sperm is used. These cases happen with couples who have absolutely zero sperm available even with high-tech methods or for whom IVF-ICSI is not feasible within the constraints of their budget. There are also women without any source of sperm who choose to get pregnant by donor sperm. There are some who choose to go through a well-screened anonymous sperm bank and there are some who want to get sperm from someone they know.

A total of women looking for a sperm donor on Pride Angel a website that facilitates contact between donors and recipients completed an online survey. Whilst it was important for recipients to know the identity of the donor, some did not see this as important for the child and thus the level of information that parents have about the donor, and that which the child has, can differ. Whilst the survey had a large sample size, the representativeness of the sample is not known. There has been a rise in the number of websites that facilitate contact between recipients of sperm and sperm donors, yet there are no clear estimates of how large the online sperm donation market is in the UK and abroad.