Why are sperm donors having hundreds of children?

Some men are having vast numbers of children through sperm donation. This week the BBC reported on a man whose sperm contained a genetic mutation that dramatically raises the risk of cancer for some of his offspring.

One of the most striking aspects of the investigation was that the man’s sperm was sent to 14 countries and produced at least 197 children.

Sperm donation allows women to become mothers when it might not otherwise be possible – if their partner is infertile, they’re in a same-sex relationship, or parenting solo.

Filling that need has become big business. It is estimated the market in Europe will be worth more than £2 billion (about N$45.3 billion) by 2033, with Denmark a major exporter of sperm.

MOST MEN’S SPERM ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH

If you’re a man reading this, we are sorry to break it to you, but the quality of your sperm probably isn’t good enough to become a donor – fewer than five in 100 volunteers actually make the grade.

First, you have to produce enough sperm in a sample – that’s your sperm count – then pass checks on how well they swim, their motility, and on their shape or morphology.

Sperm is also checked to ensure it can survive being frozen and stored at a sperm bank.

Rules vary across the world, but in the United Kingdom (UK) you also have to be relatively young – aged 18 to 45; be free of infections like HIV and gonorrhoea, and not be a carrier of mutations that can cause genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and sickle cell disease.

Overall, it means the pool of people that finally become sperm donors is small. In the UK, half the sperm ends up being imported.

But biology means a small number of donors can make vast numbers of children. It takes just one sperm to fertilise an egg, but there are tens of millions of sperm in each ejaculation.

Men will come to the clinic once or twice a week while they’re donating, which can be for months at a time.

Sarah Norcross, the director of the Progress Educational Trust charity which works on fertility and genomics, says the donor sperm shortage made it “a precious commodity” and “sperm banks and fertility clinics are maximising the use of available donors to meet demand”.

Donors are not chosen at random. It’s a similar process to the savage reality of dating apps, when some men get way more matches than others.

Depending on the sperm bank, you can browse photos, listen to their voice, find out what job they do and check out their height, weight and more.

“You know if they’re called Sven and they’ve got blonde hair, and they’re 1.93m and they’re an athlete, you know that’s far more attractive than a donor that looks like me,” says male fertility expert professor Allan Pacey, who used to run a sperm bank in Sheffield.

Denmark is home to some of the world’s biggest sperm banks, and has gained a reputation for producing “Viking babies”.

Ole Schou (71), the founder of the Cryos International sperm bank where a single 0.5ml vial of sperm costs from €100 (N$1 984) to more than €1 000 (about N$19 800), says the culture around sperm donation in Denmark is very different to other countries.

“There is less taboo about these issues, and we are an altruistic population, many sperm donors also donate blood.”

And that, Schou says, has allowed the country to become “one of the few exporters of sperm”.

But he argues Danish sperm is also popular due to genetics. He tells the BBC the Danish “blue-eyed and blonde-haired genes” are recessive traits, which means they need to come from both parents in order to appear in a child.

He says demand for donor sperm is coming mainly from “single, highly-educated, women in their 30s”. They now make up 60% of requests.

SPERM CROSSING BORDERS

One aspect of the sperm donor investigation published earlier this week was how a man’s sperm was collected at the European Sperm Bank in Denmark and then sent to 67 fertility clinics across 14 countries.

Nations have their own rules on how many times one man’s sperm can be used. Sometimes it is linked to a total number of children, others limit it to a certain number of mothers (so each family can have as many related children as they want).

The original argument around those limits was to avoid half-siblings – who didn’t know they were related – meeting each other, forming relationships and having children.

But there’s nothing to stop the same donor’s sperm being used in Italy and Spain and then The Netherlands and Belgium, as long as the rules are being followed in each country.

This creates circumstances where a sperm donor can legally father large numbers of children. Although the man is often in the dark about that fact.

“Many recipients, and also donors, are unaware that a single donor’s sperm can be lawfully used in many different countries – this fact should be better explained,” says Norcross.

In response to the investigation into the sperm donor who passed on a gene that led to cancer in some of the 197 children he fathered, officials in Belgium have called on the European Commission (EU) to establish a Europe-wide sperm donor register to monitor sperm travelling across borders.

Deputy prime minister Frank Vandenbroucke says “the initial mission of offering people the possibility of a family has given way to a veritable fertility business”.

The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology has also proposed a limit of 50 families per donor across the EU. That system would still allow one donor’s sperm to make more than 100 children if the families wanted two or more babies each.

Concerns have been raised about the impact on the children conceived through sperm donation, as well as donors, who often have no idea their sperm is being so widely distributed.

These risks are amplified by readily available DNA ancestry tests and social media where people can search for their children, siblings or the donor. In the UK, there is no longer anonymity for sperm donors and there is an official process through which children learn the identity of their biological father.

Schou argues more restrictions on sperm donation would just lead families to “turn to the private, totally unregulated, market”.

Dr John Appleby, a medical ethicist at Lancaster University, says the implications of using sperm so widely was a “vast” ethical minefield.

He says there are issues around identity, privacy, consent, dignity and more – making it a “balancing act” between competing needs.

Appleby says the fertility industry has a “responsibility to get a handle on the number of times a donor is used”, but agrees that global regulations would be undeniably “very difficult”.

He adds that a global sperm donor register, which has been suggested, comes with its own “ethical and legal challenges”.

– BBC Health

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