Sperm donation: Inside a deeply emotive world of powerful incentives, polarised views and heated debates
It was reported last week that the national sperm bank has only nine donors
Imagine discovering that your birth certificate is a lie and that your true biological father was a sperm donor who also fathered hundreds of other children. It’s a reality for more people than you might think.
Barry Stevens, who found out he was donor conceived (DC) when he was 18, discovered through DNA tests that his biological father, Bertold Wiesner, had up to 600 children. Wiesner founded the London Barton clinic in the 1940s, promising to provide sperm donors from “intelligent stock”, and there is evidence to suggest that around two-thirds of the children born to couples using this clinic were his.
In a similarly unsettling discovery, Jo Rose learnt that at the time of her donor conception, in the early 1970s, there was a small number of medical students from Barts NHS Trust – most of them now high-profile doctors – who donated sperm time and time again up and down Harley Street, essentially cornering the market.
“In my search for my own father, I met one of them and he said that this handful of men treated the clinics as a ‘w*** bank’, and estimated that he and each of his friends have between one and 300 children,” explains Rose. Add to this the estimated thousands of people in the UK who don’t even know they’re donor conceived (historically, clinics encouraged parents to keep it secret) and you start to see a disturbing picture.
Bertold Wiesner, who may have fathered up to 600 children (Rex)
The man from Barts admitted to being deeply troubled by the biological and moral consequences of his naïve choice to treat reproductive material as on par with blood to be donated (the more the merrier), says Rose, who has also suffered emotionally from the creepy discovery that she may have scores of half-siblings out there. “Before I met my partner, I used to worry I might wind up having a relationship with one of them unwittingly, as research shows people are likely to be attracted to someone they have some genetic commonality with,” she adds.
Since 2006, UK guidelines suggest that a maximum of 10 families should use sperm from the same donor. But there have already been six cases where donor sperm created more than 10 families, and the British Fertility Society is keen to “revaluate” the limit anyway. Moreover, sperm is regularly imported from abroad (notably America and Denmark, the so-called sperm capital of the world), meaning that many donor-conceived children are still growing up with an absurd numbers of siblings.
“Even under current UK guidelines, if one donor produces four children per family, that’s still a potential of 40 offspring per donor,” says Julia Feast, research and development consultant at the children’s charity CoramBAAF, who has a special interest in people’s right to access to information about their genetic origins.
Welcome to the world of sperm donation, where this is just one of many issues that stir up deep emotions, trigger polarised views, cause heated debates and lead to everything from heartfelt campaigning to downright foolish decision making. Powerful incentives are at stake here – women desperate to have babies, the fertility industry seeking big profits and many donor-conceived offspring claiming their basic human rights are being violated.
Last week, the subject hit headlines when it was reported that only nine men are registered as donors a year after the opening of Britain’s national sperm bank. For many who are hoping to conceive using donor sperm, the news will have felt devastating. Why the shortage, demanded journalists, and what can be done about it? Others, including Kamal Ahuja, managing director of the London Sperm Bank, were bemused by the news. “It’s fundamentally untrue that there’s a shortage of sperm. London Sperm Bank, which provides sperm to 26 private and NHS clinics, has an excess,” he says. (There are 50-odd “banks” in Britain, with a few hundred donors between them.)
And then there were those who were frankly relieved at the thought of a drop in sperm donor numbers, pointing to research such as the 2010 American study, “My Daddy’s Name is Donor”, which found that “young adults conceived through sperm donation are hurting more, are more confused and feel more isolated from their families”. The report continues, “They fare worse than their peers raised by biological families on important outcomes such as depression, delinquency and substance abuse.”
Laura Witjens, chief executive of the National Gamete Donation Trust (NGDT), a government-funded charitable body whose job it is to promote egg and sperm donation in the UK, has a more nuanced view. In fact, she says, there has been a rise in donor numbers over the years, but “it has failed to keep pace with the dramatic increase in demand for sperm, particularly from lesbian couples and single women”. Indeed, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), between 2010 and 2011, there was a 24 per cent increase in the number of lesbian couples undergoing donor insemination. “Then there’s the fact that, whilst many clinics do have enough sperm, many NHS patients, particularly those in certain geographical areas, can face a waiting list of over a year – longer still, if they’re from an ethnic minority.”
Witjens – an egg donor herself, who was attracted to the industry after feeling, even as a young woman, that she’d have done “anything illegal, immoral or unethical to have children” – says the lack of equal access is the very reason the national sperm bank, of which she is also chief executive, was set up last year. Based at the Birmingham Women’s Hospital and funded by the Department of Health, its aim is to provide a central store of sperm for both private and NHS clinics so that they no longer have to buy from overseas and so that fewer women resort to alternatives (more of which later).
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