There are more reasons than not for rejection: Kelley Fitzgerald, CCB’s Cambridge branch manager, explains that even things like trips to Europe can disqualify a guy because of the possibility he consumed tainted meat. Claims on the application, like having gone to Harvard, are also vetted for accuracy.
And California CryoBank demands plenty from those who are accepted. A routine donor at CCB is expected to give three specimens a week — and remain abstinent the rest of the time.
It’s no surprise then that the newest trend in donorship is to forego the paperwork and restriction and just do it oneself. Indeed, just as if you were looking for a used couch or a “massage,” Craigslist and the Web offer a whole new marketplace.
I don’t exactly recommend typing “sperm” in the search form on Craigslist — unless you’re looking for a different sort of donor relationship — but you can find a donor on the site easily enough, anywhere in New England.
Likewise, there are men with their own Web sites advertising their semen, for sale or otherwise. One is Sean S., a 34 year-old software consultant from Somerville, Massachusetts, who also posted an ad on Craigslist’s Warwick community page. Sean even designed software to find nearby Craigslist locations where people seeking donors have recently posted.
Like many of the doctors who run fertility centers, Sean’s reasons for donating are two-fold. After reading about the difficulties women had finding “known donors” — men willing to be known by the child — Sean “immediately understood that non-anonymous donation would really help people,” he writes in an e-mail. “And the stated reason why it isn’t done (donors want to be anonymous) simply didn’t apply to me.”
Then there’s the second reason: the desire to have babies. As Sean writes on his site, “I come from a very small family, and like the idea of there being some more people in the world who share my genes.”
Rothman considers this to be at the heart of why people donate. “For 600 billion years we have wanted our seed out there,” he says.
Still, it took Sean 11 years to actually do it. What stopped him: the near-impossibility of finding a sperm bank that accepted known donors.
“Nearly all sperm banks required anonymity. I would have been willing to be a known donor much sooner, but had no effective way of getting in touch with possible recipients. The Internet,” he says, “made that possible.”
Through Craigslist and his Web site, Sean has become the father of four children through donorship, with another on the way. According to Sean, the process is fairly simple: he and the recipient “have an initial meeting to make sure we’re comfortable with each other, and sign an initial donor contract.” Using an ovulation test, the recipient keeps in daily contact with Sean.
“When she gets a positive, we plan a meeting for sometime in the next 24 hours, and I hand over the collection cup,” he says.
The known donor idea is controversial. Danish sperm is so popular in part because of the strict anonymity laws enforced by Denmark on its sperm banks. In England, where donor anonymity is illegal, Deborah Spar says they’ve effectively “killed the market.”
