Sperm Donation: On Donor Profiles

When you're in the market to buy sperm, anonymous or open, you can nearly always pay a fee to download a profile. California Cryobank, as of today, charges $17 to download what they call their "long profile". It contains SAT scores, medical information, and a few extra details outside of the short (free) profile.

One has to wonder how truthful these profiles really are. How many of these 20-something men really know their ethnicity or family's medical history accurately enough to convey it to women trying to conceive? These guys are being paid about $100 a shot (sorry) for their sperm and what is the incentive to spend hours filling out medical history forms in order to do this? "Grandma, I need your medical history so I can donate sperm and get $100 a load. Can you please help me out?" I'm sure these conversations rarely happen and so I have to question to validity of the data that these donors provide.

One donor, whose information I paid for, when asked why he was donating honestly said that he was doing this for the money, plain and simple. I appreciate his honesty. I really do. But I'm a prospective buyer and I would plan on buying the entire packet of information for my child, and in there my child would read that their genetic father donated sperm for money.

For money.

At least adopted children have a better story than that. So my child would be greeted with the idea that the impetus for their existence amounted to little more than a couple hundred dollars in their father's pocket?

I am sorry but no matter how good the donor looks on paper, I would never want my child to read something so base, so unfeeling as that, for the reason for their existence.

Another donor that I considered, because the clinic said that he was quite attractive, said that he had smoked pot EVERY DAY from 1999 to 2006. The profile showed that he applied to be a donor in 2007. Oh really. So he decided to stop smoking COMPLETELY in 2007 just so he could donate sperm? Seriously, we're supposed to believe this? THC, the active ingredient in pot, is absorbed by the fat in one's body, and can wreak havoc in the body for a period after one has ceased to smoke. And so when I give my child THIS donor's profile, and s/he asked, "Gee mom, why did you pick this donor when he was a druggie?" what on earth would I say? Scratch this one, too.

After reading profile after profile, paying $17 for numerous profiles, I realized what a gimmick this sperm bank crap was. They really need to do drug testing and make a subscription model so that us prospective parents can do a thorough screening of the sperm donors.

I don't trust these young men's profiles. They're being paid. They're anonymous. I question their motives. There's no accountability or liability should they have lied that known genetic mutations run amuk in their families. And most of them probably don't know the difference between Serbian and Slovakian when citing their ethnicities.

It's so scary to be in the position of having to rely on donor sperm to become a parent. Truly, it is. I applaud Sweden and other EU counties for doing away with anonymous donor sperm and only hope that the U.S. will wise up and follow suit.