Story by Elliott Kennedy
Photos by Alicia Greenwell
Number 9894: Brown hair and blue eyes. Speaks French and Spanish. Holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in civil engineering. Number 6371: Blonde hair and hazel eyes. Loves dogs, jazz music, and cooking. Number 9224…4635…8719… Scrolling down the website, the four-digit codes blur into one continuous spectrum. So many options. So many men. So much sperm.
Welcome to the world of assisted reproductive technology (ART), where sperm and eggs can be selected based on desired characteristics from an online pool, an “eBaby” of sorts. A world where the term “traditional family” is checked at the clinic door. Where single moms, gay couples, and infertile newlyweds invite a stranger into their lives—and sometimes their bodies—to achieve the coveted title of “parent.”
Scientific advances have cultivated a medical landscape lush with reproductive options such as hormone treatments, surrogacy, and in vitro fertilization. For the most part, these practices have flown under the radar of political and social controversy, only propelled into the limelight in extreme circumstances. Yet there is one reproductive procedure that has arguably endured more criticism and suffered more misconceptions than others: sperm and egg donation.
The sources of these misconceptions are easy to pinpoint. Within the last four years, popular culture has become a breeding ground for baby fever. Jon and Kate Plus Eight aired on TLC in 2008, bringing with it a wave of criticism about the size of the family and the dynamics within it. In 2009, Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets, earning her the now infamous nickname “Octomom.” Numerous other media outlets have reported on the rapid growth of the fertility industry, yanking ART center stage and sometimes casting it in the least flattering of lights.
Take for example a 2006 article on MSNBC.com that shares the story of five sperm donor-conceived children who contracted a rare disease that affects less than 0.05 percent of the population. Or CNN’s 2008 web article, “Dim economy drives women to donate eggs for profit.” Then just last year, authors Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquardt claimed that sperm and egg donation centers are “not regulated and that [donor-conceived] children’s health and well-being are not tracked.”
The resulting confusion surrounding ART is understandable. With terms such as estradiol and gonadotropins, it’s difficult to not get lost in the complexities. But the negative stigma and exaggerated stereotypes concerning sperm and egg donation are even more difficult to comprehend. Why are they given so much weight? Who do they affect? And most important, are they true?
Misconception #1:
The business of sperm and egg donation is an under-regulated industry that has a reputation as a twenty-first century get-rich-quick scheme.
Reality: Sperm banks and egg donation facilities must obey numerous local, state, and national statutes. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are just a few of the national organizations that oversee the activities of the fertility industry.
“In order to be a clinic, to simply open our doors, we have to abide by a myriad of guidelines, regulations, and laws,” says Brian Sereda, the sperm bank facilitator at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). “The FDA, especially, is really harsh.”
In May 2005, the FDA launched a rigorous program designed to prevent the spread of infectious diseases through sperm donation. Through this program, any clinic with a sperm donation program is subject to random inspections, and all semen samples are required to remain under quarantine for a minimum of six months before being available for patient use.
“It’s grueling,” Sereda says of the FDA guidelines. But it’s nothing compared to the intrusive process sperm and egg donor applicants must endure.
At OHSU, potential donors go through an extensive screening process that can last for weeks or sometimes months. A potential sperm donor begins by listening to a telephone recording that outlines all the basic requirements for eligibility. If he meets the listed prerequisites, he schedules a phone interview with a bank facilitator, such as Sereda, where he is asked to give details about himself: his appearance, his likes and dislikes, his education, even his hobbies.
Egg donor applicants are asked similarly wide-ranging questions. College student Ashley Andersen donated eggs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) last year. “I remember one question in particular,” she recalls. “They asked me if I enjoyed stamp collecting.”
Patients’ medical histories usually constitute the bulk of the interview questions. Both sperm and egg donor applicants must provide medical histories reaching back as many as three generations. According to the medical experts on New York State’s Task Force on Life and the Law, “if you do not have access to the necessary information, either because you are adopted or there is no informed person to ask” you cannot become a donor.
However, for those applicants who can supply the required facts, the screening process continues: full-body physical examinations, blood and urine tests, ultrasounds, semen analyses, STD testing, genetic screening, supplementary interviews, and psychological counseling. Only after this entire process is complete can an applicant begin the process of donation.
“I was taken aback by how difficult it is to become a donor,” Sereda says. “I had always thought anybody could donate, but that’s simply not true.”
And yet, the misconception that donating sperm and eggs is an easy way to make a quick buck continues. Such was the worry in a 2007 New York Times article in which author Roni Caryn Rabin reported, “ethicists and some women’s health advocates worry that lucrative payments are enticing to young women with credit card debt and steep tuition bills to sell eggs without seriously evaluating the risks.”
Not so, says Sereda. “It’s not a fun or easy process. The ones who need the money—I mean really need the money—are the ones who don’t make it past the paperwork.”
The application process has been specifically designed to discourage financially focused men and women from donating. Since sperm and egg donation procedures can be prolonged over multiple weeks, they are anything but quick.
“Donors have to do a lot of work up front,” Sereda says. “They get stuck with needles quite a lot before they even see the financial payoff.”
Men and women who donate often consider the money a secondary or even tertiary factor in their decision. Some have friends or family members who are infertile and feel that donating is their way to show support. Others feel grateful to have experienced the joy of having their own kids and want to help others share in such happiness.
“I truly believe donors want, in their heart of hearts, to help people,” says Dr. Elizabeth Barbieri, reproductive endocrinologist at Oregon Reproductive Medicine. “It’s a lot to go through if you’re not wholly dedicated to it.”
Misconception #2:
Anonymous sperm and egg donation creates legally protected “deadbeat parents” who have been permitted by the government to abandon responsibility for their potentially conceived children.
Reality: Sperm and egg donors are chosen based on a rigorous screening process that requires dedication and maturity—two words that do not fit the typical definition of a “deadbeat.” Looking at the OHSU sperm donor list, the men behind the four-digit codes seem anything but cavalier. Six work in the medical field, three are teachers, and one is a software developer. Their interests range from reading about philosophy and playing the harmonica to running marathons and gardening. One of them listed Where the Wild Things Are among his favorite childhood books.
“They’re awesome guys,” says Sereda of the donors he works with at OHSU. “If the bank were to close right now, I think their hearts would be heavy. They’re all so altruistic and empathetic.” But a quick visit online yields a wealth of opposing opinions.
Simply type “sperm donor dads” into the search engine on Facebook, and the result is astoundingly negative, even hostile. Hundreds of groups pop up with names such as “We Hate Sperm Donors, Big Up Real Daddies,” “Happy Sperm Donor Day to All the Deadbeat Dads Out There,” and “Sperm Donors Should Be Castrated.”
Philip Jonsrud, a junior at the University of Oregon and a child conceived from donated sperm, finds such opinions extremely offensive.
“I wouldn’t be sitting here right now if that so-called ‘deadbeat’ hadn’t been kind enough to give up his time and donate sperm,” Jonsrud says. “So I have nothing but respect for him. And I think any negative attention focused on the donor is not only offensive to the person who helped create you, but also insulting to the parents who raised you.”
UNC student and egg donor Andersen says accusations of being a deadbeat are simply “weird.” She says she never encountered feelings of disapproval about her decision to donate eggs. “What? No way,” she says about the idea.
“I am not abandoning a child, because it’s not a child,” she adds. “It’s something that might have a better existence than on a bloodied tampon in the toilet.”
Still, her friends’ unconditional support couldn’t completely stop curious questions. “Sometimes they would say to me, ‘Don’t you think it will be weird to have a kid out there?’ Yeah, that would be weird … if it was my kid and I was its mother. But I’m not. A mother is a feeling you get, a person who raises you, who shapes you as a person. I’m not that person.”
Nor are any of the other thousands of men and women who donate each year, says Dr. Mary Hinckley, reproductive endocrinologist at the California-based Reproductive Science Center.
“Donors aren’t signing up to be parents,” she adds. “They never intended to be moms or dads so they can’t be classified as ‘deadbeat dads’ and ‘abandoning moms.’ They can’t be what they never were.”
Jonsrud’s mother and sperm donor recipient, Laurie Godfrey, agrees. “I call bullshit on that,” Godfrey says of people who hold negative views of sperm donors. “I think bashing them grossly takes away from the point of seeking donation—the point being that you’re trying to have a baby, not a husband or a wife.”
Angie Gambone, a New Jersey-based attorney who specializes in non-traditional family issues, says that the definition of “parent” can sometimes be difficult to isolate in cases involving sperm and egg donors. Gambone explains that there are two definitions of “parent” within this field. The term “biological parent” means that a child was conceived as a result of the donor’s reproductive contributions. “Intended parents” are the people who will assume all legal rights and responsibilities for the child.
“It gets a little tricky to define the term ‘parent’ because, in essence, all of the parties involved are ‘parents’ in some form, whether through law or nature,” Gambone says.
But any trickiness takes a back seat to the stringency of the law. Both donors and recipients sign contracts recognizing legal standing in the fertility procedure. The donors know they forfeit all rights to their eggs or sperm to the potential recipients who will be the legal parents of any resulting children. All parties are made fully aware of their rights and responsibilities before any procedures take place. “This protects the intended parents who crave that security of knowing that their child cannot be taken away from them,” Gambone says.
Misconception #3:
Third-party reproduction creates maladjusted children who cannot develop a sense of personal identity because they feel disconnected from their biological families. Consequently, donor-conceived people are more likely to suffer from psychological and social disorders.
Reality: The portrayal of donor-conceived children as victims of a corrupt medical field is often exaggerated and hyped-up for the sake of media sparkle.
Last year, authors Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquardt wrote an article in conjunction with the Christian research group the Commission on Parenthood’s Future that tossed around such weighty claims as, “The donor offspring are more likely than the adopted offspring to have struggled with delinquency and … a significant number have confronted depression.” The article also asserts that donor-conceived children are “more than 1.5 times as likely” to report mental health problems because they feel like a “freak of nature” or a “lab experiment.”
These would be compelling claims if they held any water. The 485 donor-conceived persons that Clark and Marquardt surveyed for their article represent less than one percent of the more than 60,000 donor-conceived babies born in the United States each year. However, because large health organizations have not yet begun conducting major surveys about this crossroads of medicine and psychology, the study has been republished on numerous blogs, perpetuating the false idea that these statistics are a substantial representation of the donor-conceived population.
When compared to information gathered by nationally recognized groups, it becomes clear that social and psychological disorders are a growing trend among all American youth—not just donor-conceived children.
Clark and Marquardt claim that depression is a common problem for donor-conceived people. Yet, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, depression affects more adults than cancer, HIV/AIDS, and coronary heart disease combined. TeenDepression.org reports that at least 20 percent of teens will experience depression before reaching adulthood. A study published in the scholarly journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior found that the stress of college life leads nearly ten percent of students to contemplate suicide.
Delinquency and mental health problems were also recorded in the Clark-Marquardt study as major issues confronting donor-conceived children. But National Public Radio reported in 2008 that children who were adopted are also at risk for such problems, including developing oppositional defiant disorder, a condition marked by being “persistently hostile and disobedient.” In June, Time published an American Sociological Review survey that showed children of divorced parents also often struggle to form friendships and express themselves in healthy, productive ways.
Looking at websites such as AnonymousUs.org, where donor-conceived children can “revolt” against their unconventional roots, a new and rarely discussed theory presents itself: isn’t it possible that any existing social and psychological disorders are not due to the donor-conceived person’s unconventional origins, but to the secrecy surrounding these origins?
The Washington Post reports that among the first generation of sperm- and egg-donor babies born in the 1980s and 1990s, the vast majority (up to 75 percent) were not told about their true conception. While sperm and egg donation has become more publicly accepted, it seems that much of it is still kept under wraps within families.
One AnonymousUs.org commentator wrote that her relationship with her mother was ruined after she was told about her roots. She blames the fertility industry. “For 22 years of my life she told me everything and was my best friend. But [the fertility industry] told her … that she should keep it a secret. The secrecy, deception, and ignorance surrounding human reproduction is the reason,” the commentator says that she and her mother are no longer close.
According to Kris Probasco, author of Discussions With Children About Their Donor Conception, truth is the healthiest and most respectful way to deal with this sticky situation: “All discussions with children should place emphasis on acceptance of the total child, acceptance of the donor as a good person, and recognizing that donor conception is basically one person helping others to become a family with children.”
“I always told myself this wasn’t going to be a secret, from him or anyone else,” says Godfrey of her decision to be open with her son about his conception. “There’s no story I could make up that would be more fantastic than the truth.”
Third-party reproduction is not a dark and malicious industry. It does not foster the development of unsafe medical practices, deadbeat parents, or emotionally stunted children, nor does it intend to. Pop culture often casts a shadow over all procedures, triggering a wave of prejudices that are based on a few misconceptions.
But the incongruities do not lie within the fertility industry, but rather outside it. Leaving out the minor, boring details like the applications that run up to five pages long or the screening processes that take months ultimately obscures the original point of ART: to conceive a child.
“The people who are willing to pay that much money, who are willing to go through that kind of stress when their bodies clearly don’t want to, who want a kid that badly—those are the kind of people who deserve to have a family,” Andersen says. “They are the kind of people who deserve any help available to have a baby.”

Gallery • 4 Photos

The Art of Conception