The Other Banking Crisis

I can sympathize with donor-conceived individuals like Ryan Kramer who have tried to track down their fathers using genetic databases. All I know of my biological father is that he was a tall, blue-eyed law student from the East Coast. For a time, especially during my adolescence, I craved to know more. I wished I’d been born later, after most clinics relaxed the rules.

Now I feel differently. What bothers me about the bans on anonymity isn’t that they will hurt the fertility industry, which at $3 billion a year in revenues is doing just fine. For me, it’s a lot simpler. Without privacy and compensation, many donors simply aren’t going to step forward, which is exactly what’s causing the shortage we’re seeing right now. And if, as a result of fewer donors, the sperm recession becomes a full-blown sperm depression, infertile and same-sex couples are going to find the difficult task of having a child a whole lot harder.

The internet and DNA testing have given us powerful new tools for finding and identifying people. This doesn’t mean those tools should be taken advantage of in all situations—some donors want to be tracked down, but many others simply want to be left alone. They donated sperm years ago in return for, say, college tuition and the promise of anonymity, the same promise given to a kidney donor. Unlike kidney recipients, of course, we products of IVF did not consent to the anonymous transaction. But my suspicion is that some of these new regulations have less to do with bioethics than with our increasing expectations as consumers. We feel it’s our right to know, even if that makes it more difficult for others seeking donated sperm down the line.

My parents, who lived hand-to-mouth, barely scraped together enough money to afford their fertility doctor’s modest fees. But even though they were poor, the service was within reach. That’s always been one of the great things about the sperm banking system: it’s low-rent. Donors get around $75 per specimen; single-serve vials of semen can be bought for a hundred bucks. Why? Because the world has more sperm than it knows what to do with, and the distribution system has put a premium on accessibility.

But when sperm banks dry up, will the price of sperm skyrocket? Will it become a product for only the wealthiest of would-be parents? I suspect these are real possibilities, should the shortage continue to worsen.

Now that I think about it, maybe I wasn’t born too soon.

Justin Clark is a writer based in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, his articles and essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, LA Weekly, and Nerve.