First came love, then came marriage, but before Mira came in a baby carriage, Ben Weber did “a fun, naughty, slightly strange thing.” And he doesn’t mean sex.
Quite bluntly, Weber, a 32-year-old arts educator in New York City, means he masturbated into a Mason jar, handed it off to his dear friends, a married lesbian couple and left their house while one of them used a feeding syringe to inseminate the other. About a month later, he learned they were pregnant. “It was unbelievable,” says Weber, who met Mira, now about 8 weeks old, for the first time last week.
[See: In Vitro Fertilization Grows Up.]
Weber’s experience becoming a sperm donor to friends — aka a “directed” or “known” donor — is a lot different from the more common type of sperm donor, called “anonymous,” who rarely knows anything about, let alone meets, his sperm’s recipients or their offspring.
And while arrangements like Weber’s come with their own set of risks (the so-called “turkey-baster method” can cause infections in the woman, a lack of legal oversight may raise parental rights questions later and the absence of clinical protocols can mean recipients might not know everything about the donor’s medical record), men like him tend to at least be quite aware of what they’re getting into. “That is the most exciting part of it: I am participating in building this intentional, special kind of family,” Weber says.
Not so much for anonymous donors, who are typically lured to sperm banks by the prospect of earning money for doing something pleasurable and routine — and surprised to learn it entails so much more. “It’s not easy and I think there’s a public perception that, ‘I need quick money for my rent at the end of this month,'” says Susan Kellogg-Spadt, director of female sexual medicine at the Center for Pelvic Medicine in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. “That [level of simplicity] may have been yesteryear, but it’s certainly not now.” Here’s what she and other experts say men should know before donating sperm via a bank today:
1. It’s very selective.
While sperm donation used to almost entirely help heterosexual couples struggling with male infertility have kids, about 70 percent of donor sperm recipients today are lesbian couples or single moms by choice, says Scott Brown, director of client experience and communications at California Cryobank, which has four donor labs in the U.S. “It’s more in demand than ever before,” Kellogg-Spadt says.
As a result, donor sperm seekers are willing to pay sperm banks good money to choose sperm from their Rolodexes of men who will ultimately provide half of their child’s genetic makeup. For the donors, that means the stakes are high: They need to be healthy, well-educated and sometimes above a certain height to be considered for acceptance. If applicants get through the initial application process, they typically must provide an extensive medical history, undergo STD testing and a “specimen test” for sperm quality and quantity and, if they get that far, genetic testing. Less than 1 percent of all applicants at California Cryobank qualify to become donors.
[See: Which Medical Screenings Should You Have in 2017?]
“Everybody jokes that they want 6-foot-2 or taller and an Ivy League education and a professional degree, and I don’t think that’s that far from the truth,” says Dr. Joseph Alukal, director of male reproductive health and a clinical associate professor of urology at NYU Langone Medical Center. “They’re going to refuse anybody who doesn’t have a perfect count because they have the luxury of doing that.”
2. It’s a commitment.
Becoming a sperm donor involves more than changing the scenery when masturbating once or twice. The screening process itself takes a few months, and then most approved donors must go into the clinic once or twice a week for a year to contribute sufficient sperm, Brown says.
Not only might that be problematic for work or personal travel, it can also affect your personal life since donors are usually asked not to ejaculate for 24 to 48 hours before each donation to maximize the sperm’s quantity. And you have to be patient for your paycheck: You probably won’t see money (typically $35 to $50 per “specimen”) until about six months into the process since the bank has to receive results on a second set of blood tests first.
3. Anonymity isn’t guaranteed.
While donor banks vary in their policies, sperm donors at California Cryobank have three options: They can allow the bank to release identifying information to offspring when they turn 18, commit to accepting a minimum of one anonymous contact from their offspring when they turn 18 or, if they opt for “anonymous,” they still must understand that the facility might contact them later in life if the offspring request more information or contact, which the men can refuse. While banks do their best to protect all men’s and recipients’ anonymity, and donors waive all parental rights and responsibilities, any offspring with curiosity, a DNA kit and the internet might still be able to track them down, experts say.
“The psychological risk is that there’s no such thing as anonymity,” says Carole LieberWilkins, a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles who’s counseled both sperm donors and, more often, infertile couples who have or are trying to become pregnant using donor sperm. “[Sperm donors] have to anticipate that at some point in the future, they may be contacted for medical or psychological reasons or by the offspring.”
That means it’s important to consider how your donations might affect your family, current and future partners and even future kids. For instance, how might your spouse feel about your genetic material already being out there? How might your kids feel about having an unknown number of genetic half-siblings? How might you feel if you face your own infertility struggles later in life? “Sperm quality can change over time in a number of ways,” LieberWilkins says. “We ask donors to consider that, even though it’s impossible to know how one will feel in the future.”
[See: What Only Your Partner Knows About Your Health.]
4. It’s a lifelong responsibility.
Long after you’ve sealed the cup on your last deposit, having donated your sperm is no small deal. If you or someone in your family ends up getting cancer or another illness with a genetic link that you haven’t previously reported, for example, it’s important to update the sperm bank about your health history, LieberWilkins says. “Assisting to create human life — there’s responsibility that comes with that,” she says.
On the upside, being a sperm donor comes with virtually no medical risks and, in fact, delivers a medical benefit: the chance to be screened, free of charge, for STDs, sperm quality and quantity, genetic conditions (if you get that far) and more. “This is another way to find out how healthy you are as a man,” Kellogg-Spadt says. “These are wonderful things to know.”
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4 Things to Know Before Becoming a Sperm Donor originally appeared on usnews.com
