It started with a Facebook post tapped out on a whim.
“Hello selfless people,” Cody Jackson wrote from her bed, two days after Christmas 2020, “my partner and I are a same-sex couple looking to fulfil our dream of creating a family.”
The couple, then in their late 20s, were doing more than just thinking about having a baby. By the time she hit post, Cody’s partner Sarah Armstrong had already undergone two unsuccessful rounds of insemination at a fertility clinic with sperm from a catalogue of anonymised donors.
Costs were racking up, not only from the insemination procedures themselves, but also the charge for accessing donor sperm, the mandated counselling sessions, and the myriad other tests and procedures needed before they could even start the process of trying to get pregnant. In total, they had spent roughly $15,000 and had nothing to show for it.
When the clinic suggested they try in vitro fertilisation (IVF), a more expensive and physically arduous procedure that involves joining the egg and sperm outside the body, they were shocked. “I was young and had no fertility issues, so we thought it seemed ludicrous to put my body through IVF so quickly,” says Sarah, who is now 32. “We were like, no not interested in that at the moment, put a pause on it.”
That’s when, in the middle of Melbourne’s first COVID summer, they stumbled across a Facebook group called Sperm Donation Australia.
“We were kind of joking about it, like ‘how do people do that sort of thing’, and then Cody was like ‘want to make a post?’,” Sarah says. “I took her phone and drafted up a little bit of a mock post and asked ‘What do you think of that?’ and Cody just looked at it and clicked post. We’re very impulsive people, that was literally it.”
A growing number of Australian women are bypassing traditional fertility clinics and seeking out sperm donors online, a practice that concerns some legal and health experts who describe informal sperm donation as a kind of “wild west” — a lawless and unregulated space fraught with safety risks and moral quandaries.
A Netflix documentary series released earlier this month offers a real-world example of what can go wrong. The Man With 1,000 Kids follows the saga of Jonathan Jacob Meijer, a Dutch so-called “super donor” who travelled the world donating sperm to hundreds or possibly thousands of women through poorly regulated international clinics and entirely unregulated online groups, all while allegedly lying to the would-be mothers about the number of children he had fathered.
While it is an undoubtedly extreme case, the series has put a spotlight on a thriving online sperm market that has operated in plain view for years. A market that has helped conceive countless real children, including Cody and Sarah’s two-year-old son.
Into the online sperm market
It took just two days from when they posted to when Cody and Sarah first sat across from their sperm donor in a Melbourne cafe. The donor, who isn’t being named to protect his privacy, had messaged them within hours with his pitch: he was a first-time donor, healthy, young, ate a balanced diet, with no family history of serious health issues.
He was one of about 15 potential donors who responded to their call out — more options than they were presented with at the clinic.
The couple had a set of criteria. They were only looking for artificial insemination, or AI as it’s called in the group, not natural insemination (NI, otherwise known as sex); they didn’t want to co-parent, but were open to providing updates on the child; and ideally they wanted someone who would be open to donating again, so they could give the baby a sibling.
“We went in with our questions, he had also come with his questions, which just proved to us that he was in it for the right reasons … we got really good vibes,” Cody says. “Five minutes after getting back in the car we were like, ‘We really like him, we want to take the next step’.”
Once the results from sperm and STI testing were in, and Sarah was ovulating, the donor drove to their apartment. They made small talk and then left him alone while they went for a walk. When they arrived home a plastic medical sample jar was waiting on the bathroom counter. Using an at-home kit with a specialised syringe with a curved plug to make sure no sperm was left behind — “it could be the lucky sperm that’s stuck in there” — Cody inseminated Sarah in the privacy of their home.
They would repeat this process multiple times every cycle for the next three months. “There was always that little sense of awkwardness, all three of us knew why we were there. A stranger was coming into our house, was going to watch who knows what in our bathroom, and you know, ejaculate into a cup,” Sarah says. “It’s a really bizarre concept, but it’s exactly what made our baby.”
In the Sperm Australia Facebook group, frankly discussing the ingredients that go into making a baby is the opposite of bizarre — it’s completely normal. Donors post their sperm count to thousands of strangers in the same paragraph they detail their hobbies and childhood hair colour. In response, prospective parents, nearly always women, type out their reasons for wanting children and why they’ve turned to the group, often with some version of the caveat, “If you know me in real life, please respect my privacy”.
The group, founded a decade ago, is not the only one of its kind but it’s by far the largest in Australia, with more than 20,000 members at the time of publishing. “The gravity of the issue, or the size of the group of people that are seeking to donate and those that are sourcing sperm online, is probably a lot larger than 20,000,” says Deakin University Associate Professor Neera Bhatia.
Given the group is made up of thousands of strangers, the mood is, perhaps surprisingly, wholesome — at least by social media standards. When a woman raises her concerns about COVID-vaccinated donors, there are no arguments in the comments. Others who share stories of relationship breakdowns, traumatic births, and failed fertility treatments are met with only well wishes and offers to help.
This decorum is, at least in part, a result of the group’s strict entry criteria and rules, created and maintained by its founder, Adam Hooper. “I felt compelled to clean it up and make it safe,” the 38-year-old Perth resident says. “We don’t want people starting to go, ‘Hey, I’m ovulating in five minutes can anyone come meet me?’ … no you need to get to know people first.”
Another big no-no is pressuring people into insemination methods not advertised in their post (which must be listed for it to be published), an infraction that could land members a sanction and then, if it’s repeated, a lifetime ban, according to Adam. “All posts need to be respected, and if you’re approaching someone ignoring what they’ve written, you’ll be punished,” he says.
Adam has become a sort of poster boy for informal sperm donation, a term he rejects because “if you don’t get the chance to meet someone, that’s informal, when you’re meeting someone, I’d say that’s formal”. His reputation has been cultivated through regular media interviews, the Facebook group and the fertility podcast he’s been hosting since 2018.
Adam is also an experienced donor. Though, he says, he’s doing less of that these days and now only through clinics as what’s called a known donor. “I consider these my twilight years,” he says. “I’ve pretty much stopped donating in my own backyard, but every now and then I come across someone from another state or country who wants help.” (The product page of his website currently advertises what it costs for him to travel abroad to donate.)
Over about a decade, Adam says he’s donated to “a tad over 20 families”, most of whom are now in a private “mother’s group” he manages on Facebook. A couple of times a year the parents and half-siblings — sometimes called “diblings” — get together for barbecues or trips to the water park. Adam’s own two children come along. “They love meeting new babies or seeing siblings they’ve met before,” he says. “When you’re open and transparent and don’t lie to your children, you don’t need experts telling you about how they’re going to feel because you’re having those conversations day to day.”
When it comes to how the donor children view Adam, he’s led by the mothers and children. Some call him “DD”, short for donor dad. As for the future, he does think about how available he will be if in 20 years all those donor children want active relationships with him. That calculation has formed part of his decision to retire. “I feel like I’ve done enough,” he says.
Cutting out the middleman
While there is no way to know for sure the exact number of children being conceived through informal sperm donation, there are signs it’s increasing in popularity.
Adam keeps a tally of the known pregnancies to come out of Sperm Donation Australia: In 2021, he says he recorded 528, in 2022, 714, last year, 903, and seven months into this year, he says he’s already recorded 702. (ABC News is not able to independently verify these numbers.)
Then there are other meeting places, like the Just a Baby app, sometimes described as a sort of Tinder for potential donors, surrogates and co-parents. The app’s founder and chief executive, West Australian Paul Ryan, told ABC News that it’s so far been downloaded more than 300,000 times across the Western world.
“We are not a sperm donor catalogue,” Paul says. “You need three things to make a baby: sperm, eggs and a womb. A lot of the time, people are not seeking a ‘donor’ per se, they just need someone to help them out … we open the door to more human encounters.” Paul does not align his app with Facebook groups and he’s even hesitant to use the term “sperm donor” — though, he says, it does feature in some of the apps marketing for “SEO reasons” — because it excludes those who want to be fathers themselves, just in a less-conventional way.
Of course, finding and using sperm donors outside clinics is not a new phenomenon. “For eternity there have been private arrangements for sperm donation,” says Professor Steve Robson, a fertility specialist and president of the Australian Medical Association. What’s changed, he says, is how those people find each other. “The one thing that really has put this on the map is social media and the ability to use social media to line up women with potential donors.”
This is happening against the backdrop of a booming assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry. There are about 90 accredited fertility clinics across the country, and these days, around one in 18 Australian babies are conceived through IVF. So, why are some people looking elsewhere?
The first draw-card is obvious: cost. It’s illegal to receive payment for sperm in Australia so all donors must provide it altruistically, but fertility clinics often charge a fee to access their donor catalogue. This is on top of the cost of procedures and consultations.
While some ART treatments are covered by Medicare, there are significant out-of-pocket fees (around $2,300-$2,500 for the first cycle of intra-uterine insemination) and rebates aren’t available to everyone. Those seeking treatment are split into two categories: “socially infertile” and “medically infertile”, the former referring to people who are physically able to get pregnant but not able to do so naturally due to their sexual preference or circumstances. If you’re considered “socially infertile” — like Cody and Sarah — Medicare rebates are only available after two rounds of failed intra-uterine insemination or a diagnosis of medical infertility.
A sperm shortage has also highlighted a lack of diversity in formal donor catalogues, which is a problem when recipients want their children to look like them.
But perhaps most importantly, the majority of people ABC News spoke to said they decided on the unconventional path because they wanted a relationship — however fleeting or deep — with the person they were making a baby with. While sperm donors who donate through Australian clinics can no longer remain completely anonymous, their identity is only released upon request once the donor-conceived child turns 18.
That is why Adam started the Facebook group, after initially considering donating to clinics. “I didn’t get to look into people’s eyes and see who they are, if they’re ready to be a parent and how much it meant to them,” he says. “I don’t want my own two children walking past kids on the street and not knowing who they are”.
Chris*, who started donating sperm via the Facebook group in 2021, was also drawn in by the promise of connection. “I was pretty socially isolated at the time, so I was probably thinking it’d be interesting to meet some of these people looking to start a family and build some nice friendships out of it as well,” the 29-year-old, who had never considered donating before reading about the group in a newspaper, says.
His donations have so far led to eight babies, including one set of twins. In most instances, recipients meet Chris at his apartment and wait in the car. “I come downstairs and it feels like I’m about to do a drug deal,” he laughs, “Even talking about it feels so weird … the first time is the most awkward, after that it becomes ‘OK, we are doing this, it’s a bit bizarre, but hey, it’s what you’ve got to do’.”
For the recipients, the motivation is clear. But Chris isn’t trying to have a baby — though he does hope to have his own children one day — so why do it? “It’s just heartwarming. I get some seriously cute photos for Christmas, Easter and birthdays,” he says. “It makes me feel like I’m actually doing something half decent in the world, you know, that I’m not a completely useless person.”
Experts warn of a ‘Wild West’
As the popularity of online sperm donation groups has grown, so have concerns that the law isn’t keeping up. Dr Bhatia, the head of Deakin University’s Law Health and Society Unit, is one of those sounding the alarm. “Is this something that’s likely to go away? Probably not,” she says, “that’s why I continue to research in this space to see how it can be better regulated … because of the larger broader implications to society.”
Her research focuses on so-called “shadow markets”, not only for sperm but also other bodily fluids, like breast milk. “The first thing that struck me was the immense amount of risk involved,” she says. “The idea of creating a person, a human, a baby, or thinking of conceiving a child using sperm that was sourced through the internet was, to me, just absolutely wild as a concept.”
In a research paper published in the Adelaide Law Review in 2022, she described these groups as a wild west, outside the scope of legal protection and regulation. “What you’re working with, fundamentally, is a system based on trust,” Dr Bhatia says. “You’re trusting that the person that you’re conversing with … that they have no family history of disease or illness or no undisclosed medical or genetic conditions.”
Beyond the potential health issues, she says the other major risk is the lack of formal record-keeping. Most Australian states have a legislated cap on the number of families a donor can provide sperm to, which is ostensibly meant to protect donor children against the trauma of finding out they have large numbers of half-siblings and the risk they would unknowingly meet and reproduce, a phenomenon called consanguinity. Donations outside the formal system are not recorded, so there is no sure-fire way to know when the limit has been reached.
Like any arrangement that involves meeting someone from the internet in person, there are also safety risks, even if Dr Bhatia’s research found most donors are motivated by the idea of “doing something good”. And given the emotion that so often accompanies the process of trying to get pregnant, she says women can be particularly vulnerable to exploitation. “There are often cases, and this is known, where a sperm donor insists on natural insemination, where he says ‘I’m more than happy to provide you with sperm but only if we have sexual intercourse because there’s a higher chance of you becoming pregnant’,” she says.
Lastly, some donors may find their way to informal groups after being rejected from regulated clinics. “I think that could be considered quite unconscionable, at least morally,” she says. “The motivation factor isn’t always as simple as ‘I want to get to know the family’.”
According to Adam, many of these risks are alleviated by face-to-face relationships between donors and recipients. “When you are actually speaking to people, it’s a lot harder to lie or want to lie,” he says, referring to what he has heard from donors, “but on the [sperm] clinic papers they were less honest in talking about family history”.
As for health screening and genetic testing, he says, that isn’t exclusive to fertility clinics and many donors take the initiative to have their own testing done before ever offering up their sperm. But, Adam adds, “The fact is in the real world, we look at our parents and all our friends who have had babies, the majority haven’t gone down that route — that’s just a little perk that the clinics put on.”
While Adam acknowledges that online donation has the potential to be dangerous, he says his group’s record speaks for itself. “We’ve got 10 years of history and we haven’t made the papers like the clinics have,” he says.
A recent Four Corners investigation into Australia’s formal IVF industry uncovered allegations that clinics had mixed up sperm donors, destroyed embryos and allowed a single donor to father possibly hundreds of children, due to poor vetting practices.
“There’s the possibility that we’ll always have the subset of people that will want to seek sperm online for whatever reason, but we also need to further explore how we can make the regulated system a better system,” Dr Bhatia says. As for informal donation, she says, “it’s an area for urgent, urgent, urgent investigation”.
The peak body for the IVF sector, the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, is calling for an overhaul of how fertility clinics are governed and the introduction of a national donor registry that, crucially, would include a mechanism to track informal donations. “The society is calling for a national approach to IVF and ART to address current legislative gaps and create a more inclusive and regulated fertility landscape for Australians,” FSANZ president Dr Petra Wale says. “A national donor registry that includes informal donations promotes transparency and upholds ethical practices in donor insemination.”
She also encourages those who have found a donor online to consider having their treatment through a clinic, as part of a known donor process.
Professor Robson echoes that statement and believes it doesn’t have to be one or the other when it comes to having a relationship with the donor. “If we look at the way formal sperm donation occurs, it is extremely safety and outcomes-focused — and it is that way because having a baby is such a massively important thing to get right,” he says.
The safeguards are not only there to alleviate the possible risks to physical health through genetic and STD screening, he says, but emotional ones, too, through sessions with trained fertility counsellors. The database also allows parents and donor children to be contacted if donor health conditions come to light down the track. “Informal sperm donation sidesteps all of the safety paradigm that is in place to help with this, and that is why there’s such a high level of concern about these practices,” he says.
At a minimum, Professor Robson urges anyone considering conceiving through sperm donation — informally or otherwise — to speak with a professional about the process. “The worst possible place to get reliable information is social media, the people that advertise their services, these sperm bros who tour around, I would strongly urge that as much scrutiny as possible is placed on these arrangements,” he says. “We all get wanting to have a baby really badly … but it’s entirely possible to achieve this safely”.
For Cody and Sarah, it comes back to research and trusting your intuition. With their donor, not only did they request health checks, but they were careful to outline in writing the expectations of both parties. Following the birth, the donor signed a statutory declaration confirming the baby was conceived through donation and the birth certificate lists Cody and Sarah as mothers. “A random guy can go out and sleep with someone new every day of the year if they wanted to, there are risks no matter what,” Cody says. “Clinics have their place, but so do [Facebook] pages like this and it’s up to each family to decide what’s best for them.”
Despite the initial awkwardness, the late nights with a baby, and the energy it takes to chase around a toddler, they say they wouldn’t have it any other way. So much so they’re planning to use the group again later this year when they start trying for their second child. “Looking at him, I don’t see the donor,” Cody says. “He’s just our kid”.
*Name has been changed for privacy reasons.
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Inside the Facebook group where Australian women subvert the system and go looking for sperm #Facebook #group #Australian #women #subvert #system #sperm
Source Link: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-28/inside-the-growing-online-sperm-marketplace/104103648
Inside the Facebook group where Australian women subvert the system and go looking for sperm
It started with a Facebook post tapped o… – BLOGGER – WP1, Australian, Facebook, Group, Sperm, subvert, System, women
