When Kate Macintyre and her partner Laura Murphy decided to start a family eight years ago, they considered asking a friend to supply the sperm. But there was an insuperable problem. Their friend had had gay sex and so was turned down as a donor by Louisiana's health authorities who considered him to be in a high-risk group.
"I was furious ... given that we knew he'd tested negative for HIV," says Macintyre. "But the more we thought about it, the more we were glad that we didn't go down that path. It can really complicate things to have a friend as a donor.
"I was 37 when we started thinking about this and we knew that time was ticking by. Then we thought about adoption, but being two women that could have been pretty hard."
Instead, the couple decided to buy sperm supplied by an anonymous donor over the internet. "We went with cryobank.com because it was the largest sperm bank in the US at the time, and because many donors were reportedly university students. Both of us are academics so that appealed to us."
British-born Macintyre and Murphy, a Californian, are assistant professors in the department of international health and development at Tulane University in New Orleans. In April last year, anonymous sperm donation was made illegal in the UK. The change in the law has been blamed for an acute shortage of donors, and this week an opinion poll found that 58% of adults questioned thought they should have the right to remain anonymous. But as the first generation of donor-conceived-children have grown up, their experiences as well as advances in genetics have changed the way we think about our biological origins.
According to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), nearly 2,000 children are born every year in the UK using donated eggs, sperm or embryos. "There has been a cultural shift," says Laura Witjens, chair of the National Gamete Donation Trust, "and the rights of donor-conceived children to know who their fathers are has become important." In this, the UK follows Holland, Sweden and Australia.
In the US, though, sperm donors retain their right to anonymity. So how did Macintyre and Murphy go about choosing their future child's father? "We read a short form online about each donor and then chose candidates to get more information," says Macintyre. "The short form tells you about the donor's race, favourite colour, things like that. On the basis of them, we ordered more information from four guys, one of whom is now Callum's dad." Why him? "He just stood out. He had a good sense of humour, he wanted to travel, he seemed pretty idealistic, he wanted to work in social policy which is something we're interested in, and he was very fond of his sister, which seemed nice." Macintyre also knows that the donor is of Indian descent, born in Switzerland and bred in the US.
"I guess what we did was a little like Jodie Foster," says Macintyre. The film star has two sons both of whom were conceived by artificial insemination through the same sperm bank donor, reportedly a handsome PhD with an IQ of 160. (Foster has had to endure opprobrium in the blogosphere to the effect that she is a tinsel town eugenicist.)
"I think the sperm was about $300 and shipping about $200," Macintyre says. "Half a dozen phials arrived [at a fertility bank in Louisiana] packed in hydrogen to keep them cool." Cryobank.com at that time colour-coded the phials' stoppers according to race: "There were black, yellow, white and in our donor's case red. That signified he was categorised as east Asian. When we took a phial to the doctor he looked at the stopper and said: 'Is this radioactive?'" Macintyre had to be declared legally infertile before the treatment could continue, which, because of what happened next, was ironic: "I got pregnant first time."
Callum is now six. Does he resemble his genetic father insofar as you can tell? "Well, he's bright. He's very calm and gentle. Maybe he gets that from his dad. He's incredibly tall and has curly hair, which are probably from the Macintyre side, but he has beautiful north Indian eyes that are just to die for. "When Callum turns 18, he may be able to get in touch with his genetic father. "Kids can write to the sperm bank on their 18th birthday and if the donor has stayed in touch the letter will be forwarded."
In the US this is unusual: children born from donor sperm have no legal right to contact their genetic fathers. In Britain, since April 2005, donor sperm-conceived children and those born using donated eggs or embryos have the right to know the identity of their genetic parent when they turn 18.
While some fertility clinics and media commentators blame the end of anonymous donation for the lack of sperm, the truth is more complicated. If one compares HFEA figures for the six months after the law change with the same six months in the previous year, one finds that (contrary to most press reports) the number of donors has risen. Admittedly by only 10 donors (from April to October 2004, the total was 133; from April to October 2005, 143) but this doesn't support the claim that men are terrified at the prospect of a knock on the door in 18 years' time from their genetic child.
There is none the less a calamitous dearth of sperm donors in Britain. "We need 500 sperm donors a year from those 17m British men aged between 18 and 45," says Laura Witjens. "The fact that we don't have anything like the number of donors we need shows that the men we need aren't getting the message. We are trying to find out why."
One consequence of this lack of British sperm has been a rise in fertility tourism with couples wanting IVF going abroad for treatment. This trend worries the HFEA whose chair, Dame Suzi Leather, said: "We have heard of some clinics which offer treatment that is so dangerous that it has been banned in the UK - for example implanting five embryos, which significantly raises the chance of multiple pregnancy - the biggest risk of IVF for both mothers and babies."
But the lack of British donors and waiting lists for artificial insemination mean such fertility holidays will remain a temptation. "The number of donors has been falling since the late 1990s," says Gemma Wilkie of the HFEA, "but there are a huge variety of reasons for that." One reason is that from the late 90s potential donors were discouraged by the prospect of a law change and false rumours that ending anonymity would be retroactive. Many smaller sperm banks closed. In 1999, Glasgow Royal Infirmary was allowed to import sperm from a Danish clinic because of a severe local shortage - the first bulk import of sperm from abroad.
The decline in British sperm donations has continued. In 2000, there were 325 sperm donors registered with the HFEA; in 2004, there were 247. The number of egg donors is similarly in decline: 1,242 women were registered as HFEA egg donors in 2000, only 1,060 in 2004. True, there are non-HFEA registered donors but it is not clear how many, nor whether their numbers have changed.
A decade ago the stereotype of a sperm donor was that of an impecunious student offered a well-thumbed porn mag and a few moments of quiet contemplation in a discreet room to earn beer money. "Donors were paid £15 and they kept their anonymity," says Gemma Wilkie. "They were mostly men aged 18 to 24 and they were the stereotype - students who needed a bit of extra cash. Now we've have moved to people doing it for altruistic reasons. That said, donors now don't lose out: they don't get their £15 [it is now illegal to pay for donations] but they can claim for reasonable expenses - so it may amount to much more than £15."
But there is a problem with the new type of donor: altruistic thirtysomething dads often have to work during clinics' opening hours. This may be another reason for the decline in sperm donors in Britain. "When it was students who were the main donors, they were free in the daytime," says Wilkie. "Now clinics need to be more responsive - to provide out-of-hours services in the evenings and weekends. That may be beyond some clinics' resources."
Another complicating factor is the now thriving business among non-licensed clinics dealing in fresh sperm that continue to offer anonymity to donors. "Only sperm that has been frozen is covered by the new law and as a result a lot of clinics that are not licensed to the HFEA are making money."
Among them is spermdirect.co.uk, which not only offers to pay £50 expenses, but also tempts potential donors with the following statement on its site: "The new law affecting donor identity only applies to frozen sperm donors. It will not affect donors registered with sperm direct. Spermdirect donors will stay anonymous and all donor records will be destroyed 12 months after leaving the spermdirect programme." Recipients are charged £450 for a single donation and £695 for a double donation within one ovulation period of four days. Spermdirect.co.uk did not respond to a request to be interviewed. Witjens says: "Such clinics are exploiting a loophole in the law that will be closed in the spring. And then, I hope, organisations that are not licensed by the HFEA will close down."
Another site that advertises fresh sperm is mannotincluded.com (aka fertility4life.com), which was set up to help lesbians and single women discriminated against by being denied artificial insemination. They offer a home insemination service costing up to £5,985 (for a so-called Crystal package) and point out that they can protect donors' anonymity because they use fresh sperm. Witjens says: "I am not very happy about their procedures. With some of these clinics you don't know what you're getting into - it could be anybody giving their sample. A donor might get their mate to donate in their place. It sounds dodgy and smutty but it could happen." In April next year the new EU tissues and cells directive will compel all organisations offering artificial insemination to be licensed with the HFEA. Witjens hopes that only frozen sperm will be used from that date onwards: "With fresh sperm, adequate screening cannot be carried out. Donor sperm needs to be quarantined and screened for infections. And that requires freezing."
"The other thing about those clinics that use fresh sperm is that, by law, the donor is considered to be the child's legal father, with all the rights and responsibilities. This is not the case with frozen sperm donations at HFEA-licensed clinics. With those, donors can be contacted by their genetic children because of the law change but the donors will have no duties towards them."
A complex picture of sperm donation in Britain emerges. You can get a sense of how patchy recruitment initiatives for donors are across Britain and the consequent anxiety among would-be sperm recipients by reading the following message board: http://tinyurl.com/ygxjx4
Only a handful of HFEA-registered clinics have managed to increase the number of sperm donors since the law on donor anonymity changed. They include Manchester Fertility Services, a fee-paying centre, and the NHS donor insemination service at St Mary's Hospital in the same city.
Why have they been successful? "They are very hands on," says Laura Witjens of the National Gamete Donation Trust (without a hint of irony). "They carefully recruit and they counsel their people properly. This doesn't always happen. We need to get these sort of standards across all UK clinics to reverse the decline in donations."
Witjens says that next week a working party will start examining how to recruit sperm donors across Britain, and that they will study the recruitment success in Manchester.
But there is another possible way of reversing this decline. Scientists at Sheffield University have been doing research to find out if they can develop lab-grown sperm. They have shown that in principle, stem cells could be cloned from an infertile patient and turned into the required sperm or eggs for IVF.
It is not impossible that such lab-grown sperm could be given to Britain's depleted sperm banks. True, there are ethical objections to these scientific developments, but it is none the less possible that the selfless services of Britain's masturbating men will no longer be required - though not for a good while yet.
Sperm banks: A history
Technology to test, collect and preserve sperm has existed since the 1950s but the first commercial sperm bank was set up in the US when doctors Cappy Rothman (a male fertility specialist and urologist) and Charles Sims (a pathologist) opened the California Cryobank in 1977.
As its name implied, it used cryogenics - extremely cold temperatures - to preserve sperm. The focus then was to allow men to become fathers once they had become sterile either following a vasectomy, or because of diseases such as cancer, or after surgery, chemotherapy or radiation. Such men would deposit specimens of their sperm to be frozen and stored until they wanted to father a child through artificial insemination.
In the late 70s a survey by the University of Wisconsin found that many US doctors treated infertility problems with donor insemination, often from medical students or hospital staff, trying to match the husband's physical traits with the donor's. By the early 80s, meeting the demand for anonymous artificial insemination had become the new focus.
The threat from Aids led to the introduction of strict biochemical tests. As the use of fresh semen was discouraged, sperm banks were the beneficiaries. There, frozen semen was subject to a six-month quarantine, after which the donor was retested.
Men worried about the effects of radiation, toxins or pollutants at work have also been banking sperm. However, the number of donors has been falling since the 90s and especially since a 2005 law in the UK gave children the right to know the identity of their donor father at the age of 18.
