Filling that need has become big business. It is estimated the market in Europe will be worth more than £2bn by 2033, with Denmark a major exporter of sperm.
Some men are having vast numbers of children through sperm donation. This week the BBC reported on a man whose sperm contained a genetic mutation that dramatically raises the risk of cancer for some of his offspring.
One of the most striking aspects of the investigation was that the man’s sperm was sent to 14 countries and produced at least 197 children. The revelation was a rare insight into the scale of the sperm donor industry.
Sperm donation allows women to become mothers when it might not otherwise be possible – if their partner is infertile, they’re in a same-sex relationship, or parenting solo.
Filling that need has become big business. It is estimated the market in Europe will be worth more than £2bn by 2033, with Denmark a major exporter of sperm.
So why are some sperm donors fathering so many children, what made Danish or so-called “Viking sperm” so popular, and does the industry need to be reined in?
Denmark is home to some of the world’s biggest sperm banks, and has gained a reputation for producing “Viking babies”.
Ole Schou, the 71-year-old founder of the Cryos International sperm bank where a single 0.5ml vial of sperm costs from €100 (£88) to more than €1000 (£880), says the culture around sperm donation in Denmark is very different to other countries.
“The population is like one big family,” he says, “there is less taboo about these issues, and we are an altruistic population, many sperm donors also donate blood.”
In response to the investigation into the sperm donor who passed on a gene that led to cancer in some of the 197 children he fathered, officials in Belgium have called on the European Commission to establish a Europe-wide sperm donor register to monitor sperm travelling across borders.
Deputy prime minister Frank Vandenbroucke said the industry was like the “Wild West” and “the initial mission of offering people the possibility of a family has given way to a veritable fertility business”.
The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology has also proposed a limit of 50 families per donor across the EU. That system would still allow one donor’s sperm to make more than 100 children if the families wanted two or more babies each.
Concerns have been raised about the impact on the children conceived through sperm donation. Some will be happy, others can be profoundly distressed by the double discovery of being made with donor sperm and being one of hundreds of half-siblings.
The same is true of donors, who often have no idea their sperm is being so widely distributed.
These risks are amplified by readily available DNA ancestry tests and social media where people can search for their children, siblings or the donor. In the UK, there is no longer anonymity for sperm donors and there is an official process through which children learn the identity of their biological father.
Mr Schou at Cryos argues more restrictions on sperm donation would just lead families to “turn to the private, totally unregulated, market”.
Dr John Appleby, a medical ethicist at Lancaster University, said the implications of using sperm so widely was a “vast” ethical minefield.
He said there are issues around identity, privacy, consent, dignity and more – making it a “balancing act” between competing needs.
Dr Appleby said the fertility industry had a “responsibility to get a handle on the number of times a donor is used”, but agreeing global regulations would be undeniably “very difficult”.
He added that a global sperm donor register, which has been suggested, came with its own “ethical and legal challenges”.
