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Wednesday, May 22, 2019

SPERM DONATION AND THE URGENT NEED TO LIMIT THE NUMBER OF BIRTHS PER DONOR



About two weeks ago, I had read an article by an American woman who had, seven years after her divorce, decided that she was ready to have children. Because of the (infamous?) biological clock that women yet to have their own children are never allowed to forget, the woman at 37, decided to take the plunge into motherhood. This is normal enough. However, while it is also becoming quite normal for some women to decide that they do not want to get married (again for those who had married before, or at all for those who have not) and would rather be single mothers, what I thought is not yet quite that prevalent but which some research has proved otherwise (at least in Western countries), is the decision for a woman to decide to approach sperm banks to get her eggs fertilized and go the whole motherhood route without at least some man in the background if not by her side.


The woman in the article I read, did it and now has two children she is raising alone and without a father figure in those children’s lives.

Later on last week as well, Wendy Williams during the Hot Topics segment of her Show, mentioned the story of 25-year old unmarried Matteo[1], a Bachelorette contestant who, while a management consultant, also appeared to have chosen being a sperm donor as a vocation. This guy, at 25, claimed that his sperm has been used to produce 114 children! There doesn’t seem to be any information yet on whether all these children were born to women resident in the USA.

A number of countries particularly in Europe, have enacted laws with regards to Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART). In Africa, South Africa seems to be at the forefront in the enactment of a Law on ART. Kenya had a 2014 Bill on In-vitro Fertilzation (IVF) which appeared not to have been passed[2].

While there are a number of aspects like surrogacy, IVF etc to ART, the main focus of this write-up is the issue of how many offspring or live births a single donor’s sperm[3] should be used to produce and how to effectively regulate same especially in view of ART tourism by persons who for one reason or the other, including, but of course, not limited to cost and restrictive laws in their own countries, go outside their countries of residence to get sperms (or eggs, as the case may be).

In the UK, the maximum number of families a single donor can endow is 10[4]; six families in Spain and 12 families in Denmark, in the Netherlands one donor can contribute to 25 families while Taiwan allows just one[5]. Though there is no law at present governing ART in Kenya, it’s been reported that a donor can only be allowed to donate 3 times[6], in South Africa, sperm from a donor can only be used for 6 live births[7].

Whereas a number of countries in Europe as already mentioned, have laws limiting the number of families sperm from a single donor should be allowed to assist in producing children, the United States of America has no such law. At best, what the USA has is a voluntary guideline issued by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), of no more than 25 births per sperm donor in a population of 800,000 people. As has been mentioned however, this guideline is voluntary and in the absence of strict laws to ensure compliance, sperm banks can use a donor’s sperm to produce as many live births as they are able to[8].

In Nigeria, in spite of calls for regulation by medical practitioners and the Association for Fertility and Reproductive Health (AFRH), there is as yet no law to regulate ART. The closest to what may be regarded as some kind of regulation is the provision of Part VI of the National Health Act of 2014 which prohibits the procurement of human blood or tissue or any organ of a living being for money except reimbursement of reasonable costs incurred[9] and mandates the giving of consent by donors[10].

ART is however becoming quite popular in Nigeria and recruitment of sperm donors are reportedly being done in our higher Institutions, meaning the majority of sperm donors if reports available are correct, are undergraduates. And where sperm donors are prohibited from receiving payment for their donations, they are said to receive what is called Inconvenience allowance which, as at the writing of an article in the Guardian in January of 2017[11], was between N10,000 to N25,000 per visit depending on the donor’s personality, academic qualifications, physical attributes among other things. An undergraduate interviewed in the Saturday Magazine of the Guardian Nigeria article just mentioned, was in fact quoted to have claimed he was making up to about N200,000 to N250,000 a month just from donating his sperm. How true this claim is can only be wondered at.

Whether the claim is true or not, is however not the focus here. The real focus is, and rightly should be, as is being expressed all over the world where the practice of ART particularly around sperm (and egg) donations are concerned, how to regulate the number of live births a donor’s sperm or egg should be allowed to produce in view of the very real danger of incest an absence of regulation can cause. Besides the very real danger of incest among siblings is the issue of genetic diseases that may be passed on from the donors to the children especially in places where absence of laws or regulations make genetic testing optional.

In the United States and other Western countries, there already is a big outcry over the huge number of children some popular donors are fathering. And except for countries like Sweden, Australia, and the Netherlands which do not permit anonymous donations, tracking donor-conceived children and ensuring they do not meet and ignorantly have sexual relations with each other can be real difficult. The need to track donor-conceived children is one of the reasons some countries including the UK and Sweden prohibited anonymous donation.

But while the laws prohibiting anonymous donations may work to a limited extent to limit the number of children conceived by a single donor in those countries, they reportedly also had the effect of reducing the numbers of donors willing to come forward to donate. The laws also created fertility tourism with those who can afford it, taking trips to countries with more liberal or no laws, to purchase sperms and eggs. It was reported for instance that the Danish sperm Bank, Cryos, claims to have 1,400 active and real donors in Europe, about 200 in the US and that it sells sperms to over 100 countries worldwide[12].

Denmark is said to be about the most popular destination for ART tourism and Cryos mentioned earlier, is reported to have the largest bank of sperm in the world. Indeed, research has indicated that about 90% of Danish sperm goes to other EU countries. This is perhaps the reason Denmark in addition to pegging the number of families one donor’s sperm can be used for to 12, also went further to limit the number of conceptions such a donor’s sperm can be used to achieve internationally. And so in addition to the 12 families in Denmark, a donor’s sperm can only be used for 6 couples in Sweden and eight couples in Switzerland[13].

Just as important as regulating the number of donor-conceived children per donor is, so is creating a strong process of ensuring that donor-conceived children are aware they were conceived through the assistance of donors, and that they have means of knowing and identifying their half siblings and other members of their biological fathers (or mothers as the case may be)’ families. Indeed, under the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the right of a child to know his parents was given the status of a Fundamental Human Right.

In some countries, donor conceived children are entitled to information on their donor-fathers upon reaching the age of 18. In New Zealand for instance, a Registry for the purpose of access to information by both donors and donor-conceived children was established under the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act of 2004. A donor-conceived child can thus get access to information at the age of 18 or by Court Order at the age of 16[14]. 

Whereas the countries that have laws and binding regulations restricting the number of children that a single donor’s sperm should be allowed to produce can be said to have taken some steps, albeit inadequate, to address the issue of the danger of siblings ignorantly engaging in sexual relations, the major problem is with countries with no law or regulations and virtually all the countries on the African Continent because of the culture of stigma (or shame) surrounding the issue of infertility will be guilty here. This may be the reason a country like South Africa absolutely prohibits disclosure of both the donor and the recipient’s identities in spite of the fact that donors are required to register with the National Health Directorate and may choose to be informed when their donation produces a pregnancy[15].

In a country like Nigeria where data gathering in most aspects of our national lives is still a very big challenge, preventing incest among donor-conceived children especially where there is an absence of regulation and or monitoring will be impossible. Nigeria’s case will especially be difficult for a number of reasons besides the absence of a law to regulate. Nigeria generally has a history of regulatory agencies that focus more on revenue generation as opposed to their primary tasks of regulation and monitoring. Most important however is the stigma or shame around infertility which would mean that most couples will keep not only the fact of the donor assistance from their donor-conceived children, to forestall the possibility of the children ever finding out; they will also keep it from their close relatives and friends.

 Obviously, a lot of work will need to be done in Africa generally, and Nigeria in particular, to remove the shame and feeling that a woman or a man who for one reason or the other, is unable to have children, is less than whole. This should be done by our religious organizations and bodies who have a lot of influence on their followers. It may be time to start using religion for purpose other than dividing the populace.

While it at first appeared that Matteo’s boastful claim of having fathered 114 children through sperm donation, was far-fetched, some research on the subject soon showed that his claim may well be true. The story of Cynthia Daly who in a bid to connect her donor-conceived son to his half-siblings through a web-based registry but found that her donor as at 2011 had fathered 149 other children is a popular one[16]. There are reports also of other donors each of whom have been found to be biological fathers of hundreds of donor-conceived people. Some donors were reportedly shocked to have learnt that their sperms were used to conceive so many children[17] and one donor has an excel spreadsheet file to keep track of his offspring.

The lack of regulation in many countries have made it difficult to track exactly how many people globally were conceived using ART and more particularly, the Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI). While sperm banks ask recipients to report births of donor-conceived children, only about 40% of births are for instance, reported in the US[18]. Countries with laws regulating ART while able to monitor births internally will be missing figures of those who travel outside to get sperms or eggs.

This writer’s recommendations for keeping near accurate track of births of donor-conceived children to avoid accidental incest are first; as is already the practice in most countries, each donor should be given a unique number through which donor-conceived people can identify themselves as offspring of the same donor. This should work even for countries like South Africa which prohibits disclosure of both donors and recipients identities.

There should also be a central registry much like the Donor Sibling Registry which was founded in 2000 by Wendy Kramer while trying to look for her 10-year old son’s half siblings. As at the 22nd of May 2019, DSR claims to have 64,186 members inclusive of donors, donor-conceived people and parents of donor-conceived people. According to the figure on its website, the Registry has also successfully connected more than 17,060 offspring with their half siblings and or their donors.

While DSR has done very well in facilitating these connections, it is obvious that a Registry that will be supported by, if not all countries of the world, but majority of the countries will be required especially in view of tourism engaged in by persons either looking to evade their countries’ strict laws or just looking for sperm banks in a country with better donor testing. And for the Registry to work effectively, countries should have laws which compel parents/recipients to disclose to their donor-conceived children their status as having been so conceived. This is most important with respect to African countries whose people seem to have a culture of shaming people with fertility issues. And Sperm Banks will have to be regulated and mandated to keep records of both donors and recipients and to monitor the results after purchases.  

The Registry can still work very effectively with the identities of Donors undisclosed for countries which are still uncomfortable with disclosure of identities of the donors. Other information except the names of the donor can be put in the registry. With his/her unique number, a donor can also track the number of births that have been produced with his/her sperm or eggs. It should then be the choice of the donor to reveal or keep undisclosed, his/her identity.

With well over 5 million donor-conceived people[19] in the world today and with social media and technology shrinking the distance between humans, the danger of accidental incest between half siblings cannot be more real and the need for laws mandating Sperm Banks to drastically reduce the number of conception a single donor’s sperm is used to achieve cannot be over-emphasised.

An interesting point to close this write-up is the fact that single women like the woman in the first paragraph of this article, and gay couples make up a considerable percentage of recipients of ART (at least in the more developed countries even though countries like France does not allow donation to single women and gay couples and hence ART tourism).







[1] After getting initial information which did not include the name and occupation of the Bachelorette contestant on the Wendy Williams Show, further information in the course of research into this topic was obtained in an article by Sarah Zhang published on May 13, 2019 in the The Atlantic. The article is titled The Trouble With Fathering 114 Kids.
[2] The 2014 Bill was apparently not passed and there’s a report that a similar Bill was reintroduced into the Kenyan Parliament in 2018. The fate of the re-introduced Bill is not known.
[3] It should be noted that there are couples and singles who received donations from people they know. These people are called known donors, and in some countries with laws governing ART, such known donors can be sued for child maintenance. Conversely, known donors can also sue recipients to allow them have access to the donor-conceived child. Though, there may have been written agreements between the known donor and the recipients, Courts, particularly in the US will usually disregard such agreements with respect to the paternity of a child. This piece is however not focused on known donors but really on donors who donate through sperm banks mostly anonymously, whether for pecuniary gains or for altruistic purposes.
[4] Human Fertilsation and Embryology Act, 1990.
[5] A lack of Regulation has created enormous genetic families. Now they are searching for one another by Ariana Eunjung Cha published in the washingtonpost.com on 12th September 2018.
[6] The number of times a donor is allowed to donate does not however take care of the number of live births the donated sperm can or will be used for. Since each sample donated can still be divided and put into several vials, it means many live births can be achieved even from a single donation.
[7] See: The Rising Debate – Anonymity of Gamete Donation in South Africa. www.aevitasfertilityclinic.co.za published on August 16, 2017. See also provisions of the National Health Act of South Africa.
[8] The American Fertility Society (AFS)’s Guidelines also recommends 10 pregnancies per donor or under 10 if recipients are members of an isolated subgroups of the population: www.scholarship.law.duke.edu
[9] Section 53(1) of the National Health Act 2014.
[10] Section 48(1)(a), National Health Act 2014.
[11] Sperm Donor’s Nightmare: Have I fathered 500 Children Already? Written by Franca Osakwe in www.guardian.ng on 7th January 2017.
[12] See the article published in theguardian.com/science/2018 titled America’s hottest export? Sperm, written by Soo Youn on August 15, 2018.
[13] Ibid
[14] Regulated Sperm Donation: Why requiring exposed donation is not the answer by Vanessa L. Pi. Published on March 8, 2009.
[15] The Rising Debate – Anonymity of Gamete Donation in South Africa. Supra.
[16] See publication in www.nytimes.com One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring written by Jacqueline Mroz published on September 5, 2011. By the article earlier cited and titled The Trouble with Fathering 114 Kids, Cynthia Daly’s donor’s children had risen to 189!
[17] One Sperm Donor, 150 Offspring. Jacqueline Mroz (Supra)
[18] Regulating Sperm Donation: Why requiring exposed donation is not the answer. Vanessa L. Pi.
[19] ART in Europe: Usage and Regulation in the context of Cross-Border Reproductive Care by Patrick Praig & Melinda C. Mills published on 13th January 2017. https://www.link.springer.com.

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