You can find them while surfing the Net. Select one you like, purchase it with a credit card and have it shipped overnight. Problems? Call customer service. On the wild, wild Web, you can shop this way for clothes, books, computers … and human sperm.
Thanks to a proliferation of sperm bank Web sites with online donor catalogs, the Internet is transforming the way some people make babies. For single women, lesbian couples, and heterosexual couples with fertility problems, it makes securing donor sperm as easy as an online business transaction.
“For us, the Internet works because of our lifestyle,” says Michelle Darne, a magazine publisher in New York City whose partner, Kathleen Weiss, recently gave birth to twin girls conceived through artificial insemination. “It gives us the privacy in our home or office to go online 20 times a day, if we want, to make sure we have an appropriate donor.”
The couple located their donor sperm through the Web site of California Cryobank in Los Angeles, which, like many banks, offers an online listing of basic donor information such as race, blood type, occupation and eye color. As their search progressed, the pair downloaded more detailed donor histories featuring three generations of medical and genetic data.
Single women make up 40 percent of California Cryobank’s clientele, according to medical director Dr. Cappy Rothman.
“We try to provide enough donors to give them a choice, the same opportunity as if they were dating,” Rothman said.
The other 60 percent are married couples with fertility problems who seek a donor similar to the husband; 80 percent of them keep the process a secret from family and friends, he said.
After six months of catalog-combing, Darne, 38, and Weiss, 34, selected someone tall and healthy, with a religious background and Weiss’ “Italian-Irish looks,” said Darne. They stored the sperm for a year so they could launch their gay-lesbian parenting magazine “AndBaby” and, when they were ready to try, had it shipped in a cryogenic tank to their doctor’s office in New York where the insemination took place. Weiss got pregnant right away.
The Internet brought Jill and Shelli Strenzel Gibson, whose daughter, Elli, was born March 21, to Midwest Sperm Bank, a small Downers Grove facility 20 minutes from their home. Its Web site has a basic donor catalog but offers less information than California Cryobank, so ultimately, the couple browsed in-depth profiles the old-fashioned way–turning pages in a book. After settling on an athletic, blond-haired, blue-eyed donor similar to Jill, they explored the Web for everything they could find about the insemination process.
“We used the Internet to research all the stuff doctors weren’t telling us,” said Jill, 41. “We did more research after we selected the donor than before. … what to expect, how ovulation works, what the side effects of certain drugs were.”
When they were ready, they picked up the sperm from the clinic and started monitoring 42-year-old Shelli’s ovulation at home. At the appropriate time, they used a syringe to inject the sperm into her, but the process failed several times over a three-month period. They ended up in the doctor’s office trying ever more expensive methods to boost Shelli’s estrogen level; it took a year to get pregnant.
Easy for banks and couples
While the Web has transformed the way couples like these find donor sperm, it has also changed the way sperm banks do business.
“It’s our only source of advertising,” said Dr. Joanne Kaminski, director of Midwest Sperm Bank, which was established in 1998 and went online in 2000. “We get all our clients from it and through word of mouth.”
“It makes it easier to disseminate information to those who need it,” said Rothman. “It makes it easy because of the time differential. We service every state in the U.S. and 22 countries worldwide, so it allows people to see what’s available 24 hours a day in the privacy of their home.”
Besides its donor catalog, California Cryobank offers online pages dedicated to the history of sperm banking, donor screening, how to become a donor, and frequently asked questions about the purchasing and shipping process.
This use of the Web site as a marketing tool reflects a change in the field of reproductive medicine that Terri Kapsalis, an alternative insemination health worker at Chicago Women’s Health Center, has observed in the last decade.
“Reproductive medicine has become a cash cow for practitioners serving unmarried women who used to be denied services or made to undergo psychological testing before insemination,” said Kapsalis, who is writing a book about the sperm industry. “The trend is more and more corporate-marketing-oriented. The donor catalogs are more detailed and specific, offering more products along with profiles to sell sperm.”
For example, California Cryobank clients can peruse donor baby pictures and personality test results, Rothman said. They also can listen to audio tapes of donor interviews, which Darne said she and her partner appreciated. Fairfax Cryobank, a large Virginia facility, lets customers see donors’ SAT scores and created Fairfax Doctorate, a special category of sperm from donors who are pursuing or already have PhDs.
“People like to buy educated sperm,” said Kaminski, who likens the search for the right sperm to shopping for a new car. “It’s something that clients like to see. They feel more comfortable knowing something about the donor, that they’re buying sperm from a married, professional donor.”
This attitude concerns Kapsalis, whose book explores how marketing affects contemporary ideas about genetics.
“If a donor’s favorite color is blue and he’s good at Scrabble, do I think that my kid will have these traits, too? How does this affect our ideas of genetic transmission?” she asked. “There are some pretty rudimentary and false notions out there.”
Most like some interaction
Because some sperm bank Web sites make everything available through the Internet, Rothman and Kaminski say it is theoretically possible for an individual to do the entire process online without ever talking to a human being and with minimal involvement from a doctor. Rothman said a release form signed by a physician enables California Cryobank to ship sperm directly to a person’s home.
However, few clients opt for a process totally free of human interaction, they said. In the case of the Strenzel Gibsons, the couple developed a friendship with Kaminski after talking to her extensively about possible donors (she knows all 40 in the Midwest Sperm Bank catalog). After Elli’s birth, they brought her to meet Kaminski.
“The personal touch is nice,” said Jill Strenzel Gibson. “It’s a hard enough process as it is.”
The personal touch can mean the difference between success and disaster in an industry that the Food and Drug Administration has yet to regulate. Rothman, Kaminski and Kapsalis advise phoning a sperm bank to make sure it is legitimate before doing any business online. They also recommend seeking out facilities that meet guidelines for infectious disease and genetics testing of donors set by the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB).
Just 11 sperm banks, including California Cryobank, out of an estimated 115 nationwide are accredited by the AATB, according to Rothman. Midwest Sperm Bank is in the process, said Kaminski.
You won’t find any eggs online
The Internet may have transformed the search for donor sperm, but it hasn’t helped people in the market for eggs.
Unlike sperm banks, facilities that freeze and store eggs for future use don’t exist, because donor eggs must be used fresh, says Dr. Sandra Ann Carson, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
Instead, egg banks offer a catalog of women who are available to travel to a city to go through the egg retrieval process in close proximity to the recipient, she adds. In addition, women have a harder time donating eggs than men do sperm, says Dr. Joanne Kaminski, director of the Midwest Sperm Bank in Downers Grove. Egg retrieval is an invasive procedure dependent on the use of fertility drugs that can pose a health risk to the donor, Kaminski says.
–Gail Schmoller Philbin
BANKING ON INTERNET
California Cryobank (www.cryobank.com)Fairfax Cryobank (www.fairfaxcryobank.com)Midwest Sperm Bank (www.midwestspermbank.com)Chicago Women’s Health Center (www.chicagowomenshealthcenter.org)American Society for Reproductive Medicine (www.asrm.org)American Association of Tissue Banks (www.aatb.org)
