Sperm donation

 

Sperm donation is the provision by a man of his sperm with the intention that it be used in the artificial insemination or other "fertility treatment" of one or more women who are not his sexual partners in order that they may become pregnant by him. Where pregnancies go to full term, the sperm donor will be the biological father of every baby born from his donations.

The man is known as a sperm donor and the sperm he provides is known as "donor sperm" because the intention is that the man will give up all legal rights to any child produced from his sperm, and will not be the legal father.

Sperm donation may also be known as "semen donation". A man provides his semen but the purpose of the donation is that his gametes contained within the semen, i.e. the sperm cells, be used to provide pregnancies for third parties.

Sperm donation enables a man to father a child for third-party women and is therefore categorized as a form of third-party reproduction.

The process of inseminating a woman with the sperm of a donor to enable her to have a baby is known as donor insemination or DI.

Sperm may be donated by the donor directly to the intended recipient woman or through a sperm bank or fertility clinic. Pregnancies are usually achieved by using donor sperm in assisted reproductive technology (ART) techniques which include artificial insemination (either by intracervical insemination (ICI) or intrauterine insemination (IUI) in a clinic, or intravaginal insemination at home). Less commonly, donor sperm may be used in in vitro fertilization (IVF). See also "natural insemination" below. The primary recipients of donor sperm are single women and lesbian couples, but the process may also be useful to heterosexual couples with male infertility.

Donor sperm and "fertility treatments" using donor sperm may be obtained at a sperm bank or fertility clinic. Sperm banks or clinics may be subject to state or professional regulations, including restrictions on donor anonymity and the number of offspring that may be produced, and there may be other legal protections of the rights and responsibilities of both recipient and donor. Some sperm banks, either by choice or regulation, limit the amount of information available to potential recipients; a desire to obtain more information on donors is one reason why recipients may choose to use a known donor or private donation (i.e. a de-identified donor).

Potential donors are screened for:

• Presence or risk of STIs such as HIV, hepatitis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis.
• Physical abnormalities.
• Blood type.
• And many other Tests.

Sperm donation  process 

Sperm can be donated by different ways and under different laws of the country.

A sperm donor may donate sperm privately or through a sperm bank, sperm agency, or other brokerage arrangement different online websites in different countries provide the data of sperm donations. Donations from private donors are most commonly carried out using artificial insemination.

Generally, a male who provides sperm as a sperm donor gives up all legal and other rights over the biological children produced from his sperm. Private arrangements may permit some degree of co-parenting although this will not strictly be 'sperm donation', and the enforceability of those agreements varies by jurisdiction.

Donors may or may not be paid, according to local laws and agreed arrangements. Even in unpaid arrangements, expenses are often reimbursed. Depending on local law and on private arrangements, men may donate anonymously or agree to provide identifying information to their offspring in the future. Private donations facilitated by an agency often use a "directed" donor, when a male directs that his sperm is to be used by a specific person. Non-anonymous donors are also called "known donors", "open donors" or "identity disclosure donors".

The contract may also specify the place and hours for donation, a requirement to notify the sperm bank in the case of acquiring a sexual infection, and the requirement not to have intercourse or to masturbate for a period of usually 2–3 days before making a donation.

Sperm provided by a sperm bank will be produced by a donor attending at the sperm bank's premises in order to ascertain the donor's identity on every occasion.

Collection of sperm through masturbates

The donor masturbates to provide ejaculate or by the use of an electrical stimulator.

Collection of sperms through sexual intercourse.

A special condom, known as a collection condom, may be used to collect the semen during sexual intercourse.

In some countries it is not allowed but in some its allowed.

Transfer of sperms through direct intercourse

This process is adopted mostly privately through directly by a close friend family member or in some cases sperm donar person.

It is allowed in some countries and but not in some it is not allowed.

Storage process

The ejaculate is collected in a small container, which is usually extended with chemicals in order to provide a number of vials, each of which would be used for separate inseminations. The sperm is frozen and quarantined, usually for a period of six months, and the donor is re-tested prior to the sperm being used for artificial insemination.

The frozen vials will then be sold directly to a recipient or through a medical practitioner or fertility center and they will be used in fertility treatments. Where a woman becomes pregnant by a donor, that pregnancy and the subsequent birth must normally be reported to the sperm bank so that it may maintain a record of the number of pregnancies produced from each donor.

History

In 1884, Professor William Pancoast of Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College performed an insemination on the wife of a sterile Quaker merchant, which may be the first insemination procedure that resulted in the birth of a child. Instead of taking the sperm from the husband, the professor chloroformed the woman, then let his medical students vote which one of among them was "best looking", with that elected one providing the sperm that was then syringed into her cervix (neck of the uterus).

At the husband's request, his wife was never told how she became pregnant. As a result of this experiment, the merchant's wife gave birth to a son, who became the first known child by donor insemination. The case was not revealed until 1909, when a letter by Addison Davis Hard appeared in the American journal Medical World, highlighting the procedure.

Since then, a few doctors began to perform private donor insemination. Such procedures were regarded as intensely private, if not secret, by the parties involved. Records were usually not maintained so that donors could not be identified for paternity proceedings. Technology permitted the use of fresh sperm only, and it is thought that sperm largely came from the doctors and their male staff, although occasionally they would engage private donors who were able to donate on short notice on a regular basis.

In 1945, Mary Barton and others published an article in the British Medical Journal on sperm donation. Barton, a gynecologist, founded a clinic in London which offered artificial insemination using donor sperm for women whose husbands were infertile. This clinic helped conceive 1,500 babies of which Mary Barton's husband, Bertold Weisner, probably fathered about 600.

The first successful human pregnancy using frozen sperm was in 1953.

"Donor insemination remained virtually unknown to the public until 1954". In that year the first comprehensive account of the process was published in The British Medical Journal.

Donor insemination provoked heated public debate. In the United Kingdom, the Archbishop of Canterbury established the first in a long procession of commissions that, over the years, inquired into the practice. It was at first condemned by the Lambeth Conference, which recommended that it be made a criminal offence. A Parliamentary Commission agreed. In Italy, the Pope declared donor insemination a sin, and proposed that anyone using the procedure be sent to prison.

Sperm donation gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s.

In many western countries, sperm donation is now a largely accepted procedure. In the US and elsewhere, there are a large number of sperm banks. A sperm bank in the US pioneered the use of on-line search catalogues for donor sperm, and these facilities are now widely available on the websites of sperm banks and fertility clinics.

Recent years have also seen sperm donation become relatively less popular among heterosexual couples, who now have access to more sophisticated fertility treatments, and more popular among single women and lesbian couples  whose access to the procedure is relatively new and still prohibited in some jurisdictions.