There have always been infertile heterosexual couples who need a sperm donor, but with the legalization of gay marriage and the rise of elective single motherhood, the market has expanded in the past decade. About 20% of the sperm bank’s customers are heterosexual couples, 60% are gay and 20% are single mothers by choice, the banks said.
To meet this demand, men have supplied sperm at a constant rate for years, some banks said. But the coronavirus changed things. Existing donors were afraid to enter. New donor registrations stopped for months during the blockade and never really recovered in some banks. Several banks said they had a lot of old frozen sperm stored, but that they could not last long.
“Donor recruitment is a growing challenge,” said Scott Brown, vice president of strategic alliances at California Cryobank. “And I would definitely say that people are still very interested in having children.”
Many people also want intelligent sperm. That is why some large banks are close to elite colleges. They have sperm collection centers in Palo Alto, California, near Stanford University, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, near Harvard. College students are one of the most trusted groups to see the potential chaos of raising perhaps 50 biological children around the world in exchange for about $ 4,000 over several months – and deciding it is a good deal.
A donor would usually go to the bank once or twice a week for months to produce enough sperm to sell to dozens of families.
“A lot of their recruitment takes place around fraternities, but fraternities are not getting together,” said Rosanna Hertz, director of women’s and gender studies at Wellesley College and co-author of “Random Families,” a book on donor design. “People want college-educated sperm, so to speak.”
Therefore, banks were getting desperate. A recruiter told me that she started advertising on outdoor trails since the gyms were closed. A sales representative from another sperm bank said he hoped the administration could offer cash bonuses to attract donors, but that its bosses were concerned with setting a precedent.