For single women, rainbow and straight couples all over Aotearoa, a sperm donation has turned their dream of creating a family into a reality.
But as families change, demand for sperm has skyrocketed to a point where fertility clinics simply cannot keep up. Clinics often have two to three-year waitlists for sperm donors, and for clients usually pay thousands of dollars in fees.
It’s a phenomenon that’s pushed sperm donation out of the medical field and into the hands of DIY donors, creating an environment some say is ripe for exploitation, control and deceit.
In Auckland, 33-year-old teacher Jordan began her search for a private sperm donor after her long-term relationship broke up. She has polycystic ovary syndrome, which can make it difficult to conceive, so she didn’t want to risk a three-year wait to find a donor through a clinic.
She signed up to an app called CoParents, which pairs hopeful parents with private sperm donors. She matched with a farmer called Dexter in Hawke’s Bay, but it wasn’t long before alarm bells began to ring.
“We emailed back and forward for, I think it was maybe a month and a half, but it became really clear that he was just trying to manipulate someone into having sex with him,” Jordan says.
TVNZ’s Sunday has viewed emails Dexter sent to Jordan. When she asked whether he wanted them to spend the night together, he informed her that “from a scientific point of view, it could well be regular sex, and the presence of semen in your vagina is likely to restore a normal menstrual cycle”.
He also asked about her body hair.
“Do you have excessive hair growth on your body? Actually, I find hair on women to be very erotic, especially a lot of pubic hair.
Sunday emailed Dexter through a fake account for several months, enquiring about a potential donation, and he made multiple false claims about the efficacy of sex versus artificial insemination (AI).
“When using AI, there can be splash loss during collection and sperm damage as the semen hits the walls of the collection vessel upon ejaculation. The plastic vessel can contain chemicals damaging to sperm. These are some of reasons I know nature to be better,” he said.
No merit to claims sex better than artificial insemination
Medical director at Repromed Dr Devashana Gupta says there is no merit to the claims Dexter made to Jordan or to Sunday, and says any general claims that sex is more effective than artificial insemination are false.
“In a normal cycle a heterosexual couple have around a 15% chance of conceiving in a month, so that’s not high at all,” she said. “Having sex definitely does not have the trump card over doing intrauterine insemination.”
She said that such cases are “very concerning”.
“There is no framework, there is no protection for these women who are undertaking treatment at home… from donors, they meet in forums.”
When contacted, Dexter said that having sex was optional, but he preferred the natural process. He was unapologetic about the claims he made.
“I've looked at things in depth. Often, medical practitioners are very limited in what they know. I have got qualifications in reproductive technologies, specifically, with regard to animals, of course.”
Regarding his commentary on body hair, he said “our whole bodies work on pheromones and they’re integrated with things like hair growth, for instance”.
Jordan says she’s angry at Dexter, and though she stopped contacting him, she worries about other donors approaching women in the same way.
“That really scares me and upsets me,” she says. “I’m really grateful I could see through it for what it was. And that I wasn’t in a more desperate situation.”
Stewart Dalley, a lawyer who specialises in fertility, sperm and egg donation and surrogacy, and Repromed counselling team manager Helen Nicholson debate the issues of sperm donation. (Source: Breakfast)
Donor admitted to convictions
In another concerning case, mum Candice was in a desperate situation when she began speaking to a local donor who she met through a Facebook group last year. She was approaching 40 and aching to give her son a sibling.
She says she received about four or five donations from him before he admitted to her that he had convictions.
Sunday checked the history of the man, who has permanent name suppression, and he was convicted and fined in 2005 for three charges of possessing an objectionable publication.
The man declined to comment when approached, but when Sunday posed as an interested recipient through a fake profile, he confirmed he would be happy to donate sperm, and that he has one child through sperm donation.
Candice says she wants the man to stop donating, but doesn’t think he will.
“He’s said he’d like to give a few families a chance,” she says.
That wasn’t the end of Candice’s nightmare search for a donor. Earlier this year, she began using a donor who told her he only did natural insemination (NI) i.e. sex.
“He said that NI is more effective than AI. He sort of gave me a few reasons, like it’s fresh sperm and hasn't been out in the air, which kills sperm.”
That information isn’t accurate. Sperm can be outside the body for 30 minutes to an hour before it’s no longer viable.
Candice says it isn’t right that she felt she had to have sex with her donor because she was so desperate for a baby. After receiving a few NI donations from the donor, Candice ultimately cut off contact with him and stopped her fertility journey completely.
“It was having an effect on my mental health,” she says. “I felt that he was taking over and having more power over what he wanted than what I wanted.”
She says she’s proud of herself for ending her search for a donor when she did.
“I was always thinking of how to conceive. Now I want to concentrate on my little boy, and life and studying. It’s kind of a good thing, coz now I can move on.”
$70,000 spent on rounds of IVF
A third woman, 43-year-old Sarah* says she’s wanted to be a mum “since I was a little girl”. She’s spent $70,000 so far on rounds of IVF, which haven’t been successful.
“The idea of being pregnant and growing a life, and then being able to shape them into an amazing adult that can go out into the world and make a difference, I would love the opportunity to experience that,” she says tearfully.
She was hugely relieved when in 2019 she came across a donor online who seemed to tick all the boxes – young, healthy and keen to help her.
“He seemed like a really nice guy - really genuine, intelligent, funny, caring. He had a good job, he helped out in the community. He wasn’t a big partier, or boozer, he wasn’t into drugs. The word wholesome comes to mind when I think about who he was when we were talking.”
The pair lived in different cities, but spoke online for a year before Sarah decided to take the plunge. The donor banked his sperm at a clinic, so Sarah could use it for IVF. The clinic provided counselling for the pair, and Sarah says there were “no red flags” raised at all.
She did get pregnant last year, but lost the baby in the first trimester, which devastated her.
“I wasn’t emotionally prepared for how hard it hit me. The only silver lining to that situation was that I've learnt how to grieve, and finally starting to realise that this may never happen for me.”
In October last year Sarah was shocked to read a post in a Facebook group that her donor, 27-year-old Liam Chappy Nixon was facing a raft of serious charges.
In May this year he pleaded guilty at the Greymouth District Court to three charges relating to sexual abuse of children, including performing an indecent act on a child under 12. He also pleaded guilty to five charges relate to possessing more than 1500 objectionable videos and images, and two charges of distributing an objectionable publication. He is due to be sentenced in December.
The offending occurred between 2016 and 2022, during which time he had donated to Sarah.
“It felt like I'd been kicked in the chest by a horse. I felt physically ill,” Sarah says. “Once it sunk in, I felt a massive wave of relief, I felt so thankful that I never conceived a child to him.”
‘12 kids for five families’
However, Sarah wasn’t Nixon’s only recipient. In an interview with an overseas Youtube channel before his arrest, he said he’d donated “the maximum number of times” through the clinic. “It’s five families, up to 12 kids for the whole five families,” he said.
The clinic Nixon used cited privacy reasons for not disclosing how many women received Nixon’s sperm, or if he’s fathered any donor children.
The clinic says it has a comprehensive donor screening policy. It used to apply “more stringent vetting policies” to clinic donors than private donors that people brought to the clinic themselves.
It has decided to strengthen vetting processes, saying “historically personal donors were often friends or acquaintances, but social media has changed that. We have decided to put all donors through the same vetting process. Additionally, although not standard procedure in NZ, we have decided that future donors will be subject to police checking.
“It’s just extremely expensive.”
So why the demand for DIY donors? It mostly comes down to cost, and time. Doing intrauterine insemination with a donor through a clinic costs around $3500, plus a donor fee for each cycle if you use a clinic donor. IVF costs around $15,000.
Most clinics are battling demand that far outweighs their supply of donors, which means waitlists can be up to three years long.
Repromed’s Dr Gupta says her clinic has about a tenth of the donors it needs, and there’s about 250 people on the waiting list, half of whom are single women.
“We have a handful of Asian donors, maybe only one Māori donor, and European donors. There is probably somewhere around a dozen women who would like a Māori donor - definitely not enough donors and there is a big need for donors in all clinics.”
She says the shortage could be down to lack of awareness of the need, and lack of compensation. Currently clinics can only compensate donors with a token gift like a Prezzy card. Dr Gupta says she would like for clinics to be able to compensate donors more.
“Recently, the UK increased their donor compensation for sperm donors to about 35 pounds, which is about $68 dollars, and they did find that that increased the number of donors that they had available.
“Currently, we have around a $50 dollar Prezzy Card each time (donors) bank, so that’s about $300 dollars. I'd say it’s reasonable to consider maybe up to $600 to $800, maybe not more than a $1000.”
The benefits of clinics include greater accountability and safety. Most clinics in NZ allow donors to provide sperm to a maximum of 12 children across five families, though that doesn’t stop clinic donors from donating privately as well.
Sperm banked at a clinic goes through rigorous testing, including testing for genetic disorders and STDs, which can still be passed on through at-home artificial insemination.
Should clinic treatment be cheaper? Dr Gupta says that could conflict with the interests of running a business.
“Each year, you know there’s always a review of costs and at times we don’t increase the costs.”
Meanwhile, the popularity of online sperm donor groups, mostly organised through Facebook, are exploding. The biggest New Zealand based Facebook group has nearly 3000 members.
“A sperm donor is not a blood donor.”
Trying to find biological father
Donor-conceived Kiwi Bec Hamilton spent more than 20 years trying to find her biological father, an anonymous sperm donor who was part of Professor Dennis Bonham’s sperm donor programme in the 1970s at National Women’s Hospital.
She spent her early 20s scouring the country via newspaper ads, even taking part in a documentary that helped put her in touch with men who donated around the same time.
It wasn’t until 2020 that an alert from a DNA testing site finally allowed her to connect the dots, and get in touch with biological siblings, cousins, aunties and uncles. Her donor father, she found out, had died when she was two, but she finally had the information, and family links, she’d spent her adult life searching for.
“I burst into tears, there was a whole well of emotion. I must have traded 60 emails with my relatives over the coming days exchanging photos and stories and filling this huge gap in my identity.”
Now Bec, a law professor at American University, is also an advocate for donor-conceived Kiwis.
She says people navigating donor conception, whether as parents, donors or donor conceived people, can find information and support through Donor Conceived Aotearoa.
She wants to see a legal cap on the number of children donors can father, as well as a mandatory register for all donors, not just clinic ones, so their children can find them later in life. Currently, there is no legislation covering DIY donation.
“What I want is for everyone who is involved in donor conception, whether as a donor or recipient parent, is to ask one fundamental question, which is, have we done everything that this human being that we're creating needs to be a healthy donor-conceived person? Do I have a system in place so that the biological parent or parents can be updating their medical information on a regular basis for the next 30 years? What am I doing to ensure that this human being that I'm creating has the chance to have authentic connections with their biological relatives?”
She says sperm donation done wrong can be “fundamentally damaging to human beings”.
“I think the big reframe in this conversation needs to be from focusing on creating a baby or creating a child, to realising that you are creating a human being who's going to live with the lifelong consequences of the choices that you're making now. And we'll pass those consequences on down the generations.”
“Modern day Genghis Khans”
Law professor and fertility fraud expert Jody Madeira says you just need to look overseas to see what could happen if DIY donation remains unregulated in Aotearoa.
Fertility fraud expert Professor Jody Madeira explains the risks of not going through official sources. (Source: 1News)
In April, a Dutch man suspected to have fathered more than 550 children was charged with endangering public health and ordered to stop donating by the courts. Last year, American serial donor Kyle Gordy was detained on his way to New Zealand for a so-called “sperm tour”, but his Australian counterpart Adam Hooper was let in.
“There are men who essentially want to become modern-day Genghis Khans and populate the world. They think they have great genetics, there's something attractive about them. They're attracted to the idea of having a large number of children.
“And of course, they never have to raise these children, and they don't pay child support. They're not emotionally involved with these children in many circumstances. And that also, I think, is a form of gratification, a form of power, perhaps, especially for men who lack these or have lacked these sensations of power in other areas of their lives.”
She says serial donors often donate through clinics as well as privately, so there’s no real way to know exactly how many children they have.
“We have some serial sperm donors who have hundreds of children, and they accumulate a large number of donations by donating through multiple fertility clinics. And when those venues exhaust themselves, they donate at the same time through private Facebook donations. So we're talking about individuals with 550 confirmed donations, but that's likely as high as 1100, 1200 children.”
She says the best way for women seeking sperm donors to protect themselves is to use a person known to them, either a trusted friend or non-biological relative.
“The second is to sign a contract and specify things like what forms of contact that individual will have with a child going forward. Is this a co-parenting relationship? Or will that person have no legal responsibilities? Just identify that at the time prior to conception. The third is to go with that individual to a clinic where that clinic can examine the individual, genetically test that individual [and do] STD testing.
“They should be willing to be as transparent as it takes to help you conceive. If there are any signs of reticence, refusal to provide information, hesitation. Those types of things are red flags that should warn individuals away from particular men who might otherwise seem to be good candidates for private sperm donation.”
*not her real name
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