The advertisement in the Amsterdam metro station caught my eye. “If you can, help those who can’t,” read the short tag line that ran across a photo of a smiling young man.
At first I thought perhaps this was a campaign recruiting people to teach English to refugees or volunteer to assist elderly neighbours.
Then I spotted the company’s name on the top right corner of the advert: European Sperm Bank. Ah, right. I was curious, so a few days later – for the purpose of journalistic research – I gave the European Sperm Bank a call.
One of the largest sperm banks in Europe, the company was set up in Copenhagen in 2004 and today sells to 80 countries.
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Denmark has a reputation as a hub for “fertility tourism”. The company expanded to Germany, where it has a base in Hamburg recruiting donors, and more recently it moved into Amsterdam.
The standard rate for a single donation is €40 and in the majority of cases donors stop in once a week. The number of times a person can donate in a month is capped at 14.
A lot of the men who apply to be donors are students and the average age is 27. Most do it for a year or so. The company, which is owned by UK private equity firm Perwyn, says it has more than 900 active donors.
There’s a fairly rigorous screening process men have to go through. Samples are tested to assess quality, and their family medical history is studied for any record of hereditary diseases.
Blood and urine samples are tested and the prospective donor is required to attend counselling, to make sure they understand the implications of helping other families conceive children. They take a personality test as well.
Only between 5 and 7 per cent of applicants end up becoming donors, which means a sperm bank needs to get a lot of people through the door initially to produce enough stock to meet demand.
Single women make up about 45 per cent of the European Sperm Bank’s clients. Same-sex couples are another big cohort.
A decade ago fertility clinics would have purchased samples from a sperm bank. Now it’s more common for the couple, or woman, to buy it directly, picking from profiles of donors online, with the sample then sent to their chosen clinic or hospital.
Sometimes a family will choose a “local” donor from their home country, others prefer the opposite.
Anonymous donors are prohibited in Ireland and many other European countries. When a child conceived through the use of a sperm donor reaches a certain age, usually 16 or 18, they will be entitled to find out the identity of their biological father.
The industry has been rocked by scandals in recent years. Some men have exploited gaps in the regulation of the practice to father hundreds of children, raising serious ethical concerns for the children involved.
There is no European Union-wide limit on the maximum number of children a sperm donor can father and tracking donations across national borders is difficult.
While national limits exist, there is nothing to legally stop an individual donating in several countries, and to separate private sperm banks. There’s pressure in Brussels to close that loophole.
The European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology recommends an EU limit capping the number of families a single donor can help at 50, which it says should be phased down to 15.
In a statement, the organisation said “the wellbeing of donor-conceived people should have the highest priority when determining limits on the number of donor offspring per gamete donor”. Donors should also have to sign a declaration listing out all previous donations, it recommends.
The European Sperm Bank supports an EU cap but doesn’t want it set too low. The company sets its own restriction on the number of families one donor can help at 75 globally.
Within that the company has national limits to prevent large numbers of children being fathered by the same donor in one country. The limit is four separate families in Ireland and 12 in Denmark.
In response to a recent parliamentary query from an MEP, European commissioner for health Olivér Várhelyi said most European states had national limits in place, usually capping one donor at a dozen families.
The Hungarian commissioner said EU rules kicking in next year would require countries to enforce “all national maximum limits for distribution by gamete banks”.
“This marks a significant step forward in the control of cross-border distribution of sperm,” he wrote in a reply last month. It had not been possible to agree on an EU-wide donation limit when negotiating those new rules, he said.
