Why do some sperm donors end up having hundreds of children?

First, you must produce enough sperm in a sample (i.e. your sperm count). You then need to take control of its mobility and its shape or morphology.

The sperm is also tested to ensure that it can survive freezing and storage in a sperm bank.

You could be perfectly fertile, have six children, and still not be eligible for donation.

The rules vary around the world, but in the UK you must also be relatively young (between 18 and 45), not have infections such as HIV or gonorrhea, or be a carrier of mutations that can cause genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and sickle cell anemia.

In general, this means that the number of people who ultimately become sperm donors is small. In the UK, half of the sperm is imported.

But biology means that a small number of donors can produce large numbers of children.

One sperm is enough to fertilize one egg, but there are tens of millions of sperm in each ejaculate.

Men come to the clinic once or twice a week while donating, which can take months.

Sarah Norcross, director of fertility and genomics charity Progress Educational Trust, said the shortage of donated sperm makes it a precious commodity and sperm banks and fertility clinics are maximizing the use of available donors to meet demand.

In this small group of donors, some men’s sperm are simply more popular than others.

The donors are not selected at random. It’s a process similar to the harsh reality of dating apps, where some men find many more partners than others.

Depending on the sperm bank, you can browse photos, hear their voice, find out what they do (engineer or artist?), and check their height, weight, and more.

“If their name is Sven, they’re blonde, they’re 6ft 3in tall, they’re athletes, they play the violin and they speak seven languages, you know that’s a lot more attractive than a donor like me,” says Professor Allan Pacey, a male fertility expert who ran a sperm bank in Sheffield, England.

“Ultimately, people swipe left and right when it comes to finding a compatible donor.”

Denmark is home to some of the largest sperm banks in the world and has earned a reputation for producing “Viking babies.”

Ole Schou, 71, founder of sperm bank Cryos International, where a single 0.5ml vial of sperm costs between $117 (100 euros) and more than $1,175 (1,000 euros), says the culture of sperm donation in Denmark is very different from the culture in other countries.

“The population is like a big family,” he says. “There are fewer taboos around these topics and we are an altruistic population; many sperm donors also donate blood.”

And that, according to Schou, has enabled the country to become “one of the few sperm exporters”.

But he argues that Danish sperm is also popular for genetic reasons.

As he explained to the BBC, the Danish genes for “blue eyes and blonde hair” are recessive traits, meaning they must come from both parents to appear in a child.

As a result, the mother’s characteristics, such as dark hair, “could be dominant in the resulting child,” Schou explains.

It says that demand for donor sperm comes primarily from “single, well-educated women in their 30s who are focused on their careers and have given up on family planning too late.” They currently make up 60% of applications.

One aspect of sperm donor research published in early December looked at how a man’s sperm was collected at the European Sperm Bank in Denmark and then sent to 67 fertility clinics in 14 countries.

Countries have their own rules about how often a man’s sperm can be used.

Sometimes it is tied to the total number of children, sometimes it is limited to a certain number of mothers (so that each family can have as many children together as they want).

The original argument for these boundaries was to prevent half-siblings who were unaware of their relationship from meeting, forming relationships, and having children.

But nothing prevents the use of sperm from the same donor in Italy and Spain, as well as in the Netherlands and Belgium, provided that the regulations of each country are respected.

This creates circumstances in which a sperm donor can legally father large numbers of children. Although people are often not aware of this fact.

“Many recipients, as well as donors, do not realize that sperm from a single donor can be legally used in many different countries. This fact should be better explained,” says Sarah Norcross, who argues that it would be “prudent” to reduce the number of children a donor can have.

In response to the investigation into the sperm donor who passed on a gene that caused cancer in some of the 197 children he fathered, Belgian authorities called on the European Commission to set up a European sperm donor register to monitor cross-border sperm transport.

Deputy Prime Minister Frank Vandenbroucke said the industry was like the “Wild West” and “the original mission of offering people the opportunity to start a family has given way to a real fertility business.”

The European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology also proposed a cap of 50 families per donor across the EU.

This system would allow a donor’s sperm to produce more than 100 children if families each want two or more babies.

Concerns have been raised about the impact on children conceived through sperm donation.

Some will be pleased, others may be deeply disturbed by the double discovery that she was conceived with donor sperm and is one of hundreds of half-siblings.

The same applies to donors, who are often unaware of the wide distribution of their sperm.

These risks are compounded by the easy availability of DNA ancestry testing and social media where people can search for their children, siblings or the donor.

In the UK, there is no longer any anonymity for sperm donors and there is an official process through which children learn the identity of their biological father.

Ole Schou of Cryos argues that further restrictions on sperm donation would simply encourage families to turn to the completely unregulated private market.

Dr. John Appleby, a medical ethicist at Lancaster University, said the implications of such widespread use of sperm represented a huge ethical minefield.

She explained that there are issues surrounding identity, privacy, consent, dignity and more, making it a “balance” between competing needs.

The expert explained that the fertility industry “has a responsibility to control the frequency of use of a donor” but that it would undoubtedly be “very difficult” to agree on a global regulation.

He added that a global sperm donor registry that has been proposed poses its own “ethical and legal challenges.”

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