Who Donates Sperm?

“Sperm is a hot commodity in 21st-century Britain,” writes Alice-Azania Jarvis in the Independent, which, go ahead, have a good laugh. HOT SPERM! It’s the perfect SEO lead! While you’re chuckling, let’s also get these out of the way: the article mentions the “grey market” for sperm and also talks about “how the act of donation is rather opaque.” Okay, got it all out of your system? Great.

Jarvis’ piece uses Britain’s sperm sparsity — you will recall that the situation is so dire that random sperm vigilantes are going out on their own to seek semen — to ask a larger question: What sort of man donates sperm? Well, the helping kind, mostly. But there are also other motivations.

Mark Jackson first learned of the sperm shortage six years ago. Sitting at his computer, reading news of the Boxing Day tsunami, he was made aware of his own mortality. “I realised that you could be wiped off the earth without having left any impact,” he reflects. “My eye was caught by a ticker running across the screen. It said that there was a shortage of gamete donations. I didn’t even know what that was, but I clicked on the link. I realised that maybe I could make a difference after all.”

Jackson is not alone. Hundreds of British men are showing their spunk in a period of sperm austerity. The number of registered donors nearly doubled in a four year period in response to a series of awareness campaigns that hopefully used the slogan “Keep calm and fill your palm.” But there is another part of the donation experience, the previously mentioned “grey market.” Let’s meet Ed.

Ed Houben of the Netherlands has been donating sperm since 1999, and doing so privately since 2002. He is Europe’s most prolific sperm donor. Head to his website and you are directed towards an upbeat missive in which he explains his willingness to offer “a good sperm cell” to needy couples around the world. He has fathered some 70 children, several in his home country, and others as far flung as Australia, Canada and Israel. At present, he has another eight on the way.

While this situation seems ripe for some sort of Sophoclean tragedy down the road, it’s hard not to see Ed as another altruist whose charitable acts just happen to involve spreading his seed all over the world. Also, he sometimes gets to do sex to his donees — “I would never have mentioned it. But then people began asking. I was amazed at first, but there are people who find artificial insemination lacking in intimacy. For many, [natural insemination] is the closest they get to being normal.”

This is very clearly a case of doing well by doing good. While this topic naturally lends itself to some nervous laughter, it’s actually rather moving, and it makes me reassess my own life. I’ve been so busy getting this website of the ground over the last year and a half that I’ve haven’t really had much of a chance to contribute to the community which has done so much for me. I think maybe it’s time I started giving back.