Have you ordered your pandemic baby yet? Would you like a Viking baby? Cryos International, a sperm bank will send it right to your doorsteps.
Sperm banking is a four billion-dollar industry. And the small Scandinavian country of Denmark is one of the biggest players.
This conversation was inspired by a conversation with Court a mother from a same-sex couple family who decided to have a baby from artificial insemination (episode #193).
I was so intrigued by the baby-making process that I decided to call Peter Reeslev, The CEO of Cryos International, a sperm and egg bank with the largest number of donors, over 1,000 donors from all kinds of ethnicity, with sperm deliveries to over 100 countries. and the highest number of registered pregnancies in the world.
Cryos is located in Denmark but it also has a full sperm and egg bank set-up in Orlando, Florida. The reason for sperm donation is altruism and money. Male donors get paid up to $100US per donation and female egg donors get paid 5,000 USD at Cryos per donation. Male students can go several times per week and be compensated for their time and effort.
Denmark is the leading sperm exporter in the world. Peter Reeslev said that Danish men like to share their sperm for the common good, but I think that ladies like the idea of having Viking babies, tall, blond, with blue eyes.
According to Peter Reeslev, clients want to make sure that the sperm donor is in good health, doesn’t have any bad medical history, and has similar physical characteristics as the receiving family.
Customers can have access to lots of personal information about the donor, including the voice samples, handwriting. Another plus is when the doner is college-educated.
The average sperm donor varies from 25 to 28 years old.
Once a client makes an order, the sperm is shipped to her via carrier.
Here is a video demonstrating how home insemination is performed.
Where is the sperm industry going?
The industry is expanding fast. There have always been infertile straight couples in need of donor sperm, but with the legalization of gay marriage and the rise of elective single motherhood, the market has expanded over the last decade. About 15 percent of sperm bank clients are heterosexual couples, 35 percent are gay women, and 50 percent are single moms by choice.
Also, women who decide to have a career first and children later on in life, have the ability to freeze their eggs when they are at the peak of fertility and then use those same frozen eggs when they want to have a baby and they might not be as fertile anymore.
Another advantage of artificial insemination is that in the real world, not every woman can find an attractive, intelligent, athletic man with good genes to have a romantic relationship with, but in the word of artificial insemination, practically any woman can buy their sperm.
This is evolution at work. Women, by the power of choosing with whom to mate, have always been in control of the evolution of humanity. They can continue having that control through artificial insemination.
Additional information about sperm banks
Due to Covid-19, more women want to have babies, so the demand for sperm continues to increase.
Artificial insemination is not a taboo any more, more and more families are doing it. At one time people used to keep this information confidential, now it’s the kind of conversation you would have at a cocktail party.
Countries like England and Australia make it illegal to pay sperm donors significant amounts of money. In the United States, the F.D.A. does not set a financial limit, but it regulates sperm donation the way it does all tissue donation. A donor must consent of his own free will, without coercion. The banks follow the American Society for Reproductive Medicine guidance that payment should not be a donor’s primary motivation.
Because sperm donation is regulated and donors are compensated for their time but not for their sperm, there seems to be a black market forming where donors give the sperm directly to the client and charge a higher price. For the client, one sperm straw costs about $1,100US.
However, the black market has several huge risks, the risk that a mother will ask the donor for child support, and the risk that a donor will want custody, and the law around these issues are not the same in every state.
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