The sperm black market...(sorry)

Also a good present for godchildren, more Dennis, and the rise (and rise) of posh bedding

You ever spent much time on a sperm bank website? I have, largely for research purposes. I made a podcast about egg freezing and the issues surrounding it in 2020, and as part of that I interviewed a Danish sperm donor who I disguised and called John on the podcast.

John was quite a solemn, unemotional chap so I needed to try and wring some feeling out of him for our interview. ‘Do you ever think about any of the children you might have fathered?’ I asked him hopefully. ‘No,’ John replied simply in accented English, ‘because it’s not my child. I’m only a donor.’

Ok John, I pressed on, but was it not a major time commitment, visiting the clinic multiple times to donate over a period of four years? 

‘Well, it was on the way to work,’ John replied, with a small chuckle.

John, come on! Give me something!

I ask because there’s a new documentary landing on Netflix tomorrow called The Man With 1000 Kids, which highlights one of the troubling and growing problems with the sperm industry. The doc is about a Dutch man - Jonathan Jacob Meijer - who’s donated sperm so many times that he’s suspected of fathering over 1,000 children worldwide. I mentioned Jonathan in a piece I wrote for The Spectator last year because he’d been ordered to stop donating by a court in The Hague a month earlier.

That piece was about how Copenhagen has become the sperm capital of the world. According to the most recent figures available, in 2020, almost half of all sperm used in Britain came from abroad - 27 per cent from America, and 21 per cent from Denmark. Given that America’s population is 332m and Denmark’s is 6m, this means that the Danes are punching considerably above their weight, sperm-wise.

This is for various reasons: Danish banks were very ahead of themselves in the 90s when sperm banks started opening, they have quite a liberal culture and Danish men see giving sperm as akin to giving blood, and also we have very little home, er, grown sperm. The UK’s biggest sperm bank, the London Sperm Bank, has just 89 donors on its books right now. Although that’s a vast improvement on this time last year when I wrote the Spectator piece and discovered that it only had 29 donors. I rang them to check that number was correct because it seemed so low and a wary employee at the London Sperm Bank confirmed it: the UK’s ‘biggest’ sperm bank only had 29 donors. No wonder people are looking abroad.

I have friends who’ve had a baby thanks to a Danish donor. They spent nearly £20,000 on sperm, fertility treatments and drugs and now have a gurgling Viking baby - as they’re often dubbed - of their own. ‘Have you ever checked in at the airport next to a flight for Copenhagen? They’re all beautiful,’ she once joked to me.

Now, on the one hand, how lovely and generous and altruistic of Danish men like my podcast pal John. How wonderful that they’re helping people have babies. Hurrah for that.

On the other, it’s led to a situation where donors can donate extremely often and too much, fathering dozens or hundreds or, in the case of the dude in the Netflix documentary, potentially over 1000 children. He’s Dutch, this guy, but he’s managed to do it via Dutch and Danish clinics, among others, including Cryos - based in Copenhagen - which is the biggest sperm bank in the world (1231 donors on their books, currently).

It’s actually remarkably easy for something like this to happen, because while each country has its own laws regarding sperm and egg donation, there isn’t a centralised body overseeing them all.

How to explain. Ok, different countries have different limits on how many children one man can father via a sperm bank, right? In the UK, donors are restricted to 10 families max. In Denmark, it’s 12 families. In Sweden it’s six, and in Portugal it’s 10. These are sensible limits designed to try and protect half-siblings from ending up together and funky stuff happening to our gene pool.

The trouble is, there isn’t a law preventing donors or clinics from selling their sperm to multiple different countries. So the same clinic can easily sell sperm from one donor to father six families in Sweden AND 12 families in Denmark AND 10 families in Britain AND as many as they like in America, where there’s no limit at all.

Do you see? It essentially becomes very easy for one man to father hundreds of children in many different countries - and entirely legally because there’s no regulation against it, only limits within the individual countries themselves. I spoke to an embryologist last year who told me a story about a 44-year-old woman at her London clinic who’d recently failed to get pregnant with sperm that she’d ordered from a Danish sperm bank. Upset, she called the bank to complain that the sperm must be faulty, only for the sperm bank to turn around and say that couldn’t possibly be true because, according to their records, he’d already fathered 52 children around the world.

I also spoke to two British women who’d used Danish sperm banks to have their respective daughters, and were becoming increasingly fearful that their donors had fathered too many children. Both women were in touch with other families around the world who’d used the same donor as them. Nowadays, clinics state in their terms and conditions that neither recipients nor donors should seek one another out before the child turns 18, but obviously the internet has made it very easy to find out if a donor has had other children. One of the mothers I spoke to already knew that her daughter had ‘diblings’ (donor siblings) in Germany, France, Italy and America thanks to a Facebook group she’d discovered, and she described this revelation as ‘overwhelming’. It made her scared that she’d chosen that donor, she told me.

Alternatively, you can try and seek out sperm donors online for free. A few years ago, while researching this subject for my second novel, I asked and was allowed to join a closed Facebook group called ‘Sperm Donors UK AI Only’. (AI means artificial insemination as opposed to NI which means natural insemination. Sex, in other words.)

This is one of many Facebook groups you can join if you want a baby via a sperm donor and don’t have a few thousand lying around. Instead of going to a sperm bank, you post a message online asking if anyone’s willing to donate. ‘Me and my fiancé are looking for an AI donor only,’ someone posted a couple of days ago in this group. ‘We live in Gloucester and can travel if needs ideally looking for light hair blue eyes.’ Elsewhere, men offer themselves up as willing donors for free. ‘Welsh donor here,’ wrote one guy recently, ‘willing to travel for the right couples. I will have a clean sti test.’

It’s the sperm black market, in other words - completely unregulated and dangerous -where you meet a stranger from the internet and he hands you his sample in a cup.

After The Spectator piece came out last year I wanted to make another podcast series about all of the above - why Denmark has become the sperm capital of the world, the dangers of that, why Britain has such a sperm shortage, and why the sperm black market is booming as a result. I also wanted to look into whether the cost of living crisis has increased the numbers of those seeking donors for free on Facebook groups like the above. I wanted to investigate the egg black market, because that’s apparently booming too, as older women increasingly try to have children and find their eggs are past it, so they buy younger eggs elsewhere. One fertility contact told me she knows of a Spanish business flogging British women eggs from young Argentinian girls. Again, unregulated. Dangerous. Exploitative. Grim.

I wrote a podcast series pitch for this and everything, but then other bits and bobs of work took over and it got parked. But if anyone reading this is interested in a podcast series about these murky developments in the fertility industry and the dodgy black market, then shout! Let’s chat sperm! (And eggs!) The Netflix doc is out tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Picture Video of the week

I promise (sort of) these won’t all be of Dennis forever. But yesterday I came in from the garden to discover this:

As someone said on Instagram, his expression seems to say ‘I know we don’t have a cat, but a cat did this.’

There is a schism between old-school sorts who still believe you should get cross with your dog when they do something naughty and, eg, rub their noses in it if they have an accident inside. Then there are the contemporary dog trainers who say don’t tell puppies off for things they simply don’t understand because you’ll just scare them. I think this video shows the kind of disciplinarian I’m shaping up to be…

Recommendation of the week

This artist, Emma Mounsey-Heysham. Isn’t this sweet? I went to a christening baptism on Saturday (did you know the difference? I didn’t. Baptism is the Catholic one, apparently). Luckily, a few of weeks before I discovered Emma online and asked her to do a painting as a present for my godson, Luca. We settled on a lion, a lemur and a lizard and she was a JOY to deal with. Her alphabet paintings are £75 which I think is pretty great for something bespoke and personalised. This isn’t an advert; I paid for it and everything. I’ve just fairly often been that person panicking about what to buy a godchild, and if you’ve got a christening/baptism/birthday of a small person coming up soon then she might just help you out… Her website is HERE.

Nonsense of the week

A £22,000 duvet, which I discovered via this Airmail piece. It’s made with ‘down culled from the rare Icelandic eider duck’ which apparently is much posher than other down by poxy geese because it doesn’t ‘bunch up’. Icelanders hand down eiderdowns made from the stuff which I suppose makes sense when they’re worth more than a car but, also, do you want your dead grandfather’s duvet on your bed? Anyway, last month a Parisian company launched this £22,000 version for oligarchs who have insomnia, and also for private jets. Because weight is an issue on private jets, so the lighter the bedding the better, you see.

‘Quick, kids, follow me otherwise they’re going to put you in a duvet on a private jet’

When did we all get *quite* so silly about bedding? I can be deeply pretentious about bedding myself. I have a lovely feather duvet from Peter Jones, feather pillows from the website Soak&Sleep (which ALWAYS has some sort of sale on if you need new bedding), a magnificent mattress from the same place with a memory foam topper, and white Egyptian cotton sheets and pillowcases. I’m quite obsessed with specifically white bedding, which is something I’ve inherited from my mother, but the other day, a sale email from Piglet in Bed caught my eye and I thought ‘Yeah, why not have a look at some nice gingham bedding for a change? Live a little, Sophia.’

So I clicked on the sale link, which directed me to their website, and I threw a duvet cover, sheet and two pillowcases into my basket only to be told that the grand total was £386 EVEN though this was technically a sale price. WHAT??? I suppose one gets quite a lot of use from bed linen, ideally. But nearly £400 for a set?? Is that not quite mad? So I abandoned my basket and decided I’d wait for the next John Lewis sale.

But when did we all go so mad about linen and wildly expensive sheets and duvets and so many pillows you have to throw several of them on the floor at night just to get in the fricking bed? Was it a pandemic thing, like all those home improvements, because we were all spending so much time at home and wanted to make our bedrooms all sanctuary like? Was it to take artful pictures of our beds with 83 pillows for social media purposes? I genuinely don’t know. I’m a big fan of posh bedding, like I said, but imagine if you went home with someone after a date and they said, just as you were getting down it, ‘Please be careful, this is a £22,000 duvet.’

Red card, I’d say.