Brexit, UK, Sperm Donor

UK – A Shortage of Sperm Donors: The Brexit Dilemma We Didn’t See Coming

Source Huffington Post UK

Every year, around 2,500 men and women in the UK have a baby with the help of a sperm donor. For many, using donated sperm is their one chance to fulfil the dream of having a family. But while the number of women using donated sperm is rising every year, the number of willing British donors remains low. 

This is why the UK relies heavily on foreign sperm – recent figures show 3,000 sperm samples from Denmark alone were imported to the UK in 2017. But like all imports, these could be affected by Brexit next March if these thousands of samples are held at the border, unaccounted for by trade agreements. 

Is this the hard Brexit dilemma we didn’t see coming? And if British men don’t step up and donate, will we see a drop in the number of babies born in the UK by sperm donor? 

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Sperm Donor

Woman Wants to Meet All 44 of Her Half-Siblings, Fathered by the Same Sperm Donor

Source Life News

A recent story in the Washington Post described the story of Kianni Arroyo, who is on a three-year quest to meet all of her half-siblings. It’s not as idyllic as it sounds… So far she has found forty-four of them. They live in eight states and four different countries.

The “father” of these children was, of course, a sperm donor, known affectionately to Kianni as “Donor #2757.”

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Denmark, Sperm Donor

Why are British women using Danish sperm to get pregnant?

Source Metro

Despite the fact that Danish men are renowned for being tall, psychically fit gentlemen, they are not actually involved in the child’s life – but is that the whole clue? A paper from the Department of Health and Social Care revealed on Friday that Danish semen made up almost half of all non-British male reproductive material imported to the UK with 3,000 samples last year.

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Sperm Donor

UK – How I Chose My Sperm Donor

Source Refinery 29
The doctor who performed my egg collection was a Nigerian man with a round face and a cheeky grin. I liked him immediately. Now he was waving a piece of paper in my face. On it was a description of the sperm donor I’d chosen; I needed to confirm the details before any fertilisation process could begin. Clad in nothing but a hospital gown, I dutifully looked it over, signed, and handed it back to him.

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Sperm Donor

Dear Donor 14659, thank you for your sperm

Source Washington Post

Dear Sperm Donor 14659:

You don’t know me, but I am the mother of your child. I’m a single, 42-year-old, African American woman with a successful public-policy career, a strong social network and a tightknit family. I always believed I would bring a child into this world, but by the time I entered the geriatric phase of fertility, I still had not found “the one.” So, a little more than two years ago, after lots of soul searching, research and a few conversations with people I trust, I selected your profile from hundreds of potential donors in the California Cryobank. With God’s abundant grace, and with your generous genetic contribution, I gave birth to a healthy, smart, beautiful and hilariously tenacious little angel who is curious about the world and is just learning to walk in it.

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Canada, Sperm Donor Registry

Canada – Has the age of the anonymous sperm donor ended?

Source Ottawa Citizen

Erin Jackson did not learn that her biological father was a sperm donor until she was 35. Until then, her parents had kept it a secret, as the doctor involved had advised.

That information, when it arrived, put Jackson’s entire life into a new perspective. “It was shocking, but it also made complete sense to me. It was probably the most transformational life event I have experienced,” said the Toronto native who now lives in California.

The first question she had after learning the truth was about the donor. And that is where Jackson, like many people who were donor conceived, hit a brick wall. There was no donor number, no health information; her mother didn’t even remember the name of the clinic she used.

“I wanted to know where I came from.”

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Australia, Single women, Sperm Donor

Australia – WA single mums’ search for the right donor

Source Perth Now

MORE WA women are seeking to become “single mothers by choice” by using sperm donors, with the wait list at one fertility clinic doubling in 12 months.

A nationwide sperm shortage and increased demand for donor-assisted conception have extended wait lists at Perth fertility clinics, and hundreds of women are instead seeking sperm donors through Facebook.

PIVET Medical Centre’s wait list for donor-assisted conception has doubled in 12 months.

Donor co-ordinator Anne Wigham said more women were aware of their fertility limitations and were making the decision to have a child rather than wait for a partner.

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Sperm Donor

Australia – Sperm donors grant WA single women’s motherhood wishes

Source The West Australia

Cari Warr, Hayley Hendrix and Jayme Gibson don’t know each other, but they are bound by a common thread.

Each one longed to have a child, but had reached a point in their lives where that possibility was slipping out of reach.
They had each hoped to meet a partner to embark on parenthood with, and all eventually decided to go on that journey alone using a sperm donor rather than miss out.

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Sperm Donor, Sperm Donor Rights, Sperm Freezing

Man claims fertility facilities allowed specimen donations to thaw, declined to provide explanation

HOUSTON – A Harris County man alleges Houston Fertility Services, PLLC and Southwest Andrology Services, LLC refused to provide him information in connection with the purported destruction of his sperm donation.

In a lawsuit filed on Apr. 6 in the Harris County 334th District Court, Sharon Amos explains he contributed the specimens in question to the defendants in 2014 after he was diagnosed with cancer. Amos and his wife intended to start a family following his treatment regimen, the suit states.

China, Sperm Donor

Chinese sperm bank: Donors must ‘love socialist motherland’

Source MassLive

If you want to donate sperm at one Chinese hospital, get ready to pledge support to the Communist Party.
According to the BBC, quoting various media sources, a statement Wednesday on a since deleted website of Peking University Third Hospital in Beijing, said donors to its sperm bank must “love the socialist motherland.”
This was translated to mean “support the leadership of the Communist Party, be loyal to the party’s cause and be decent, law-abiding citizens, free of political problems.”

U.S. sperm banks ask many non-genetic based questions of donors, such as hobbies and goals, but party affiliation may be a first one for such screening anywhere.

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DNA Test, Sperm Donor

Lawsuit Claims Fertility Doctor Used His Own Sperm To Impregnate Patient

Source Courthouse News Service

(CN) – A DNA sample sent to Ancestry.com in 2017 led to the filing of a federal lawsuit Friday, as it was discovered that a fertility doctor allegedly used his own sperm to inseminate a patient in 1980.

The parents and the child of the artificial insemination filed the medical malpractice lawsuit in Idaho’s federal court. The complaint alleges that Dr. Gerald Mortimer told Sally Ashby and her husband Howard Fowler that Fowler had a low sperm count and offered an insemination procedure in order to fulfill the couple’s wish to have a child.

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Same Sex, Sperm Donor, UK

How it feels to … be a sperm donor baby and have three mothers

Source The Sunday Times

Raised by three lesbian parents, Jordan Waller had just a brief description of his biological father. Despite being bullied as a child, the actor says his upbringing has been a blessing

Supporting roles: Waller, 25, says his unconventional family has informed his acting career

I know about my dad is that he is a 6ft-tall doctor with brown hair and green eyes. My parents chose him from a list at a sperm bank in Bristol, and from the moment I was old enough to understand, they were open with me that I was born via artificial sperm donor insemination to my biological mum, Miranda.

The donor was chosen to match mum’s partner, Dawn, in terms of her physical characteristics, so on paper I should have been tall and dark, but I turned out to be blond and blue-eyed. My mum likes to joke that they must have mixed up the sperm

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Grandparents, Same Sex, Sperm Donor

Parents of sperm donor win right to see grandson

Source: The Times

Judge’s awarded the paternal family access to the child GETTY IMAGES

The parents of a sperm donor have won the right to have contact with their four-year-old biological grandson in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

Three senior judges ruled that encouraging the boy’s relationship with his paternal family would help him understand the “big picture of his birth story”. The boy was born to a gay female couple, one of whom knew the donor, Lord Justice Peter Jackson said. There was no dispute that he was legally their child but, for the first three years of his life, the natural father had regular contact with the boy.

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Artificial Insemination, Parental rights, Same Sex, Sperm Donor

Supreme Court lets stand Arizona ruling on same-sex paternity case

Source azcentral

The Supreme Court on Monday let stand an Arizona ruling that said paternity should be applied the same way in same-sex marriages as it is in opposite-sex marriages when it comes to determining parental rights.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand an Arizona ruling that said paternity should be applied the same way in same-sex marriages as it is in opposite-sex marriages when it comes to determining parental rights.

The court’s refusal to hear the case means Suzan McLaughlin still has parental rights over the child that Kimberly McLaughlin conceived through artificial insemination while the two were married.

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Egg Donor, Sperm Donor, Vietnam

60-year-old woman becomes Vietnam’s oldest mother

Source: VNExpress

A 60-year-old woman delivers a healthy baby in Hanoi in mid-February, thanks to an egg donor.

She hit menopause several years ago but did not give up on her dream of motherhood.

A Vietnamese woman has given birth to a healthy child at the age of 60, making her the oldest woman in the country to become a mother.

The woman, named only as Ngan, hit menopause several years ago after struggling for a long time to have a baby. She and her husband eventually decided to resort to IVF, using donated eggs and her husband’s sperm.

The baby was born in mid-February via C-section and weighing 2.6 kilograms, and has been given extra formula milk as Ngan cannot produce enough.

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Law, Sperm Donation, Sperm Donor

Judge Dismisses Third Sperm Bank Lawsuit Over Dodgy Donor

Source: Daily Report powered By Law.com

For the third time, a federal judge in Atlanta has tossed out claims against a Georgia sperm bank involving a donor it touted as a highly educated and multitalented but who was really a convicted felon with a history of mental illness.

The order issued Thursday by Northern District Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. closely mirrors two he issued last year, finding that Xytex Cryo International clients who bore children sired by the donor have no basis under Georgia law to sue for “wrongful birth.”

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DNA Test, Donor Eggs, Donor Embryos, Egg Donor, Sperm Donation, Sperm Donor

Personal genetic testing and the implications for the donor conception community

Source: BioNews

The dramatic growth of the databases is raising ethical challenges for the donor conception community. It has been recognised for some time that donor anonymity can no longer be guaranteed but this hypothetical threat is now very much a reality.

Donor conceived individuals are using genetic genealogy databases to match with genetic relatives and identify their biological parents, and there have been many success stories. There are now also a number of cases where people have accidentally discovered that they were donor conceived after taking a commercial DNA test. Some families who have used the services of a fertility clinic have learnt through DNA testing that the clinic owner substituted his own sperm for that of the father (see BioNews 931).

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Sperm Donation, Sperm Donor

A fertility doctor’s secret, a special kinship decades later

Source: AP News

This photo provided by Matt White shows him with Jacoba Ballard, left, and Julie Harmon in New York before a television interview. The three one-time strangers have also reached out to 21 other men and women, all in their 30s, who’ve been linked through DNA tests as their half-siblings, which they claim is evidence that former fertility doctor Donald Cline is likely thei biological father. (Courtesy Matt White via AP)

ZIONSVILLE, Ind. (AP) — Matt White remembers that day in September 2016 when a mystery began to unravel that would change his life.

It started when White read a news report that Dr. Donald Cline, a retired Indianapolis fertility specialist, faced charges for lying when he denied he’d inseminated unwitting patients with his own sperm decades earlier. He searched out Cline’s address online, recognizing it as the location of his mother’s former doctor. Then he Googled the doctor’s name. When a photo popped up, he was stunned: He looked like Cline.

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Sperm Donation, Sperm Donor

Sonoma teen Tyler Sievers discovers 20 half-siblings

Source:  Sonoma Index-Tribune

Tyler and his half sister Heather. This is only the second time they’ve met. (Photo by Robbi Pengelly/Index-Tribune)

Growing up as an only child, Tyler Sievers was comfortable with solitude.

His mothers expected their son to occupy himself – and so Sievers became a creative and resourceful boy. For 18 years he lived happily as a party of one.

And then he sent his DNA to Ancestry.com, and got 20 half-siblings back.

He was conceived in March of 1999, using donated sperm banked at Pacific Reproductive Services in San Francisco. The donor was selected by his mothers from hundreds of options, using data that profiled each man’s broad particulars. Age, height, weight, eye-color. Medical history, family history, hobbies and skills. Sievers’ moms made their choice and his biological mother was inseminated. On Dec. 23 of 1999, Tyler Hammill Sievers was born.

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Sperm Donor

For gay parents, first comes the baby — then comes the debt

Source: NBCNews

There are more options than ever for same-sex couples looking to expand their families, but it’s not a simple — or affordable — endeavor for many.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and his husband, British Olympic diver Tom Daley, announced on Valentine’s Day that they’re expecting their first child. But while there are more options than ever for same-sex couples looking to expand their families, it’s not a simple — or affordable — endeavor for many.

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