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The concept of a ‘sperm marketplace’ may seem strange to the average person.
For women embarking on motherhood alone or couples facing challenges with male infertility, navigating the process of having children can be a daunting and intricate journey.
Brittany Bennett and her husband Luke McLeod were thrust into this world after fertility testing found that Luke had a sperm count of zero.
Speaking to Daily Mail, Brittany says the donor system in Australia is ‘completely shocking and chaotic’.
‘I wanted to try to find a donor who was genetically compatible with me, and also someone who had similar physical features,’ she explains.
Brittany isn’t alone. Our investigation found the most common request from prospective parents is for a male donor who resembles the mother.
She didn’t think it was too much to ask, but the clinic she was dealing with told her that ‘there was no chance to be picky, basically.
‘We were informed that we’d be placed on a list, with new donors entering the system weekly. When I inquired about the number of donors available, I guessed it might be 100 or even 1,000, thinking we’d have a broad selection. However, there were only three options, reflecting three different ethnicities.’
Brittany Bennett (pictured with her husband Luke McLeod) believed it wasn’t unreasonable to hope for a donor who shared her physical traits, but the sperm bank implied she was being overly selective.
‘For us, we were thinking about our child’s future mental health,’ Brittany adds.
‘When they’re 13 years old, I don’t want their classmates teasing them, asking why they don’t look like their mum or dad.’
Brittany stresses that she wasn’t seeking genetic perfection, and felt her requests for the donor clinic were quite reasonable.
In response, she felt pressured into making a decision quickly because there was competition for the best-quality sperm.
‘I wasn’t asking for someone like Chris Hemsworth! My aim was to find a donor with a similar bone structure to mine. But we were advised: “The moment you see a suitable option, click quickly, as others will be doing the same.” It felt more like purchasing concert tickets than choosing my child’s genetic makeup,’ she remarks.
‘When Luke and I decided to pursue IVF—and before we knew his sperm couldn’t be used—we underwent genetic compatibility testing to ensure we weren’t at risk of transmitting certain conditions,’ she mentions.
‘To go from that to being told, basically, “you get what you get” when it comes to sperm, just made our heads spin.
‘It’s like playing sperm roulette.’
‘When they reach the age of 13, I don’t want them facing questions from peers about why they don’t resemble their parents,’ Brittany (seen with her husband on their wedding day) expresses.
After their bad experience with the clinic, the couple eventually decided to use a known donor – Luke’s brother. They are now expecting a baby girl.
‘It’s the best outcome for us, and we’re so happy with the way it’s gone,’ says Brittany. ‘As amazing as IVF clinics are, I do think that the donor system needs some serious work.’
According to research from Virtus Health, up to 50 per cent of demand for donor sperm comes from single women, with 35 per cent coming from same-sex couples and 15 per cent from couples trying to overcome male infertility.
‘There has always been high demand for donor sperm in Australia which is why, in 2023, we introduced our donor program,’ explains Vanessa Ferguson, the CEO of Adora Fertility.
‘The number of donor cycles we have completed this year has doubled since last year and we predict a 256 per cent increase in donor patients alone at Adora Fertility.
‘The challenge in Australia is to find donors who are prepared to adhere to Australia’s strict rules and regulations around sperm donation.’
‘The challenge in Australia is to find donors who are prepared to adhere to the strict rules and regulations around sperm donation,’ said Vanessa Ferguson (pictured), CEO of Adora Fertility
Many Australian women are told they ‘get what they get’ when it comes to choosing a sperm donor (stock image of in vitro fertilisation)
In Australia, sperm donation can only be done altruistically, which means there can be no financial incentive for men to give sperm to fertility programs or sperm banks.
In addition, new legislation across most states over the past decade – including updates to the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act in South Australia and a new Assisted Reproductive Technology Act in Queensland – mean that anonymous sperm donation is now prohibited.
The right of donor-conceived children to know the identity of their biological parents has been enshrined in law, but creates another barrier for potential donors.
‘Not all donors wish to disclose their identifying information to a child born from their donation when the child turns 18, which is a requirement in Australia,’ says Ferguson.
There are also regulations in place – which change from state to state – on how many families each donor can donate to.
These family limits are intended to prevent ‘prolific donor’ situations such as those that have played out overseas, but add an additional burden on the system in which there are already too few donors, and too much demand.
Victorian woman Alisha Burns, who runs Solo Mum Society, an educational resource and support network for solo mums by choice, says sperm shortage is a major challenge to overcome for people wanting to start families in Australia.
Solo mum Alisha Burns says most mothers prefer a donor who is the same ethnicity as them
Burns, who became a solo mum to her daughter Alexandra five years ago, says the process was simpler before the pandemic, but critical supply shortages mean women are put under increasing pressure to act quickly.
‘While maybe, a few years ago, you would have had the option to decide on which hair colour or eye colour you might want, now it’s just a mission to choose someone with the same or similar ethnicity as you,’ she says.
This, she stresses, is not about discrimination. Instead, it’s about a desire to make donor-conceived children feel like they belong.
‘I think for a lot of women who are choosing to become solo mums by choice, they have the same sort of mentality that I had, which is: I’m already putting additional burdens on my child because they have only one parent; I don’t want to make their life harder by having them look very different from the rest of my family.’
And to suggestions that those in desperate want of a baby should be more flexible about the child’s ethnic background, Burns says it’s not that simple.
‘If you did choose sperm from a donor from a different ethnic background, there would be a number of different ethical considerations, and counselling to make sure you were equipped to raise a child who might need a different cultural awareness of their ethnic background,’ says Burns.
The race for donor sperm
‘You know, we’ve all seen the episode of Friends where they’re sifting through a giant folder of donor options and it seems like they have endless donors to choose from,’ Burns tells me.
‘But in Australia, it’s very different.
‘Now, people have to be checking their email multiple times a day for a spreadsheet the clinics send around, and if you find a donor you want, you need to decide that day. If you think about it overnight, that donor will already be gone.’
Forty-two-year-old Sydney woman Natalie, whose daughter was born eight months ago via donor sperm from America, describes the Australian system as ‘tricky’.
‘I ended up going through a Seattle-based clinic for the sperm,’ she explained. ‘In Australia, it can be quite tricky trying to get a donor.’
After years of extensive research, Natalie decided to have a child on her own with the help of IVF. When the question of donor sperm came up, she knew she was going to use a clinic-recruited donor.
‘I didn’t know anybody I could ask for donor sperm,’ she explains. ‘So for me, it was always going to be through a sperm bank.’
But as the business owner soon discovered, the process of finding the right donor was not as straightforward as she expected.
‘In NSW at least, there is a real shortage of donors,’ she says, ‘and choosing the person that is going to provide half of your child’s DNA is a big deal.’
Natalie says the Sydney-based clinic she was using originally would send around a weekly list of donors to choose from. Just like other women and couples I spoke to, she encountered the problem of the best donors being taken by the time she replied.
‘You’d have to write back immediately, and often that donor would be taken already,’ she says.
There are other considerations when choosing donor sperm that narrow the options even further, Natalie explains.
‘Most American sperm banks provide photos of the donors from when they were children. Mine also had an audio recording so you could listen to what they sounded like and hear what their interests were. I based my decision more on the audio than on his looks,’ she says.
‘It’s much more about my daughter than it is about me.
‘I kept thinking, if my child wants to hear this audio one day, would I be proud of why I chose him? My donor sounded like a nice, normal person. He was intelligent, spoke multiple languages, had a good profession and was well travelled. Most of all, he sounded kind.
‘You want to be able to stand by your choice when your child is an adult’
Burns says a major factor influencing women’s choice of donor is the legal right of donor-conceived children to know the identity of their biological father.
‘This is half of your child’s DNA,’ she says. ‘They’re actually a massive part of them.
‘And the more honest and open you can be with your child from the beginning about the donor that helped create them, the better.
‘You want to be able to tell them, “I chose the donor for you because of these reasons.” And when I read his profile, I thought this. You want to be able to stand by it and say, “I thought that this was going to be a really good person to help make up half of who you are.”‘
Burns – who runs courses preparing women for solo motherhood and hosts the podcast No Need for Prince Charming – says the donor sperm shortage is something many women are unaware of when they begin the process.
‘So many women are caught unawares,’ she says, ‘and a lot of clinics are evasive in their marketing materials about how much sperm they actually have access to.
‘There is one fertility clinic in Victoria, which a lot of women get stuck with, that made these promises of a donor program coming that has never eventuated. These women have spent tens of thousands of dollars freezing eggs, waiting for the donor program that never came. All of that time and money when they potentially could have got pregnant with one IUI at a different clinic who had a sperm donor program in place.’
Burns says asking specific questions about how much sperm clinics have access to, and what kind of sperm they have, is important when beginning the process.
‘You don’t want to get so far down the road, have all the egg-freezing and testing done, then be held up for years trying to get an actual donor,’ she says.
‘It can be heartbreaking for women.’
As for what could help solve the problem in Australia, Adora CEO Vanessa Ferguson says taking some of the financial burden off donors might help.
‘Sperm donation is a significant commitment, so providing reasonable compensation for time and travel costs may make sperm donation more appealing for men in Australia,’ she says.
‘There is a high cost associated with recruiting donors and the donation process can vary from state to state, so anything we can do to improve education and streamline the process for donors to meet the demand of single women and same-sex families is important.’
She also believes a centralised donor register in Australia would better enforce family limits and ‘close the loop on prolific donors’, while creating uniform legislation across Australia would also make things more equal.
‘A federal legislation with a consistent family limit across all of Australia would allow a donor to be accessed in all states,’ Ferguson says.
‘This would help address the current concern of too many families using the same donor within a single state, which is why the limits are currently so conservative.’
Burns believes greater awareness of sperm donation’s life-changing potential could inspire more Australian men to take part. She wishes more people understood the ‘incredible gift’ they could offer to a family that might not otherwise exist.
‘Especially for solo-mum-by-choice families,’ she says.
‘I clearly can’t talk to every family, but I know that for mums setting out on their own to have children, these kids are the most wanted, desired, intentional children, and their mothers are wanting to do everything for them, so if you are considering donating, it’s going to give your genetic child an incredible life.’
