A Georgia man who donated sperm as a way to pay his bills through college is now speaking out after realizing he has likely fathered hundreds of children due to the wildly unregulated fertility industry.
Dylan Stone-Millar told People he started donating sperm as a way to make some money while he was a graduate student at Georgia State University in 2011.
“Ultimately my motivation was financial, to help pay for bills and tuition as a broke student,” he explained, noting that he made around 400 donations over five years, pocketing about $40,000 of income.
Though he was assured that recipients would not receive his information, he was contacted by a woman who had conceived a daughter with his sperm and had tracked him down online. As time went on, he began to hear from many more recipients who had utilized his sperm.
“Right now I know of at least 62 families,” he said, adding that some of them have had multiple children using his sperm. “But typically only about 40 percent of recipient parents report their birth back to the sperm bank, so I anticipate there being around 150 families and more than 250 children.”
READ: ‘Sperm donor’ travels world impregnating women, complains he can’t get a date
In fact, the sperm bank is still utilizing his sperm, though it’s nine years old; his youngest child was born just four months ago. “The sperm bank tells me that they’ve retired me,” he said, “but there is no legal requirement in the U.S. for them to stop distributing my donated sperm.”
Stone-Miller has tried to establish a connection with all of these children — who are biologically his — and he has spent an extensive amount of time traveling to see them all. At the same time, he is calling on the fertility industry to establish regulations, including limits on the number of pregnancies for each sperm donor, and changes in the way the industry treats sperm donors and their recipient families.
Not emphasized enough in the article is the trauma frequently experienced by the children who are born as a result of this sperm donation. Stone-Miller describes leaving them as “heart-wrenching.”
“It’s very difficult for me to say goodbye to the kids, knowing it’s the last time I’m going to see them at that age,” he said. “I cherish the memories I’m able to create with them. There are a lot of tears and conversations about when they’re going to see me again.”
This unnatural separation between parent and child is just one of the many dangers of assisted reproductive technology (ART). Children of sperm donors have described feeling “mass-produced” as they are commodified and turned into products to be bought and sold. Many worry about having dozens of siblings whom they don’t even know. One study from Harvard Medical School found that 62% of children born after being conceived through donor technologies consider it to be immoral and unethical.
