The chief medical officer of Care Fertility is warning women not to use sperm from random men on social media when they want to get pregnant.
Dr. Victoria Sephton issued the obvious warning on Birmingham Live, saying, “The rise of sperm donation through social media highlights the demand for alternative family-building options, but this unregulated space carries significant risks.”
She added, “Without the safeguards provided by a clinic licensed by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) recipients face potential medical, legal, and ethical issues. Informal donors are often not screened for infectious diseases like HIV or genetic conditions.”
Men have begun offering their sperm to strangers through social media to use for artificial insemination or to donate via “natural insemination” — sex. The men who donate through social media could seek parental rights to their biological children, while those who donate through HFEA would see their parental rights terminated immediately.
Sephton is urging women seeking sperm to use HFEA donors only, not only for their own safety but with concerns for any children created as well.
“When treatment is with the sperm of a HFEA-registered donor, a donor-conceived child can access health or genetic information that may be important to them later in life,” she said. “They can also access information about the identity of their donor when they reach age 18 and information about any genetically related siblings. None of this information may be available in informal donations.”
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However, regardless of the means by which a woman obtains sperm from a stranger, he is still a stranger, and the children being created are treated as commodities. Even through a fertility clinic, the same sperm donor can be used by different women, creating dozens (or more) half-siblings who don’t know each other. One woman conceived via sperm donation, Louise McLoughlin, has been “sounding the alarm” on the practice for years.
“We are seeing men who are donating hundreds and thousands of times. They’re doing it in small areas. They’re doing it within the same kind of years,” McLoughlin said. “So you’re ending up with kids who are growing up knowing each other or meeting each other in later adulthood, which is just incredibly, incredibly dangerous.”
Beyond the dangers, there is also the feeling of losing one’s identity when a person learns they are donor-conceived.
Ellie, who was conceived via donor, explained, “I’m the child of a stranger, who altruistically sold me, his biological daughter, to a family he would never meet. He signed away his rights to be a father to me, and my parents gladly bought the gift that would give them a child. They were ecstatically happy when my mother became pregnant, but no one considered how I would feel about the transaction that took place, how I would feel about having no right to a relationship with my biological father, no access to my paternal family, not even medical information.”
Emma Dine, who learned she was donor-conceived at the young age of 10, said it makes her so uncomfortable to know she could have even more than the 25 siblings she has since located that she won’t date anyone from the UK where she was conceived. She also said that being donor-conceived “does make you feel a bit mass-produced.”
Using ‘donor’ sperm or eggs — whether through a profit-driven business or a person on social media — does not take the very persons who will be created into consideration. And when they express curiosity or concern over their conception or biological family, they are often met with pushback.
Natalie Albaran explained that her “life felt like a soap opera” after learning her mother’s best friend was actually her biological mother. But the more questions she asked, the more she was shamed until her mother kicked her out. She deals with feelings of “mistrust, depression, anxiety… and betrayal.”
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
