Can you trust the internet for sperm?

Navigating the tricky world of online sperm donation

Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of sexual coercion.

When Katherine and her partner Eric decided they wanted to have a baby, they knew that their route to conception would be complicated. Katherine already had three kids from a previous relationship, and so knew she was able to conceive through the traditional means, but Eric was transitioning trans masculine. 

Their income from manual jobs in a rural US state wasn’t enough to foot the bill for an expensive sperm bank. Semen costs a lot—over $1000 per vial for top-shelf—and rarely does one round do the job. Plus, there’s the cost of artificial insemination techniques such as IVF, the cost to keep the specimens on ice, and payments to secure any backup vials to conceive future siblings. Without a friend willing to give up the goods, Katherine and Eric had only one place to go: the internet.

They were far from alone. For years, increasing numbers of people have sourced privately donated sperm from a decentralized network of websites and social media groups around the world. Many of these people are excluded from traditional fertility pathways because they are gay, single, POC, old, or poor. Others choose this path because they want to see the person contributing half of their child’s DNA. Some reports suggest that the number of people going online for sperm has risen dramatically during the pandemic, as donations to cryobanks have fallen because of lockdown-related restrictions.

The US fertility industry is regulated by three governmental agencies: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which collects and publishes data produced by researchers and clinicians on fertility procedures, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which controls the approval and use of drugs and testing of biological and technical products, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees lab testing. This regulated, hyper-medicalized process ultimately presents recipients a choice of donors with squeaky clean, anonymized sperm whose fact sheets are written up like dating profiles. 

Outside of the state-vetted system, so many things can go wrong: STDs, genetic disorders, harassment, sexual abuse. Without official oversight, donors and recipients have had to devise their own systems to stay safe. There is no single solution—but what has become clear in these decentralized digital marketplaces is that accountability and trust between the people using, operating, and moderating them makes a huge difference.

Online sperm exchanges are not new. Some long-in-the-tooth donors recall dipping their toes into the marketplace in 2008, when the only game around was Craigslist. From what they have told me, it was a distinctly unsavory option. There were more people looking for no-frills sex for themselves than hoping to create a human being. Other prominent networks began to emerge as early as 2009, finding a welcome audience in existing informal networks of lesbian couples and single mothers-by-choice. In the US, people seeking donors began to coalesce around a site called the Known Donor Registry, or KDR, launched in 2010. 

KDR was founded by donor recipient Beth Gardiner. It was part marketplace, part gathering place: there were ads by people seeking and providing sperm, and they exchanged samples on mutually agreed upon terms. The private exchanges were not governed by health-related regulations from any jurisdiction, nor were there specially-trained mediators to help with the process of conception. As Gardiner once said, “If it’s legal to go to a bar, get drunk, and sleep with a random stranger, then it can’t possibly be illegal to provide clean, healthy sperm in a cup.”

Any woman who’s been on the internet for minutes knows that it’s full of creeps. The online sperm donation networks are, unsurprisingly, a magnet to them. According to one analysis from 2015, one in two women who seek sperm online through sperm donation websites or social networks experience some form of abuse, from harassment to sexual assault. This makes the design of these digital spaces—and the people they admit—incredibly important. 

Drew is a long-time donor. About a decade ago, he realized he was aromantic and wasn’t going to have a traditional family, which bothered him greatly. So giving away sperm, to people who’d let him be Uncle Drew, seemed like a logical thing to do. He began casting around for recipients, and the first place he landed was Craigslist. “I very quickly realized it was a terrible idea,” he told me. “I found a lot of people looking for sex. I was not interested in that.” He started Googling and found three or four fledgling communities for sperm donors. “None of them were very sophisticated. Things changed most significantly when KDR first came into existence.”

KDR was not only free of charge—attracting roughly equal numbers of donors and recipients, according to Drew—it also had one of the first known reviewing systems of online sperm donation websites. But beyond its matchmaking services, its most significant feature was a magnifier of social capital: the Off-Topic forum. 

Message boards and chatrooms like these are what make the internet feel like a place rather than space; in an ocean of information exchanges, it is here that trust—the only true currency of online interaction—develops and grows through regular interaction, shared vulnerabilities and reciprocated exchange. 

Solving the problem of matching sperm with egg isn’t just about health and fertility science. It’s also about protecting people by building a system that generates trust and accountability.

Without trust, you’re just a faceless person offering something another faceless person wants. With trust, you’re Bob, who’s vouched for by Katie and Trish, who’ve given Mary and Heloise great advice on fertility cycles. Bob didn’t donate to Katie, but he did tell her about a great movie he watched the other night and thought she’d like. He didn’t donate to Trish either, but shared some questions she might want to ask potential donors that would weed out the creeps. Bob donated to Mary, who told Heloise that he didn’t hassle her for sex. 

Over time, Drew watched the interactions of other donors and began building a list of the trustworthy ones. He also kept track of some of the problem donors. “There were some who were more interested in their own motivations, and I felt were being dishonest and manipulative, so I started advising recipients more.” Soon, those problem donors either left because their business dried up, or were kicked out because they got bad reviews.

Now, this is the internet; if you lose ground in one place, you can set up shop somewhere else. And that’s what Drew saw these KDR problem donors start to do by setting up their own Facebook groups. But the critical mass was still with KDR, so they didn’t get much traction. That is, until, one day KDR’s chat function stopped working due to what Drew assumed were “technical reasons”. Beth Gardiner wasn’t able to fix it immediately (Gardiner declined to be interviewed for this story). And so KDR’s unique sales point—the community that kept an eye out for one another—degraded, and its userbase, too, drifted to Facebook. 

It’s impossibly easy for a donor to create a Facebook group advertising himself in which he has absolute authority to exclude anyone or anything critical of him. There’s no easy way of knowing who’s behind each group, because you can’t look inside unless you’ve been accepted as a member. “It made it impossible for me to keep my running list of good and bad donors and recipients,” said Drew. “I couldn’t help to police, so to speak, because everything was happening in isolated and private conversations on Facebook.” Whereas donor ads and recipient requests were public on the KDR marketplace, they’re entirely controlled by group owners on Facebook. Drew could no longer see who, if anyone, might need help.

The accountability system in this network resembles international diplomacy more than a decentralized, community-led commune. Owners and moderators of the Facebook groups create alliances and share their blacklists, but this has created factions in the marketplace, and at times, all-out wars between coalitions of donors claiming their rivals are abusive. Users have learned to keep screenshots of conversations as evidence for any future disputes. Health misinformation is rife. Drew has been trying to regain his position as a trusted source; although he doesn’t advertise himself as a donor anymore, he has aligned himself with one Facebook marketplace, Sperm Donation USA, and maintains another, the Joe the Donor and Others Must Go group. The latter is his way of gathering warnings from recipients who have had bad experiences with a self-styled mega-donor, who has grabbed media attention by claiming to have attempted over 800 inseminations resulting in over 150 children. It’s the only way Drew can try to do what he used to do: keep recipients safe.

Communities require design specific to their needs. Solving the problem of matching sperm with egg isn’t just about health and fertility science. It’s also about protecting people by building a system that generates trust and accountability. But the internet is fluid, iterative and ruthless. Something like Facebook, promoted as a one-size-fits-all solution, is often not—but it’s difficult to interrupt the path of least resistance.

If sperm donation tells us anything about the internet, it’s that these enigmatic, squishy human outcomes are best developed in open, high-quality public spaces, with people who will own them. “A real site needs a moderator who isn’t a donor, and is willing to dedicate an extensive amount of time and energy maintaining it,” said Drew. “Sadly, it seems unlikely that anyone is going to dedicate the time, effort, and sweat into making something superior, to be able to beat Facebook Groups.” And other than the platform enacting a blanket ban on all sperm donor pages, he doesn’t see a clear step forward toward creating a safer, more cohesive community.

That leaves Katherine and Eric sailing into uncharted waters. They have only ever known Facebook. They’re not interested in any other route, nor do they have many options. And they’ve done as much research as they can. They’ve found a donor who matches their criteria—no regular contact with the future child, but with the option to meet after they are 18; no mental health issues in the donor’s family; looks like Eric; no STDs. Artificial insemination only. They like that he uses his real name, and shares trackable information. So far, they’ve had three unsuccessful attempts using samples shipped through the mail. I met them on their fourth round, when they came to New York to meet him in person. They were debating for the hundredth time what they’d do if their donor demanded to swap methods, from artificial insemination to intercourse. “I’ve had this conversation with Eric before,” said Katherine. “I’m like, you know, seriously, I’m just going to be laying there. The only reason I suggested it is because it could be done and over with.” Eric had always been more resistant to the idea, but with Katherine’s ovulation window soon closing for another month, “I’d probably be just like, fuck it, go for it,” he said. 

Katherine and Eric don’t need a saint; they just need some sperm. This stranger on the internet could give them the family they’ve always imagined. The stakes are high, and people make compromises. 🌳

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Dr. Aleks Krotoski is a social psychologist, journalist, and New_Public contributing editor. Her beat is where our human boundaries bump up against what technology can do, and how we make sense of why.

Illustration by Josh Kramer.