SPEAKER 1: Let's shift a little bit to the question of buying sperm.
So tell us a little bit about the prices paid by people who buy sperm.
I presume there's some markup between what the sperm donor is paid
and what they receive on the other end?
SPEAKER 2: Absolutely.
These are businesses after all, for profit businesses.
The sperm donor's walking in, being paid $100 to $150 for that sample.
The sperm bank takes that sample and can create anywhere from zero vials--
if the sperm count isn't high enough-- to one or two,
to as many as eight or nine vials from that single sample
that they've paid about $125 for.
Then the sperm bank will turn around.
They have to freeze it for six months.
Retest the donor for HIV.
And then they put that sample on the market.
So there is a wide infrastructure that's in place for making sure
that that sperm is then safe to sell.
And so the sperm banks-- they have a number of costs
that they're trying to manage.
However, when they turn around and sell those vials,
they're selling them for $500, $600, $700
depending on the specific characteristics of the sperm.
Those are technical characteristics.
For somebody who would like to purchase sperm in order to try to have a child,
they rarely get pregnant on the first time.
And you're buying multiple vials.
And so this can very quickly add up to be quite an expensive proposition.
SPEAKER 1: And one not typically covered by health insurance or anything else,
right?
SPEAKER 2: That's correct.
SPEAKER 1: And tell me a little bit about how--
the way in which individual sperm donors are marketed to families who
are thinking about using a sperm donor.
What kinds of information about the sperm donor are typically provided?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, well, this has really changed over time.
So sperm donation has more than a century of history behind it.
And for most of the 20th century it was very anonymous, very secretive.
And it was really the doctors who were in charge.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah, the doctor would pick somebody actually
to be a sperm donor, right?
Or even in some cases, is alleged to have
used his own sperm and stuff like that?
SPEAKER 2: Exactly.
There have certainly been cases of that-- legal cases of that.
So what would typically happen is a couple-- a heterosexual couple would
come in and say to the doctor, we've had trouble getting pregnant.
They would be evaluated.
And then the doctor would go into the next room.
Pull a medical resident or a medical student off the floor.
Ask them to provide a sample.
It was then fresh insemination.
So with the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, this became no longer tenable.
And sperm banks started these large businesses
with the freezing and the shipping and the evaluations and the screening
and all of that.
So over time, the amount of information about the donor
and also the consumer's agency in this process has really increased.
So now if you go to a sperm bank, you'll get 25 to 50 pages of information
about that donor-- the health history.
And answers to all kinds of questions, like-- what
was your favorite book as a child?
Why do you want to be a donor?
You know describe your hair and your skin
and your height and your manual dexterity, right?
So all of these questions are now made available to consumers,
who can click through and decide what kind of characteristics
that they want in their donor.
SPEAKER 1: Are there particular traits that are particularly valued?
You're paid more for by the sperm bank, or particularly valued by consumers?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, and so this is another interesting difference
that emerges when you're looking at sperm banks versus egg agencies.
And so sperm banks have a number of requirements
that really reflect our cultural expectations for masculinity.
So sperm donors have to be at least five feet eight or five
feet nine inches tall.
Short sperm doesn't sell.
Men have to be enrolled in college or have a four year degree.
And if you then switch over to the egg agencies,
they don't have that same height requirement.
They don't have that same education requirement.
So we know that your height and your education
does not appear in any one place on your DNA,
but that you inherit elements of those characteristics from both parents.
And so why do we need tall, educated sperm donors,
but we don't need tall, educated egg donors?
And I think that's one of the places where when you compare these two
markets, you can really see cultural norms around gender
emerging and infusing the way that the market operates.
SPEAKER 1: So what about ethnicity?
Are there particular ethnicities that are hard to find in the market?
Are there premiums paid for some ethnicities?
SPEAKER 2: Well, this again is another difference between sperm banks and egg
agencies.
So sperm banks will pay the same rate to all of the men in the bank.
There are some banks that, in the past, have paid extra for men with PhDs.
But in terms of ethnicity, sperm banks will really
just complain about the difficulty they have in recruiting men
from a diverse range of backgrounds.
So they might bend their expectations in terms
of those height requirements or their education requirements
in order to get men from a diverse array of backgrounds in the door.
In egg agencies, they actually do pay women more
if they come from racial or ethnic backgrounds
that they consider hard to recruit.
So African-American women donors, Asian-American women donors
will often command a few thousand dollars more than white donors.
And that's interesting sociologically, because this
is one of the few markets where women of color
do better than white women in terms of labor market outcomes.
SPEAKER 1: That's fascinating.
Can you talk a little bit about the differences between anonymous
versus open identification sperm banks?
SPEAKER 2: So again this is sort of a historical shift.
In the early days of sperm donation, as I mentioned,
it was completely anonymous, secretive.
Often records weren't even kept.
So certainly recipients had no idea who the donor was and vice versa.
And this really shifted along with demographic changes
in the number of same sex couples.
So there was a sperm bank that grew out of the feminist women's health
movement.
And they were really oriented to serving the lesbians and single women--
in the late 70s, early 80s-- who were barred from mainstream sperm banks.
So mainstream sperm banks would not send sperm to lesbians or single women,
saying that they didn't actually have infertility.
So this feminist-oriented sperm bank opens up.
And they start selling sperm to lesbians and single women who said,
it'd be really great if we could find out more about our donor,
or maybe our children could meet the donor someday.
So the very first-- what they call "identity release"
program opened in around 1980, 1981.
And that became something that then migrated to more mainstream sperm banks
as the mainstream sperm banks became more open to serving these same sex
couples and single women that they had previously been discriminating against.
SPEAKER 1: Are there any noticeable difference these days
from the ways in which lesbian women or single women select sperm donors
as opposed to heterosexual couples?
SPEAKER 2: So the number of heterosexual couples who have to go to sperm banks
to treat their infertility has actually dramatically reduced.
And that happened after the development of ICSI-- I-C-S-I,
which is intracytoplasmic sperm injection.
In the mid-1990s, this is a technology that-- if they
could find a single sperm in the male body,
they could inject it directly into the egg.
And so heterosexual couples that can afford IVF with ICSI,
now really prefer that technology because it allows them
to have a genetically-related child.
So this is that shift I was talking about,
where the sperm banks were mostly serving heterosexual clients.
They saw that population drop in the 90s.
They start opening up their doors to the lesbians and single women.
When I talk to sperm bank owners and people who work in sperm banks,
they say absolutely that the considerations
are different for heterosexual couples and lesbians.
Lesbians have no reason to hide the fact that they needed to purchase sperm.
Whereas heterosexual couples were really focused
on trying to match the husband's physiognomy in order to make sure
that people didn't guess that he wasn't the real father.
So the sort of secrecy and anonymity, along with the demographics
of the customers, have really changed how this market works.
SPEAKER 1: Can you tell us a little bit about the international market
for sperm?
So one thing I've read is that actually Danish sperm is particularly exported?
SPEAKER 2: Yes.
So this is the phenomenon of the Viking sperm banks.
So the-- Denmark is actually the largest exporter of sperm in the world.
They have a website that is festooned with little blond, blue-eyed babies.
And this is the idea that they really have sperm that people want.
And part of why Denmark has become such a large exporter of sperm
is because several of the other European countries
have exerted quite a lot of regulation on sperm banks and sperm donation.
So one example here is France.
It's a national sperm bank, a nationalized bank.
But they only allow heterosexual couples access to sperm.
So lesbians and single women in France then need to turn elsewhere.
So this is part of the market that the Viking sperm bank is serving.
SPEAKER 1: Great.
And just to pick two things out of that-- one,
is it seems to be that there's a bit of a eugenic impulse.
And we'll talk about this at a later portion of the course.
Certain traits are valued or thought to be valued.
The other this idea of trying to circumvent
domestic regulation by importing.
So they don't like the way in which France regulates sperm.
So for a lesbian couple, they may import sperm from Denmark
rather than dealing with the French authorities and their regulation.
SPEAKER 2: Right, exactly.
SPEAKER 1: Well, the last thing I want to ask you about sperm
is-- we've talked a lot about sperm donation
in the sense of men who sell sperm and people who buy sperm.
How are things different at all between true donation, altruistic donation,
if you will?
SPEAKER 2: Well, one of the really interesting elements
of this market that has been emerging in the last few years
is really due to internet traffic in sperm.
So there's been a couple of journalistic exposes
of men who offer their sperm online for free to all comers.
And so this is an example of altruistic sperm donation.
I'm not sure if it's quite the type that you were asking me about.
But that is a completely unknown underbelly of this market.
And we are just starting sort of sociological and anthropological
studies of how that market is operating.
SPEAKER 1: And later in this course, we'll
actually talk about the case of the Craigslist sperm donor
who the state of Kansas went after for child support.
And that will be something we'll talk about-- which is great.