Published On:Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Posted by devil
THE DAILY EXCLUSIVE: THE SEED OF A TREND
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As worldwide demand grows, U.S. sperm exports become a thriving business
America’s hottest new export is made by hand.
Demand for American sperm is surging — up by as much as 40 percent in the last five years — as other countries clamor for genetic material with the “Made in America” label.
U.S. sperm sales are highest in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Israel, Australia, Chile, Spain and Sweden, and demand is set to increase even more in the years ahead.
“In the last three years, we have shipped to about 60 countries,” said Scott Brown, a spokesman for California Cyrobank, the largest sperm bank in the world with $23 million in sales last year.
The rapid rise in foreign demand is a result of more liberal attitudes toward marriage and family taking root around the globe, according to Brown.
“It’s driven by the social changes — single women and lesbian couples being recognized around the world as people that should be able to have children and raise families,” he said. “That’s something that in the U.S. we’re really ahead of the curve on.”
American sperm banks are in a unique position to benefit economically from the trend, boasting a well-developed network of banks, and laws that allow for men to make donations anonymously.
And the recent upturn in exports may be just the beginning of even bigger growth for the industry.
“There will be an explosion in demand, no pun intended, around the world as other countries become more accepting of the nontraditional family,” Brown said.
The U.S. fertility industry as a whole has shot up from $979 million in 1988 to what is predicted to be $4.3 billion in 2013, according to Marketdata.
Exactly how many Americans donate sperm every year is unclear, but some reports place the number of anonymous donor-inseminated births at 30,000 annually.
However, an unpublished survey by the American Association of Tissue Banks puts the figure at 5,000.
Fairfax Cryobank, the second-largest facility in the U.S., exports to more than 50 countries, but Canada is its biggest customer. About 10 percent of its donations head overseas, according to the company.
“It’s a wonderful thing,” said Fairfax spokeswoman Trina Leonard.
She said the company has seen an increase in overseas buyers and attributes the skyrocketing demand to the lack of comparable networks of sperm banks abroad.
In contrast to the U.S., donors in Canada, Australia and much of Western Europe are not allowed to remain anonymous, which can lead to local donations drying up and long waiting periods for sperm.
In Australia, where 90 percent of sperm used in IVF treatments is imported, it’s also against the law to pay large sums for donations.
By contrast, in the U.S. men are compensated up to $500 per donation, depending on their education, height and family history.
“People are lined up virtually for years when they try to get a donor in their own country, so importing sperm is actually a really good solution for them,” Leonard said.
“Imagine wanting to start a family and having someone say, ‘Well, just wait a couple of years.’”
She said U.S. screening procedures — government regulations require testing for communicable diseases — and donor profiles in the U.S. also set the worldwide standard.
“People know more about their donors than I know about my husband, and I’ve been married to him for 20 years. I don’t know his blood type, I don’t know his SAT scores. I don’t know what his grandparents died of — but if he was my donor, I’d know.”
European Sperm Bank USA, based in Seattle, is relatively new to the industry — it began distributing in 2009 — and saw instant demand from overseas. It has a “Mother Bank” in Copenhagen, Denmark, that supplies customers in Western Europe with American sperm.
“About 60 percent of what we collect in the U.S. is distributed to other countries,” said spokesman Angelo Allard. “What we can supply is only limited to our donor pool, which we are trying to grow.”
Brown said countries with lenient IVF regulations can draw women seeking the procedure from neighboring countries as well — further boosting demand for sperm donations.
“Israel and Chile might seem strange high- demand places for us, but in the Middle East, Israel is one of the only places you can have the procedure done. In South America, the same goes for Chile,” Brown said.
In Britain, France, Sweden and Australia, there are strict limits on how many women can be inseminated by the same donor, meaning the already depleted donor pool doesn’t stretch as far.
But in the U.S., birth numbers for a single donor are virtually limitless.
The only nonbinding guidelines are from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which recommends conceptions from an individual donor should not exceed 25 births per 800,000 population.
Most major banks keep to this number, but several rogue facilities have been criticized for stretching profits from donations by using samples for more than a hundred births.
“People have likened the industry to the Wild West,” said Naomi Cahn, a law professor at George Washington University and author of “Test Tube Families: Why the Fertility Markets Need Legal Regulation.”
“We don’t know how many vials of sperm are used from each bank. We have no record of how many children are born from any particular donor. And we have no idea if the same person is donating at several banks,” Cahn said.
“Other countries look to us because we have that robust supply — which is also because we pay donors so well.”
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