According to a recent study in the British medical journal, the number of sperm donors registered with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has fallen by 40% since 1991. Since infertility rates appear to be rising and now affect one in six couples, this equates to a disaster.
As well as difficulty in recruiting donors, clinics are hampered by very long waiting lists and increasing costs. This means that the price of IVF treatments is going up and many couples can't afford it unless they take out a medical loan or re-mortgage their house.
Dwindling Numbers
The UK requires about 500 sperm donors per year to cope with the 4000 infertility patients who need donated sperm but figures for 2006 show that there were only 307 new donors.
A donor is only allowed to donate a certain number of times and there is a cut off limit for how many children can be created from a single donor's sperm. The current limit is ten children per donor. This is to avoid the possibility that siblings would grow up, meet each other and inadvertantly marry a half-sibling.
This is why the anonymity clause was removed in 2005, allowing children born from donation to trace their roots once they reach the age of 18.
Critics
Dr. Allan Pacey and Dr. Mark Hamilton, from the British Fertility Society, say the laws are wrong and the process of sperm donation should be changed. They point out that the Netherlands has a much higher cut off rate with 25 children allowed to be born from one sperm donor, and the population of the Netherlands is smaller than that of the UK. They argue that there is still scope to use more sperm from each donor without encouraging incestuous relationships in the resulting children.
New Ideas For a Sperm Sharing System
Currently in the UK, if a woman is undergoing IVF and using her own eggs, if she agrees to share them with another infertile woman who needs eggs, she can have an IVF cycle for only £500 (about $1000). Dr. Pacey has called for a similar system to be put in place for men.
There are many fertile men who are going through IVF with their wives and if they were to donate some of their sperm to other couples at the same time as providing a donation for their wife, then this would go some way in solving the supply problem.
New Regional Centers
He also suggested having regional sperm donation centers, solely dedicated to donation, rather like blood donation clinics. Infertile couples who would be in receipt of the sperm would be cared for at a different clinic. The rationale behind this would be to reduce the number of enquirers who fail to donate and encourage men to follow through with their donation.
Source: BMJ 2008;337:a2318 .
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