Tag: sperm donor

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Donor sperm families just as happy

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CHILDREN born through sperm donation belong to families that function just as well as others even though most of these children are not told they were conceived with donor sperm, an Australian study shows.

The largest and most comprehensive examination of donor insemination families has found that while most children are not told about their conception, their parents are just as loving towards them and psychologically healthy as others.

Some researchers say the use of anonymous donor sperm may lead to a more distant father-child relationship because of genetic differences between them. For example, if a child develops undesirable traits, the father may blame this on the donor.

It has also been suggested that parents of children conceived through donor sperm are more secretive and over-protective of their children to compensate for the genetic differences. They may also suffer from stigma around the male’s infertility. Read full article.

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Genetic Screening Can Uncover Risky Matches at the Sperm Bank

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Within the next year, women choosing a sperm donor may be able to use a genetic-analysis service that identifies those with DNA that could cause disease if combined with their own.

Sperm donors are already screened for a handful of genetic conditions, and recipients can choose between donors based on qualities such as height, athleticism, and education. A more detailed analysis of how donor DNA would combine with the recipient’s DNA would be the next step.

A company called GenePeeks will use DNA-scanning microarrays, which are cheaper to use than whole-genome sequencing, to examine the roughly 250,000 DNA bases in the genomes of sperm-bank clients and donors. The company will then use what’s known about how DNA is mixed and divided during egg and sperm formation to compute thousands of virtual child genomes. Each of these virtual genomes will then be analyzed for disease risks. Donors that produced virtual babies that inherited a genetic disease can then be excluded. Read full article.

 

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Inside World’s Biggest Sperm Bank

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Denmark: Ole Schou was 27 years old when he had a dream. It was 1981 and he was a graduate student at a business school in the Danish city of Aarhus.

In the dream, Schou saw an icy blue sea and, caught in the waves, hundreds of frozen sperm. “It was such a peculiar dream that I could not forget it,” he recalls, “so sometime later I walked into the university library and asked for any literature on sperm and fertility.”

Schou started reading and became obsessed. “My dream had given me another dream,” Schou says. “I was going to build a sperm bank.”

That dream came true. Cryos, the company Schou started up 25 years ago this month, is today the world’s largest sperm bank. Schou estimates that Cryos has been responsible for more than 30,000 births, producing more than 2,000 babies a year, and in what has been called a new Viking invasion the company exports sperm to more than 70 countries. Cryos and similar companies, such as the European Sperm Bank, have helped turn Denmark into the sperm capital of the world. Read full article.

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Utah Court: No Benefits for Sperm Donor’s Offspring

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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The Utah Supreme Court ruled Friday that a Utah boy who was conceived with the frozen sperm of his dead father does not qualify for Social Security survivor’s benefits.

Gayle Burns had been trying to get survivor’s benefits for a son who was conceived with her husband’s sperm two years after the husband died of infection caused by a stem-cell transplant.

Michael Burns had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, or cancer of lymphoid tissue. He signed a contract to leave the preserved, frozen sperm to his wife if he died.

Gayle Burns has said her husband didn’t expect to die, because he had been cancer free, or to have to make legal arrangements to preserve Social Security benefits for his future son. Michael Burns died in 2001. Read full article.

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Sperm Black Market in China

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Huang, a professional black-market sperm donor, vowed for a third time to Yu Hua and her husband, “I swear that I will never meet this child for my whole life under any circumstances!”

The couple from Shanxi Province nodded. They had been longing for a child, and Huang was tall and intelligent. Although not classically handsome, he bore a striking resemblance to Yu Hua’s husband, and shared his blood type, ensuring no one would ever have to know their secret.

They signed the agreement to let Huang donate his sperm to the wife, joining the ranks of a growing number of Chinese couples who resort to the Internet-based black market, despite the lack of safeguards to protect women from giving birth to an unhealthy baby. There are only 11 sperm banks in China, and they suffer from a shortage of sperm donors, explains Jiang Xiang-long, director of the Jiangxi Province Human Sperm Bank. Read full article.

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Sperm Bank: Broadcaster’s Allegations are Wrong

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Nordic Cryobank admits that one of its sperm donors carried a genetic disease but says it was right to delay informing fertility clinics about his condition.

“Two women received sperm from sick donor.”

“Sperm Bank covered up inherited disease.”

These were two of the headlines that public broadcaster DR ran earlier this week following an exposé on its program 21 Søndag about nine children, all conceived using the same donor’s sperm, all carrying a hereditary disease. Read full article.

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Danish Sperm Donor Passes on Severe Genetic Disorder to Five Children

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A Danish sperm donor passed a severe genetic disorder to five children after tests did not detect it and the fertilisation clinic failed to act on evidence that a baby had been diagnosed with the illness.

The man, known only as “donor 7042”, fathered 43 children, in breach of rules limiting the number to 25, after giving sperm to Copenhagen’s Nordisk Cryobank clinic.

But as well as fertilising the clinic’s clients, the donor was also transmitting the tumour-producing nerve disorder known as Neurofibromatosis type I (NF1) or Von Recklinghausen’s disease. Read full article.

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Lesbian Couple, Surrogate Mother and Sperm Donor in Three-Year Legal Battle Over Right to be Child’s Parents

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A lesbian couple have won custody of a child following a court battle with the youngster’s surrogate mother and sperm donor over who could be its legal parents.

The gay women were awarded sole custody rights of the youngster after a three-year legal wrangle ended in the High Court, it emerged today.

However, the judge’s decision has left the wife of the donor traumatised and upset at the ‘selfish’ determination of the lesbian couple to have a baby. Read full article.

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41 Years Ago, a Sperm Donation. Today, Twins.

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With proper storage, even 40-year-old sperm can get the job done.

A North Oaks-based company called ReproTech says it played a role in the August birth of twin girls to a woman inseminated with sperm that was frozen back in 1971.

Few details about the sperm donor and birth family were available for privacy reasons, but the local company says the previous record for a successful live birth using “cryopreserved” sperm was 28 years.

Russell Bierbaum, chief executive at ReproTech, said he hopes the story will help convince more young men facing a cancer diagnosis to consider banking their sperm before undergoing chemotherapy treatments that could impair their fertility. Read full article.

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Govt Backs Egg and Sperm Donor ID (AUS)

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IT is up to the states and territories to legislate so that Australians conceived through sperm or egg donations can identify their donors, the federal government says.

The government has backed a Senate committee’s call for donor information to be made available but says there is no constitutional power for the Commonwealth to legislate comprehensively in the area.

Last year in February a Senate committee handed down 32 recommendations, chief among them a proposal to introduce a national registry to contain donor information.

The recommendation, if implemented, would allow donor-conceived people to find out who their donor is once they turn 18 years old.

It also recommended donors not be able to identify their offspring unless the children gave their consent and siblings to have to give their approval to be identified to their half-brothers or sisters. Read full article.