What would you pay to start a family? Would you empty your savings? Barter with a stranger? Agree to unprotected sex with someone you’ve never met? With professional fertility treatments forcing many to spend thousands of pounds, a murky underworld has developed, offering fertilisation with ‘no strings attached’. But for many women, the long-term cost is much greater than they could have imagined. Now, new government legislation promises a solution. But will it work?
I’m a digital shadow. As incognito as it’s possible to get. My picture is the standard nondescript outline and all my profile contains is my (fake) name and my (fake) age. I don’t expect much attention. I don’t want any. I simply want to hover and drink in my online surroundings. But within 20 minutes they’ve found me. There’s the straight-to-the point anonymous account (‘Hey, are you wanting a donor?’); the shell account with 16 friends – the profile picture is of a suspiciously blue-eyed baby that looks digitally created or heavily photoshopped – (‘If you’re looking for a donor, I would be interested to hear more about you’); and there’s the overzealous group admin (‘I saw you join a site and wondered if I can be any use to you’) who sends 30 pictures, showing themselves posing next to signs with words such as ‘d*ck’, ‘p*ssy’ or ‘d*ke’. This is the fertility black market, where bodily fluids are currency.
Clive Jones. ‘Joe Donor.’ Gennadij Raivich. These men are not well known, but to some they’re infamous. Jones, a 66-year-old retired teacher, claims to be the ‘world’s most prolific sperm donor’. He says he has fathered 129 children (and counting) over the past nine years, travelling the country in his van to give out his free ‘donations’. ‘Joe Donor’ is the alias of an Essex-based man who says he has fathered 150 children around the world (his mission is to impregnate as many women as he can – 2,500 is his goal.) Then there’s Raivich who, in 2014, was convicted on two counts of sexual assault after fathering 58 children as a sperm donor. A detective working on the case said Raivich had ‘exploited’ the woman ‘for his own sexual gratification’. And these are just the stories that make the headlines.
In recent years, online groups run by so-called ‘donors’ like these men have begun to thrive as a place to find ‘free’ sperm for artificial insemination – particularly for single women and lesbian couples (although there are heterosexual couples on there, too). Why? For many, it’s a cost issue. Until recently, lesbian couples in England (Scotland and Wales already offer equal funding to same-sex couples) had to self-fund a minimum of six rounds of IUI (intrauterine insemination)
