Black market in sperm

Overseas donors are filling local void

A BLACK market for sperm donation is running unregulated on social media as women face a nine-month wait through IVF clinics.

A lack of Australian donors is driving women to use overseas donors and turn to online providers and possibly break the law by paying for sperm.

Experts are calling for reforms amid concerns the rights of children could be bypassed as a result of informal sperm donation, where the donor’s identity is never registered.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international guidelines state donor-conceived people have the right to information on their origins including donor and sibling linking services.

For IVF clinics in some states there are fines of up to $44,300 and two years in jail can apply, but there are no penalties for informal providers and state governments admit they are not policing online donations in any way.

“It’s the wild west out there,” Australian Fertility Society’s Dr Luk Rombauts said.

He said clinics did genetic testing, checked for inheritable diseases, provided counselling and registered donors.

Fertility First’s Dr Anne Clark said men were scared off donating through clinics once they realised the law required their identity could be revealed to their offspring.

“All the sperm we’ve got comes from outside Australia because you just can’t get Australian donors,” Dr Clark said.

Leading Australian IVF provider Genea confirmed the waiting time for donor sperm at its clinics is currently nine months, and while Monash IVF has no waiting time, 50 per cent of the donated sperm is now coming from overseas.

IVF Australia has a wait list of three to four months but had a steady supply of donors and enough to supply 30 women in the next few weeks but a spokesman said “we can’t keep up with demand”.

Donor Conceived Australia which provides support, education and advocacy for people born via sperm, egg and embryo donations as well as surrogacy, said because online donors were not a registered IVF clinic they don’t have to follow any regulations.

“We are advocating for a national register of donor conceived people and also nationally consistent legislation. Differing family limits of between 5-10 families per donor between each jurisdiction is particularly hard to keep track of, however these limits only apply to donations made through clinics and donations made in the unregulated market do not follow these laws and have no limits,” Donor Conceived Australia’s national director Aimee Shackleton said.

While IVF clinics must register the identity of all donors and donor-conceived people can request the information after they turn 18 (16 in some states), there is no way of enforcing these rules when informal donation happens.

“We learnt a lot from early donor conceived children who are now adults about how important it is for them to know where they came from, and the impact it had on some of those who never know who their donor is or never be able to have contact with them,” Genea’s Melbourne manager Marianne Tome said

Dr Rombauts said in the past two years there had been a 60 per cent increase in single women choosing to have a child and be single mothers and there was a rise in lesbian couples seeking donor sperm.