Sperm donated in UK may be used to make many families worldwide

Scientists are calling on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) to tighten restrictions on exporting sperm, to limit the number of families that can be created abroad.

There is a ten-family limit in effect in the UK for gamete donors, but there are no such restrictions on the number of families that can be created abroad using sperm or egg donations made in the UK. This has led to concerns being raised by scientists including Professor Jackson Kirkman-Brown, chair of the Association for Reproductive and Clinical Scientists, that donor-conceived people could struggle with the knowledge they have large numbers of half-siblings.

Rachel Cutting, director of compliance and information at the HFEA, told the Guardian newspaper that 'as the HFEA has no remit over donation outside of HFEA licensed clinics, there would be no monitoring of how many times a donor is used in these circumstances'.

Sarah Norcross, director of the fertility charity PET (the Progress Educational Trust, which publishes BioNews) said: 'The HFEA's position that this is outside its remit is not good enough. I'm not against there being more than ten families if some are outside the UK, but 75, which some of these banks have alighted on, is a heck of a lot of relatives. Even if they say we can't control the number of families abroad, they could insist that the number is made available to the recipient.'

Individual sperm banks set their own thresholds for the number of families which a sperm donor can help to create. The European Sperm Bank applies a worldwide limit of 75 families, and Cryos, the world's largest sperm and egg bank, said it 'aims for 25-50 families per donor' worldwide. According to the HFEA, 7542 straws of sperm were exported from the UK between 2019-21, with one straw typically being used per IVF cycle.

Several people who were donor-conceived, or who used sperm donors to conceive their children, have spoken to the Guardian about how this has affected them. Dr Grace Halden, a senior lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, who conceived her twins with the use of donor sperm (see BioNews 1232), said: 'I selected a UK donor that I believed would be used for a maximum of ten families. Everybody makes different decisions, but for me, I wanted to keep the donor sibling pool as small as I could within my control.' After revisiting her donor's profile page after the birth of her children, Dr Halden saw a note stating 'export only'. She says: 'I was blindsided. I felt as if I perhaps wouldn't have made the decision I'd made if I’d thought exportation was an option.'

Lack of clarity provided to donors over how their sperm might be used was also criticised. 'It's presented to donors as a beautiful gift to help someone create a family, not as, "We're going to maximise the number of births from your gametes and make as much money as we can from that"', Professor Nicky Hudson, a medical sociologist at De Montford University, Leicester, told the Guardian. 'When you speak to donors and present these possibilities to them, they're really surprised.'