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Infertile London couples are being offered sperm from Danish men to solve a shortage of donors.
Foreign fertility banks are charging British patients as much as £1,000 for top grade sperm.
One sperm bank, Cryos Denmark, has targeted 17 IVF clinics in London as part of a campaign which began last month. The Lister Hospital in Chelsea is on their list, as well as the London Women's Clinic and The Bridge Centre.
Cryos has recruited 50 donors and their sperm will be ready for shipping to the UK over the next few months.
The company, which runs the world's largest network of sperm banks, believes Danish men are ideal donors for British patients because of the countries' shared genetic heritage dating from nearly 300 years of Viking raids, invasions and settlements in England, which began in the eighth century.
The clinic also admits it is capitalising on a gap in the market because of the fall in donations.
Its managing director, Ole Schou, said: “We are almost the same genetic background and we all speak English. So it's easier and obvious to offer a service in the UK. It's obviously much harder to attract donors which are non-anonymous but we have now built up a bank of men whose sperm we can export.”
The decline in donors has been blamed on the removal of anonymity in 2005. This means children have the right to contact their donor father when they reach the age of 18. There were once 417 donors in the UK but this figure nearly halved after the law change and numbers are still low.
Cryos is able to import Danish sperm because it has spent more than two years ensuring its donors meet strict new guidelines from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
The HFEA recently tightened its rules governing foreign sperm imported into the UK. It requires the sperm to be frozen and kept in quarantine for at least six months. Foreign clinics are also only allowed to export sperm from non-anonymous donors. The Cryos website lists the personal details of its donors including officers in the Danish air force, models, computer scientists, an opera singer and a lifeguard.
Costs for Danish sperm start at £100 depending on the quality. But the cost of IVF is additional and can be between £3,000 and £5,000 including fertility drugs and treatment.
The Lister confirmed it had been contacted by Cryos. The clinic said it had recently boosted its stocks from a Harley Street clinic which was soon to close, but that foreign donors increased the options — especially for single women and lesbian couples.
Safira Batha, laboratory manager at the clinic, said: “We already have patients who use clinics in the US because it gives them more choice and foreign donors also give far more information about themselves.”
Reader views (5)
There were indeed 417 donors in 1996, but that was 9 years before the ending of anonymity. There was a long-term decline in numbers after that, which seems to have *reversed* by the ending of anonymity.
The numbers of sperm donors went down 4 years in a row before donor anonymity was introduced, and have gone up 4 years in a row since.
New sperm donors registered at HFEA clinics by year:
1992 331
1993 415
1994 416
1995 412
1996 417
1997 341
1998 255
1999 297
2000 310
2001 313
2002 275
2003 247
2004 224
2005 250 (donor anonymity removed)
2006 285
2007 364
2008 384
- Mark Lyndon, Manchester, UK
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
- Threaded, Roskilde, Denmark
The decline in donations in Britain has less to do with the loss of anonymity than it does the loss of pay. Here in the US, when I had my second child, I could choose from dozens and dozens of donors in catalogs at various banks. Some were anonymous, some were not. But there was a wide variety because they were paid well.
If Britain was really after the rights of the child, they would allow fair pay for sperm donation from a donor who would be identified when the child was an adult. As it now stands, the perverse result of the PC politics is that parents have to go abroad and end up using Danish sperm and the offspring have ZERO chance of ever meeting their donor.
- Andrea, Madison, Wisconsin, USA
Symptomatic of the ridiculousness of PC Britain. Take anonymity away so some poor bloke who wants to help an infertile couple (for no payment) now runs the risk of being doorstopped by a young adult 18 years + later. Now instead those unfortunate couples pay over the odds for foreign support. Very sad.
- F, London
oh the irony. A thousand years ago they were giving it away on pain of death and now they're charging a thousand quid a shot and the ladies are queueing up.
- Squiz, Islington
