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While anonymity helps the U.S. tap this market effectively, it's the quality issue that really keeps overseas buyers flocking--with top-shelf product going for top-end prices. Dads are profiled according to height, appearance and education level. A man with a Ph.D. can make as much as $500 per ejaculation. Lower-end donors, who still need at least a college degree and a minimum height of 5 ft. 9 in., can earn about $60 a pop. Depending on how dense his sperm is and the mobility of his swimmers--critical to surviving the freezing process--a donor can make up to $60,000 over two years, the maximum amount of time most clinics use a donor.
The Internet has made sperm shopping easier. A woman who logs into the Fairfax site can plug in a picture of her husband--or of Brad Pitt, for that matter--and facial-recognition software will look for the closest possible donor match. Customers can view donors' college transcripts, family medical histories and even photos of existing children and video interviews with the men themselves.
"Prospective parents know more about these donors than I do about my husband's family medical history, and we've been married more than 30 years," says Trina Leonard, a spokeswoman for Fairfax. All customers have to do is pick and pay, and a few days later, a canister of sperm frozen in liquid nitrogen arrives at their doctor's office.
Taming the Frontier
Sophisticated as all this seems, we are still in the Wild West phase of global sperm sales. Lucrative pay has raised questions about sperm profiteering. Seisler donated to two clinics--one in Boston and one in Virginia--to help pay his way through college and law school. One man in Britain who donated for over 30 years has sired more than 1,000 children. Such stories prompted Britain to restrict the number of children a donor can spawn, including his own, to 10. The FDA has no limits on the number of offspring a donor may have, but most banks say they limit men to 25 or 30 children. That said, there's evidence that those guidelines can be loose--just look at how many children Seisler has--and banks have no way of knowing if a donor has visited several facilities. And there's nothing to stop individuals from starting their own endeavors. A 36-year-old California computer programmer has been in the news of late for fathering 15 children by giving out his fresh sperm for free--often inserted with a turkey baster. He claims to be a virgin.
More worrisome, donors could be unwittingly spreading genetic diseases. One Texas couple is suing a sperm bank in New England after their child turned out to have cystic fibrosis, a disease for which banks aren't yet required by federal law to screen. The risk of an ethnicity mix-up for overseas buyers is not just theoretical--it's happened--and so far, parents have little legal recourse. Finally, when a prodigious donor like Seisler produces lots of half siblings who grow up near one another, accidental incest could result. Shari Ann knows of two other children Seisler sired in Quebec and has been careful to track them.