Inside health: Anonymity issue threatens to be a tragedy for would-be mothers

Published on Wednesday 12 November 2008 22:39

WITH 4,000 women across the UK needing donor sperm each year to help them conceive, the news that men are becoming less willing to donate is particularly worrying.

In the past, hard-up students donated sperm in return for a token payment for their time.

But now, with the removal of anonymity and the possibility that their "child" could turn up on their doorstep in 18 years, a shortage of donors is troubling doctors and patients alike.

The Scotsman has learned that the donor shortage is also affecting Scottish clinics.

It means that Edinburgh's Simpson Centre for Reproductive Health no longer recruits donors, instead buying supplies from other UK clinics when these are available.

Ninewells Hospital in Dundee said it had seven donors, but needed more.

While most centres contacted by The Scotsman were happy to reveal their donor status, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde were somewhat more cagey, saying they had "a number of sperm donors, but how many is a matter of confidentiality". They did, however, say the shortage was an issue for their fertility services at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, as it is elsewhere.

The problem finding donors extends to private clinics.

The Glasgow Centre for Reproductive Medicine said that, two years after launching, they had only recently achieved the aim of recruiting five new sperm donors a year.

The Glasgow Nuffield Hospital said they currently had about 12 donors on their books, but were always looking for more.

"We aim to recruit two or three new donors each year. We have not achieved that this year, but we hope to do so next year," a hospital insider said.

Experts from the British Fertility Society have suggested a range of measures to increase access to donor sperm. These include allowing men to produce more offspring – it is currently limited to producing ten families and men can set their own limit if they want.

One fertility expert in Scotland told The Scotsman he had another idea for increasing donor numbers.

"I can't see why you can't have a parallel track, whereby men can remain anonymous if they want to and others can say they don't mind their details being released to the offspring.

"This would give a choice to patients, who could choose an anonymous or named donor, and the men wanting to donate," he said.

Whether the government would ever go back on its 2005 legislation removing anonymity is up for debate. But there are concerns that the shortage of donors is already meaning clinics may be more likely to use lower-quality sperm than would normally pass their thresholds.

It would be a tragedy if women were forced to go through extra cycles of fertility treatment in their efforts to become pregnant because there is a falling supply of donors willing to help them.