Help a family, donate sperm – clinic bids to boost donors

MEN are being encouraged to think about how they can help change lives as part of a campaign to get more sperm donors to come forward.

In the past, efforts to get donors have often focused on students wanting to earn extra cash through the small expenses pay-outs for sperm donation.

But now a new clinic in Scotland is hoping to appeal to men's desire to help others who want to have a family, but are prevented through infertility.

With rising numbers of couples struggling to have children, the IVF Scotland service is keen to get as many donors on its books as possible. The clinic opens today in Edinburgh – the city's first private fertility service.

Lead embryologist Caitlin Delaney said sperm donation rates had dropped since 2005 when donors' rights to anonymity were removed, meaning any offspring could contact them when they reached adulthood.

She said it had led to a crisis in the shortage of donated sperm. Only 13 men registered as donors last year in Scotland, with 26 currently donating.

Under rules, each man can only produce ten pregnancies so more need to be constantly recruited.

Ms Delaney said: "We are actively going to recruit sperm donors. There's such a shortage for heterosexual couples and women who want treatment."

Currently a limit of 250 for expenses is all that is allowed to be given to sperm donors.

"We can only cover loss of expenses and earnings, so it is an altruistic act," Ms Delaney said.

"So you have to market it to people who are interested in doing it for altruistic reasons and don't mind someone possibly contacting them in the future."

There has been much debate about whether donors should be offered more for their donation, but views are mixed.

Ms Delaney said: "If you start offering money for gametes, that can open up an ethical can of worms, in terms of people selling sperm who don't have money and don't really want to be a donor."

Ms Delaney said they were taking a different approach, by trying to show men that they could help childless couples.

"We are trying to show how much it can change people's lives. It is just such a crisis at the moment and there is such a shortage. One in eight infertile couples will need donor sperm and infertility is increasing."

She added: "We want to show how much a baby can change a person's life and how grateful these people would be to have that donor sperm.

"The target market would be men who have had their children already or who know people who have struggled so they understand what it is like to go through and want to help people."

Gwenda Burn, from Infertility Network Scotland, said: "There is no doubt that the shortage of both egg and sperm donors is having a real effect on patients who need donor treatment with many being couples considering other options such as travelling abroad to access treatment."