Sperm donors needed to help single women and lesbian couples in Canada

TORONTO - 3246 plays the trumpet, enjoys judo and was a nationally rated chess player in university. But perhaps the most important detail on his five-page bio is this: “3246 is a proven fertile donor.” “I donate to share the joy of becoming a parent — a gift from my family to yours! I’m a husband and father of three with two boys and a baby girl,” he writes in an essay obtained by the Herald. 3246 is a Canadian sperm donor, but he’s also an endangered species. Currently, there is only one national sperm bank in Canada. And that bank — nestled within ReproMed: The Toronto Institute for Reproductive Medicine — only had 51 active donors, including donor 3246. Two clinics in Quebec do maintain a handful of donors, bringing the country’s total number of anonymous sperm donors to around 60, but those clinics restrict sales to their own patients while ReproMed sells coast-to-coast. By some estimates, there is a need for donor sperm for more than 5,500 inseminations per year in Canada, and 3,000 of those are for lesbian couples. Read more ... Article: 27th September 2013 www.calgaryherald.com Looking for a sperm donor in Canada? search >130 sperm donors registered at www.prideangel.com Want to help single and lesbian couples by donating sperm? search >400 recipients at www.prideangel.com

China sperm bank boosts donor payments to increase stocks

The Henan Provincial Human Sperm Bank has offered cash payments of up to 5,000 yuan ($817) for donors, according to a notice on its Sina Weibo on Sunday, though the entire process takes around eight months. Demand is high due to an increasing number of people with fertility problems coupled with limited stocks of sperm, the head of the sperm bank told the Global Times on Monday. The 5,000 yuan subsidy pays for things like losing income and appropriate nutrition, according to Li Yushan, the director of the bank. At the very beginning of the donation process, donors are given 50 yuan for each donation. After they donate three or four times, qualified donors are given 200 yuan for each donation. They also need to undergo tests for Hepatitis B and syphilis. A successful volunteer needs to donate sperm 10 or 15 times, Li said. Around six months after the donations, donors need to take an HIV examination and will receive a final payment of 1,500 yuan. The total payments amount to 5,000 yuan, Li said. The candidates should be aged between 22 and 45, be healthy and have no genetic diseases. They should be at least 1.7 meters tall and have a diploma in technical secondary school or above. Li said that while the diplomas do not relate directly to the quality of a donor’s genes, clients insisted upon the requirement. After the notice was issued there were around 50 donations a day, twice the amount during the summer holidays. The total number of donors stood at around 1,200 between January and September, Li said. “About 90 percent of the donors are college students. They are young, energetic and find it easy to accept new things. And most of them have no bad lifestyle habits and no sex lives, and their time is flexible,” Li said. Some donated sperm are provided to reproductive centers to be used in assisted reproductive technology while some are used in medical research and some are frozen for donors for up to 30 years, in case they become infertile. Across the country, many of the 16 banks urgently require donated sperm due to increasing numbers of infertile people. Although medical technology has advanced, the quality of sperm has declined in recent years to some degree, Li said, adding that this is due to a number of factors including pollution, working pressure and unhealthy living habits. Statistics published by Lei Fang, former head of the second affiliated hospital of Zhengzhou University in Henan Province, show that there were about 40 million people with fertility problems in China among those aged between 20 and 40 in the past 20 years, the Dahe Daily reported. Article: 24th September 2013 www.nznews.com

New research suggests embracing emotions during infertility

On September 27, a diverse group—doctors, authors, filmmakers, trauma therapists, and members of the public—will convene in New York City to watch the infertility documentary The Cycle: Living a Taboo. They will also participate in a forum to “challenge conventional wisdom and foster a new, more open dialogue about infertility.” This project is meant to give voice to important but often marginalized perspectives, including patients who are not only unsuccessful but traumatized by the fertility treatment experience. It’s good to redirect our attention from the depression and anxiety that we often associate with those seeking fertility treatments to a more complicated emotional cocktail that includes desperation, anger, and helplessness. But while we collectively share and show compassion for our diverse reproductive experiences, we must clarify exactly what we mean when we discuss these emotions and how they bear upon patients’ competencies. Before we encourage infertility patients to spring out of the stirrups to avoid an emotionally bumpy ride, it's good to question why so many stay on the path to fertility treatments nonetheless. I have spent the past two years researching emotion’s impact on fertility treatment decision-making and informed consent, conducting lengthy interviews and survey research with approximately 400 in-vitro fertilization patients and 90 reproductive medicine professionals. My research has revealed that, by themselves, generalized labels such as “desperate,” “angry,” and “vulnerable” are often misleading; they can actually do a disservice to and disparage the patients. Some infertile women do experience feelings of desperation, but common-sense understandings of what it means to be desperate range from unsophisticated to flagrantly wrong. Yet these labels not only are present in popular stereotypes of infertile women and couples, but for decades they have often been applied (without empirical evidence) by well-intentioned individuals seeking to draw attention to patients’ vulnerabilities—including experts in medicine, law, and business, religious leaders, and former patients. In reality, the lived experience of these emotions is highly complex and nuanced, and many purportedly “toxic” emotions actually play positive roles and are critical to successful coping processes. My research shows that some “negative” emotions, including desperation and anger, often deepen patients’ involvement in decision-making and cause them to deliberate carefully, rather than consigning them to paralyzed indecision or blind commitment to unrealistic goals. Read more ...

Alternative Parenting Show today was another success

Today’s Alternative Parenting show was another resounding success. The show included many leading experts giving advice on how to navigate through the minefield of starting a family, whether in a same-sex relationship, single or needing a donor to conceive. Topics included legal provisions, surrogacy, fertility, co-parenting along with fostering and adoption. The one day event gave people the chance to ask questions about the different options available. Many people spoke to fertility clinics about their treatment options. Other options included finding a donor through a connection websites such as Pride Angel, the leading worldwide connection service for finding a known donor or co-parent. Erika co-founder of Pride Angel said ‘We spoke with many people today at the Alternative Parenting show, who were excited to hear about the possibility of being able to find and meet their own sperm or egg donor. With many people wishing to have the option of staying in touch with the donor and even for the child to have some level of contact, maybe like an ‘uncle type figure in their lives’. To read more about known sperm donation, egg donation or co-parenting visit www.prideangel.com

Seeking out my anonymous sperm donor father

I did once seek out my biological father. A front-page article had hit The New York Times, and I was suddenly spammed by 6,000 well-meaning friends emailing me about DonorSiblingRegistry.com, a website that helps people track down sperm-donor fathers and potential siblings. Back when I was conceived, my moms chose to keep their sperm donor anonymous, in both directions, feeling that doing so best protected the family they were starting, in particular R's position as the non-biological mother. Nowadays there are scores of people reeling in their genetic line on the fishing wire of the Internet, trying to fill in the gaps of parental choices (sound as they may have been). I was intrigued. Suddenly my natural interest in finding my father intersected with the tools to maybe do so. After all, 6,000 friends spamming your inbox about a new website can't be wrong! I knew that my window of opportunity was closing with each year. My sperm-donor father, if he hadn't already been hit by a falling piano or bitten by a venomous snake while hiking, could well be dying of more natural causes. I was also propelled by a haunting scene: an image of my grandchildren, sitting out in front of me on an old person's shaggy carpet, asking, "So, did you, like, make any effort whatsoever to find your dad?" And my disappointing response: "Well, listen, I was busy. Never got around to it. Here, have a cookie and leave me alone." I would imagine the grandkids, all three of them, repulsed by me and my laziness. I had made not one iota of effort not so much to bring them a genetic match of a great-grandfather but at least to make my own life story exciting by way of a Maury-style dad hunt: paternity tests, cussing, muffin tops, everything. I thought maybe I owed them this. I signed up for the website and put in lots of details about myself and the exceedingly minimal info I had on my donor father and the fertility clinic and hospital that my moms had used. I then rather ashamedly told my parents that I was interested in doing this search. This brought up embarrassment for me and initial discomfort for R, who had spent the parenting portion of her life building a parental identity from scratch, not as a biological mother, not as a father, but as a "co-mother," as she was called on my school forms. I would cross out "father" and write "co-mother," and suddenly my emergency contact form would be as political as a burning flag. We talked candidly about how this search should in no way threaten us as a family, and about how my desire to at least casually attempt to find my father was something I needed to do for myself and certainly not as an act of destruction or rebellion. Despite their initial apprehension, my parents soon rallied around this project (as is their custom with projects of mine). It seemed also that my moms had had their own latent curiosity about this mystical sperm donor, and that I was giving them permission to air it. The search quickly yielded a sweet, nerdy man, a member of MENSA, whose donation timeline and basic background (Jew) fit mine. If you can believe this, my family and I actually sat down with him at a brunch place in Greenwich Village called Jane. We liked him. We talked about all sorts of things while silently puzzling over his forehead, his nose, his shoulders, to see if, as a man, I might be him. He was so nebbishy, the sort of guy who practically begs to be shoved into a locker. He kind of seemed like he needed a family. The Maury moment came when he agreed to a paternity test. The days waiting for the results were fraught and exciting. When the results came and he turned out to be just some guy, I realized how deeply entrenched we'd all become in this fantasy. I had let myself believe that this itch could be quickly scratched, failing to see it for what it was: a needle in a haystack and, more specifically, a needle that, very likely, actively didn't want to be found. But on the heels of defeat, I felt peaceful. I had tried. Now my grandkids could shove it. I had made one nominal attempt, and it had been a rather gargantuan expenditure of emotional energy for my moms and me. I had wrestled with the sense that by taking the bait to go on this search, I was delegitimizing my family. Admitting collectively that we were curious, all three of us, was a weight off my shoulders. Article: 19th September 2013 www.huffingtonpost.com

Pride Angel Journey | To sleep train or not to sleep train…

I was thirty weeks pregnant, perfecting my waddle, complaining about aches in muscles I barely knew I had and drinking Gavsicon straight from the bottle, like a drunkard desperate for the next claggy aniseed fix. The spare room was piled high with an impressive stash of baby gear passed on from friends, and a long car journey was an opportunity to discuss the names question again. We were heading up to Northumberland for a final relaxing break together – staying in a ‘Retreat’ which ominously didn’t accept children. We were given a warm welcome by the owner who, like so many people these days, fussed in a friendly way over me and my bump. I remember thinking how babies are so welcome anywhere when they’re still contained, any cries muffled within the uterus. Only too soon we’d be banished to the family friendly chain pubs, where you trip over ice-cream encrusted high chairs on your way in, before ordering from a sticky, laminated menu, exactly the same bland food, “all served with chips”, that you ordered a week ago from an identical pub one hundred miles away, the only difference being the kids in this one are playing hide and seek (or more accurately hide and shout) under your table instead of racing between waiters’ legs like slalom skiers as the ones in the pub last week were doing. We slowly wandered the gardens at Alnwick – especially slowly on uphill stretches where I’d struggle to catch my breath, and I began a sort of on-going game of pram bingo, proud at my ability to identify one brand from another. I photographed snowdrops in the low February sun: the delicate little white heads that had quietly formed during the depths of winter and bravely battled their way out into the world ready for the spring – just like my baby would. Every time we encountered a small child – a tantrum outside the tree-house restaurant; thigh-high hands pushing past us through the shrubbery of the gardens – we’d spend a while pondering smugly on how much better behaved our child would be. We only half joked about my partner Sally having it ‘well-trained’ (Sally’s a vet). We shook our heads gravely at yet another toddler without reigns and up to all sorts of mischief; back at home the playpen was at the ready and the naughty step identified. After all we’d both been well-trained children ourselves – conscientious at school and polite in company. To this day, we still wrote our ‘thank you’ letters promptly. Nevertheless, fully aware that we knew very little about child-rearing (save how everyone else should be doing it), we decided to start on the parenting books. Sally began with ‘Sleep Solutions: Quiet Nights For You And Your Child: From Birth To Five Years’ by Rachel Waddilove while I commenced rather a tricky, sciencey one: ‘Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain’ by Sue Gerhardt. And it was about then we started to realise a few things. Sally, who had had the easier read and was already well on with it, commented that we should be able to get our baby sleeping through the night quite easily with a bit of training. And it sounded ideal: we could have a young baby AND a good night’s sleep. But of course I’d been reading as well, and so it was that I looked at her in horror. Admittedly I’d got a little bogged down with ‘sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems’ and wasn’t fully confident with the idea of ‘fluctuating inhibitory and excitatory activity’, but I was starting to grasp Gerhardt’s argument that babies don’t have much control over their body systems and might need some help ‘regulating’ them. A stressed baby could experience a flood of the stress hormone, cortisol, and without the swift response of a sympathetic parent, lasting damage could be done to the baby’s brain which could predispose it to conditions such as anxiety and depression – the agonies of which I knew only too well through personal experience and the experience of close family members. I had no idea how I might ‘regulate’ a stressed baby, but I was fairly sure that sleep training it didn’t fit in at all. And that it might require some of this ‘regulating’ during the small hours. But the most distressing fact was that these two books were totally contradictory! The thing is, Sally and I were well aware that there was good parenting, bad parenting and a range of mediocre parentings out there – you only need to visit the nearest supermarket to enjoy a live performance of all of the above. However, we’d thought there was just ‘conscientious, trying to do the best for your child parenting’ and ‘plain lazy, can’t give a toss parenting’. What came to us as quite a revelation about this time was that the parents who practise ‘conscientious, trying to do the best for your child parenting’ don’t all agree with each other: in fact they are almost ready to tear each other into small parts and mash the bits up into baby puree over certain issues like, well whether or not to puree the baby’s food. And disconcertingly, we were just starting to see some cracks in our tidy plans for a ‘well-trained’ child, a naughty step a playpen and a good-night’s sleep. I still found it hard to grasp the fact that there was an actual baby inside me (and I’m not sure I even believed there was entirely until it slip-slopped out early one morning – but that story’s for another time). Nevertheless, running my hand affectionately over my tummy, feeling as I did regularly now that subtle, and sometimes not so subtle squirming from deep within, I thought perhaps a few years without much sleep won’t matter much in the scheme of things. Article: 17th September 2013 by Lindsey, West Yorkshire

Survivor star may have fathered over 200 children

No, Richard Hatch is not starring in Delivery Man, the upcoming comedy about a sperm donor who learns he's fathered more than 533 children at a fertility clinic. That would be Vince Vaughn (see the trailer below). However, the guy who won the first-ever edition of CBS' Survivor 13 years ago may have begot as many as 200 children—in his case, by donating sperm week after week to the Cryobank sperm bank in Fairfax, Va., over a two-year period during his college days because he was in need of cash. "I did it for two years, about two or three times a week," Hatch told Inside Edition about his stint at Virginia's George Mason University. It turns out the reality star was as free with his DNA as he was walking the beaches of Borneo in his birthday suit. Hatch acknowledged that he made several hundred deposits at his local sperm bank that netted him $30 a donation, which, if one does the math, could mean he might have fathered dozens, if not, a couple of hundred kids during that span. While there's no telling exactly how many offspring might be running around, word of his paternity got out when the news magazine interviewed him as he met two of the biological children he fathered—Emily Kidd and Devin O'Neill, both 24. Apparently, the two were able to track down the Castaway with the help of information from their mothers and a website called the Donor Sibling Registry, which listed him as a 6'4" educated Swede. At which point, O'Neill said he emailed Hatch inquiring about paternity while Kidd's mom subsequently confirmed that the erstwhile corporate trainer turned convicted tax dodger was indeed her dad. And upon hearing it was Hatch, Emily recalled watching the first season of Survivor so long ago. "I didn't remember much from when I was 11, but I do remember the naked man and the hype of it," she remarked. As for Devin, he had no clue of the Rhode Island native's past life on Survivor or The Apprentice for that matter. Hatch, who's gay, has one son whom he adopted in 1998. The latter currently lives in Newport with his dad and Richard's partner, Emiliano, whom Hatch married in 2005. As far as meeting the children whom he fathered through the sperm bank, the reality star told Inside Edition that he's up for getting to know them better, though he has no intention of taking the place of the fathers who raised them. "It's an exciting time. It's a great time," he said. Article: 15th September 2013 www.uk.eonline.com