fairfaxcryobank

When a prospective donor completes the screening and is ready to officially become a donor, they review and sign a donor agreement. In that agreement they agree to relinquish parental rights to any resulting children. On the recipient side, they sign a Terms of Use documenting that they understand and agree that the donor has no parental rights.

Donors are tested in a number of ways so we can cover as many bases as possible. We do blood and urine testing to cover infectious disease and genetic testing, as well as regular physicals by a contracted physician, psychological exams prior to joining, and a number of other checks to ensure health records are as accurate as possible.

This is a great question. We do not ask the applicants to identify their sexual orientation. That said, we are FDA licensed and must follow the their regulatory requirements. One of the exclusion factors is male sex with a male within the preceding five years. This is similar to the regulation that did not allow queer men to donate blood. When the FDA changed their policy/deferral for blood donation they did not change it for gamete (sperm) donation. Our Director has, over the years, worked with various elected officials and contacts at the Human Rights Campaign to try to get the FDA to change this, but to no avail.

Our Director recently reached out to Senator Booker because he and Congresswoman DeLauro re-introduced the Access to Infertility Care and Treatment Act.

My best advice is for individuals to reach out to their local elected officials and ask them to work to “urge the FDA to remove the ban on MSM in CFR 1271 for sperm donation.”

There are limits on the amount of "family units" a donor can have before they are required to stop to avoid situations like these. There are a number of regulations that must be followed!

We follow the American Society of Reproductive Medicine's guidelines. We also follow whatever local regulations there are internationally. Most family limits are calculated based on the population of a given country or state. I.e., in the UK one donor can be used to create 10 families. One family can be one or more siblings. The UK population is ~68million and they limit to 10 families. The US population is ~331 million and though there is no federal regulation, we limit distribution to 25 reported families, which is less than the number if we used the same population logic. We ask our recipients to report their births so that we can stop distribution at 25 families, and we promote disclosure of donor conception to the children so that openness and transparency are part of their birth story.