Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm by Rene Almeling

donor.
We knew that [my wife] had some previous problems and maybe couldn’t get pregnant. She did actually get pregnant shortly after we got married, but it was a miscarriage. We tried later and had a little girl. I just started thinking about it, the joy, the loss of our child, and not being able to have a child. I understand what some of these couples might be going through, but I also understood when a miracle does happen. That’s kind of why I decided to do [sperm donation], just to kind of help others. To be honest, the money from the little donation does help out, and we decided we’d use it toward my daughter’s [education fund]. So every check we get, we deposit it into that account.
    Being interested in helping recipients does not preclude appreciating the income from donation. Ryan was a well-paid engineer not in need ofthe extra cash, but in referring to how he “helps others” while the money “helps out” his family, he suggests a mutualism to donation.
    Three of the men are single professionals without children who referenced a slightly different version of “helping”: they wished to make their genes available to recipients as an act of charity. Travis, a thirty-year-old engineer, pointed out that he had a large family filled with relatives who lived long, healthy lives. So he considered giving “amazing genes” to “people who are trying to have kids” as just one of his many philanthropic endeavors alongside blood donation and community service projects. Ben, a twenty-six-year-old software engineer, invokes not only health and longevity, but also intelligence and athleticism.
    Ben: I think I have something to contribute. I feel like I’m a very intelligent individual. I come from a family of very bright people, and we’re all athletic. We live very long lives, very healthy. We don’t have any really serious issues until we’re in our eighties and nineties. I thought that I’m just a prime candidate for donating sperm, and I’d like to be charitable. I give a lot of my money to charitable organizations. I really don’t like donating blood. I like to keep that part to myself. Anybody can really do a lot of these things, but not very many people can donate sperm. So I thought that I’d really be adding something to the community if I did that. So that’s really [it]. Because I’m independently wealthy, I’m not interested in the money. I don’t even accept the money that they give. I give it to my brother who’s a postdoc with a wife and kids.
    Rene: So, all the way back in high school, what made you respond positively [to the idea of sperm donation]? Was it just you’re smart and you felt like you could contribute this?
    Ben: Absolutely. I thought that if there were more people like me in the world, the world would be a little better, not by that much, a tiny, little, hardly significant amount, but I’d have contributed positively. There’s not very many things as an individual to contribute positively, and this was one of them.
    Later in the interview, I asked Ben, “Of all the charitable things you could do, why is this important for you?” He replied, “Because I believevery strongly that our genes are a large part of who we are, and I think I’ve been blessed with a very strong, very good genetic heritage, and I feel like other people should be blessed.” 4
    For most men, the sperm bank was nearby, on the way to work or school, so donating did not involve going more than five or ten minutes out of the way. But three of the men who signed on to help others made much longer trips. Scott drove ten miles from work to the bank, saying, “I can round-trip it in forty-five minutes, so it works for a lunch break.” Ryan drove twenty-five miles each way, and Ben commuted an hour each way. Scott and Ryan are also among the longest-serving donors, at thirty and thirty-three months, respectively. This suggests that their commitment to helping people is strong enough to survive not