It was when she opened the guest room door to a half-naked man that Christy* started to feel seriously concerned. The 30-year-old had met him on a Facebook group connecting willing sperm donors with those looking to conceive — a seemingly selfless act that promises to save hopeful parents thousands in clinic fees. The man, in his fifties, had volunteered to produce a sample that Christy could use to artificially inseminate herself. But 20 minutes later, after he failed to emerge, she feared that he was hanging around in the hopes of “NI”: online donor group parlance for “natural insemination”, or sex.
Worried for her safety, she asked him to leave her east London home, before swearing off donations from “philanthropic” strangers altogether. “You’re excited and you’re not thinking rationally,” she says of her attempts to conceive this way. “I was holding on to potential donors, thinking that they were a miracle — but then they ended up being a nightmare.”
Christy’s story is an increasingly common tale within these groups, some of which have tens of thousands of members and are run by men who openly boast of having hundreds of children. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) limits donation to 10 families in order to minimise the risk of accidental incestuous relationships between half-siblings. Yet on social media, desperation for a child all too often outweighs the many risks that come with unregulated conception. As a result, grim endings abound. There are reports of sexual assault, rape and being fleeced out of large sums of money as a result of these groups, which are, according to one victim, “the perfect, unregulated platform for sexual predators and psychopaths preying on desperate and vulnerable women”.
“To be frank, they are coercing women into having sex”
Clare Ettinghausen, HFEA
Many such stories never come to light, due to the stronghold serial donors hold over the groups. (The Standard is not naming any of these donors or the Facebook groups themselves, so as to limit their chances of growing further.) One, who claims to have fathered hundreds of children, has made repeated attempts at taking custody from their mothers and being named on their birth certificates, with multiple cases overturned by the courts. Another, with nearly 200 hundred children, runs groups from several profiles and has also made racist and body-shaming remarks about women he has coerced into NI. These groups have also, at least at some stage, had members including convicted rapists and stalkers.
Still, every day, unregulated donor traffic passes through the capital and beyond, with ill-intentioned men travelling hundreds of miles under the guise of gifting “babydust”.
It is this highly dangerous landscape that led Clare Ettinghausen, director of strategy and corporate affairs at HFEA, to tell a select committee last month that Meta (Facebook’s parent company) is “facilitating” adverts placed by men who contravene UK donation limits, and target vulnerable women. “To be frank, they are coercing women into having sex,” she said.
Part of the reason for this boom in online donor groups is due to the cost of the regulated clinical route. A single vial of sperm can cost over £1,500; there are typically thousands more in fees for insemination, medication and blood tests. With a success rate of between 10-31 per cent (depending on the method used and age of the woman trying to conceive), multiple rounds will be required for most, making the process unaffordable for many.
Sperm donation by numbers
10 The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority’s limit on how many families a sperm donor can donate to
£1,500 The Price a single vial of donated sperm can cost in the UK
10-31% Success rate for artificial insemination via a regulated clinical route (depending on the method used and age of the woman trying to conceive)
1 Number of funded IVF rounds typically offered by the NHS to couples who have no children, a healthy BMI and have been trying for at least a year without success
800 The number of children a ‘mass donor’ has reportedly fathered, charging £50 apiece
The NHS typically offers one round of funded IVF to couples who have no children, a healthy BMI and have been trying for at least a year without success, but solo parents or same-sex couples must prove they have gone through six to 12 rounds of private artificial insemination before being able to access funded care. So many find themselves funnelled towards the black market — especially those who do not have a partner and must shoulder the cost alone. “The prices are crazy,” Christy says, “and I didn’t realise how detailed and difficult the process was as a single person.”
Feeling as though she had no other choice, she joined a Facebook donor group in October last year. After posting her request, she waded through a sea of “offers” — many of which involved insistence that she let donors stay at her home, in hotels she’d fund, or, in some cases, flew them over from other countries. She was pressed to buy them gifts (the groups purport to facilitate “free” donations) or to agree to NI, with one man “cussing me out” when she refused.
Christy’s plan was to organise two sessions per ovulation cycle, using the same donor until she had conceived. Yet each one vanished after the first donation didn’t take. “I didn’t understand the dynamic,” she says. “That’s when a red flag pinged in my head, that they wanted something that I’m not providing.”
“There are definitely a lot of people out there that are just doing it for sex”
Lucy
Lucy* has found much the same. When she posted in search of a donor in one of the larger Facebook groups, it immediately prompted a series of explicit messages from men who wanted to be sexually involved with conception; proposed unprotected threesomes with Lucy and her fiancée, or said they could only produce a specimen while watching the two women be intimate. Another said he was willing to donate because “I love the way pregnant women look.” Lucy, 25, describes these requests as “sick”. “There are definitely a lot of people out there that are just doing it for sex,” Lucy, from east London, says of these forums. “You’re not on the right app — go on Tinder.” Does it feel like there’s any protection for women from bad actors? “No, definitely not, because they’ll get banned and just make another account.”
One donor, who asks not to use a pseudonym lest a serial donor impersonate him online, says that not all who volunteer their services are bad apples. He has successfully donated to five families thus far, and has met three of his donor-conceived children (he plans to stay in limited contact with them all). Some have spent evenings with his own wife and child. His plan is to donate to a further five, in line with HFEA’s rules. “I’ve been lucky having my own kids. My wife and I didn’t have any great dramas — we didn’t need to have sex with anyone we didn’t want to; it didn’t cost us £10,000 to try with a 30 per cent chance of success via a clinic, and we had it good. We had it really easy. So what I offer to other people is what I would like to receive myself if the boot were on the other foot.”
As well as being a donor, he has found another role: as a kind of guardian within these Facebook groups, there to warn new joiners of the risks that may lie ahead. “I hate to hear of the mass donors adding to their tally of victims,” he says, noting that the worst offenders running the groups mute other donors to enshrine their supremacy. What drives these men to want to father so many children? “Something is wrong with their head. It’s an ego thing, I think.”
Fake profiles and private harems
It can also be lucrative. The groups maintain that the only costs involved are covering donors’ travel (men who donate through regulated clinics receive £45 each time). Yet some mass donors speak openly about their demands for cash, including one who reportedly has 800 children, charging £50 apiece — some £40,000. Reports swirl that repeat offenders donate multiple times in a day and charge travel costs to each recipient, despite them being in the same vicinity; others are said to mix their samples with egg or milk in order to increase the volume they can sell off. Unscrupulous, certainly, and potentially fatal for those with severe allergies. The donor is adamant that “if groups are run by a donor as a private harem, yes, they should be banned.” How many of them fall into that category? “At the moment, 100 per cent. There’s a lot of fake profiles and they’re vouching for themselves, which is terrible… It’s a numbers game,” he adds. “Not everyone falls for it, but enough do.”
Cash for children
Unregulated sperm donation can be lucrative. The online groups maintain that the only costs involved are covering donors’ travel (men who donate through regulated clinics receive £45 each time). Yet some mass donors speak openly about their demands for cash, including one who reportedly has 800 children, charging £50 a piece — some £40,000.
While these groups provide ample opportunity for bad men to take advantage, the women are not entirely blameless, he points out. “There are a lot that are treating it like a spunk Deliveroo service” — one that puts them, and their future children, at risk. Many women — Christy included — admit to not asking donors for STI or genetics tests, despite potentially catastrophic consequences.
A one-time donor who has spent years within these groups says that “the whole expectation of what the majority of recipients want is a complete contradiction to reality”. These women “want a mature and responsible man to happily impregnate a financially struggling complete stranger after a short conversation and then completely ignore the fact that the child should have the human right to reach out to him once they turn 18” (many posts from wannabe mothers specify that there is to be no contact between the donor and child). “They want a guy who will travel up to three hours with very little notice but they don’t want him to be a total loser with nothing going on in his life.”
Some recipients have tried to claim child support following birth, as private donation means the donor is legally considered the father. This has led him to conclude that most recipients are “entitled”, while “95 per cent of the donors are lonely as f***, after a shag or have some sort of breeding fetish.”
Out in the open on Facebook
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act makes plain that it is illegal to supply sperm for profit outside of a clinic; Meta’s policy is that there can be no sale of fluid on its platform. When I press the company on how these groups are allowed to remain, ditto the individuals flagrantly ignoring their rules, I am not provided with any comment.
“They’re not hiding. None of it’s a secret”
Clare Ettinghausen, HFEA
The HFEA has hit a similar wall. “We found it difficult to constructively engage Meta,” Ettinghausen tells me. “These prolific unregulated donors are very public, some of them are running Facebook groups, they’re not hiding. None of it’s a secret, they’re very transparent about what they’re doing.” Continuing to give them a platform is “facilitating these people breaking the law, and they should do something about it”.
Christy has accepted that finding a donor this way is untenable, even if it means her dreams of motherhood may never come to pass. “It was very overwhelming,” she says of her attempts to conceive, and the men she met along the way. “There’s just something off about it.”
*Names have been changed
