Shortage brings call to let sperm donors father more children
The government should consider increasing the number of children that sperm donors can legally father to tackle the critical shortage of donated sperm in the UK, according to an expert report from the British Fertility Society.
The report calls for a national strategy to tackle the shortage of donated sperm, which is preventing numerous patients at fertility clinics from getting pregnant.
The government’s decision in 2005 to remove the right to anonymity for sperm donors led to an immediate drop in the number of women treated using donor sperm, from 2,727 in 2005 to 2,107 in 2006. The demand for donor insemination is about 4,000 women a year, which would need about 500 donors to register each year. In 2006 there were 307 donors.
One way to make better use of existing donors would be to ease the limit on the number of children they can sire. Currently, this stands at 10 families. The limit is intended to lower the chance that offspring from the same sperm donor will have children together themselves without knowing they are closely related.