Fears over fall in sperm donors

12 November 2008 12:08am

Experts are calling for action to deal with the shortage of UK sperm donors as new research from the US suggests some children want to know about their donor fathers.

Anonymous sperm and egg donation was banned in the UK in 2005, meaning children can now trace their biological parents when they are 18.

The move has largely been blamed for the overall decline in the number of sperm donors since the 1990s, and fewer women than ever are conceiving children using a donor.

Leading experts in the field have called for a raft of measures to increase the availability of donor sperm. The current limit on the number of families that can be created by a single donor (10) is "arbitrary and not evidence-based", they said.

Dr Mark Hamilton, chairman of the British Fertility Society (BFS), and Dr Allan Pacey, secretary of the BFS, called for more "sperm sharing" schemes to be set up.

Such programmes allow the male partners of women needing fertility treatment to donate sperm in return for cut-price IVF. Similar schemes are already in place for egg-sharing.

The doctors said around 4,000 UK patients needed donor sperm each year. Therefore, a minimum of 500 new donors were needed each year to meet demand, they argued.

Writing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the experts said: "Currently, many clinics struggle to recruit donors, have long waiting lists for those needing treatment, have high costs, and in some areas have ceased to provide treatment services altogether."

Clare Lewis-Jones, chief executive of Infertility Network UK, said the BFS recommendations could help ease the UK's sperm shortage.

"We know from the calls we receive from patients needing donor insemination how devastating it is to not be able to access the treatment they need in order to have a family because of the current shortage of sperm donors, which in some cases is simply because of where they live," she added.

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