Nov 08
22
Shortage of Sperm in the UK?
Stop the press! There appears to be a reported shortage of donated sperm in the UK at the moment. Yes, men can donate their sperm to sperm banks and become a sperm donor for artificial insemination if they’d like. How do you feel about that? What if you became the biological father of someone you never meet, would you be ok with that? Well, lots of men are, because sperm banks never really seem to have a shortage of donations of sperm/semen. Except for now, the United Kingdom appears to have a shortage of the precious half of life making cellular structures.
The British Fertility society has reported that there is actually a shortage in willing men to give their donations of sperm lately, for reasons not totally known. Well, actually a big potential problem, and something that may need to be repealed if they are going to have any success in the future collecting sperm samples from donors, is that Britain has passed a law that does not allow totally anonymous sperm donations. This means a man’s privacy is not completely protected if he chooses to donate his sperm.
That fact could definitely be offputting for thousands of men who want to give their sperm. Men who wish to not be identified as a sperm donor by children who were fathered by their sperm sample through insemination cannot any longer be guaranteed that they will never be contacted because the knowledge is available to the kids when they become eighteen years old.
To put perspective on the sperm donor shortage, the number of women needing artificial insemination to get pregnant in the UK per year is in the thousands, and the number of male sperm donors is only in the low hundreds. I’d say that’s a pretty bad ratio, wouldn’t you. Maybe they’d take US men if they get desperate. Heck, maybe they’ll start offering some cash for it!
