Is the export of donor sperm explained adequately to recipients?
By Grace Halden,
BioNews
| 01. 15. 2024
Sperm donation is used to help infertile couples, same-sex couples, and solo women to conceive children where otherwise it would have been impossible. Private sperm banks operating throughout the UK provide tested sperm from screened donors to regulated fertility clinics at different price points. Donor profiles displayed on gamete bank websites are the principal way for potential recipients to search for available donors. Once a donor has been selected, the recipient can purchase gametes for delivery to their clinic of choice. When donor sperm is purchased through a regulated bank, a family slot (for a maximum of ten families in the UK) is filled under the regulatory framework put in place by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).
However, when donor sperm is purchased in the UK, it is not always made obvious to the patient that some UK donations will be made available for exportation to assist families abroad, beyond the UK ten family limit. For many parents, the discovery of exportation is an unpleasant surprise. Emily, a solo mother by choice through sperm donation, talks about her shock when...
Related Articles
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
By Julia Black, MIT Technology Review | 10.16.2025
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. This bundle of cells, about the size of...
By Lizzy Lawrence, Stat News | 10.14.2025