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The Sperm Donor Abuse Foundation is Launching a Helpline

1/23/2016

10th February 2016. The date has yet to arrive, but when it does, it shall represent a historic moment for the Sperm Donor Abuse Foundation. For the past year, we have been working towards establishing a helpline to offer peer support, advice and information, for women who have used, or, are considering using, unregulated sperm donor websites or social media, such as Facebook, to have a baby. The Sperm Donor Abuse Foundation is non-judgmental and knows only too well that every woman's journey is different and that there are many reasons that lead women online to find a sperm donor. Perhaps the two greatest reasons motivating women to go online comprise, 1) the high costs associated with fertility clinics for donor insemination, 2) the desire to get to know the 'donor' father.

Women considering using online sperm donor sites often envisage an uncomplicated, straightforward, and safe journey to motherhood. Whilst some women do find that to be the case, many others do not. This is an online community where violence, particularly sexual violence, is completely normalised. It is also a culture where men routinely strive to father vast numbers of children, irrespective of the profound child welfare issues, whilst at the same time frequently going to great lengths to conceal their true identity.

Our helpline will be there to offer women a listening ear, peer support, as well as information and advice on all aspects of using unregulated online sperm donor sites.

Unregulated Internet Sperm Donation is Far Removed from the Glossy Brochures of IVF Clinics

1/3/2016

The personal price girls and women pay for pregnancy and live births is so frequently underestimated. Whilst our society prefers to focus upon the joyful aspects of pregnancy and motherhood, often with a consumerist slant – pregnancy and babies generate revenue, little attention is ever paid to the personal safety or the inherent risks of pregnancy. Here, we refer not to the obstetrics or medical complications of gestation, but those dangers flowing instead from intimate and/or familial bonds with the male partner and/or the father of the unborn child. Pregnancy and violence for many women is interwoven. It is a time when some women will experience violence in their relationships for the first time or the perpetrators will increase the quantity or severity of violence during the gestation. Indeed, over one third of domestic violence starts in pregnancy (Lewis and Drife, 2001, 2005, McWilliams and McKiernan, 1993). Violence in pregnancy is also a significant cause of miscarriage and stillbirth (Mezey, 1997).

The unregulated world of Internet sperm donation is a brutal assault on the senses; it is far removed from the glossy marketing brochures depicting safe, pedestrian, and orderly, approved fertility clinics. In contrast, the cyber platform of sperm donor websites and social networking sites are a myriad of misogyny and rape culture where the chances of a woman avoiding rape, sexual abuse, or a string of other harmful and abusive behaviors, comes down to potluck rather than her application of sense and sensibility. The man with the best career and family pedigree is just as likely to engage in criminally abusive behaviour as his poorer cousin.

For the uninitiated, unregulated Internet sperm donation constitutes a non-medicalized world that lures women with the promise of easy pregnancy and the family they long for, without any complications. What could appear easier than logging online to find an altruistic man to donate his sperm to create new life? The want, the need, and the obsession, to have a child when one lacks sperm, is a powerful emotion, which has been given the opportunity to burgeon into an achievable dream with the advent of unregulated online sperm donor websites and SNS. For many that dream has already reached an impasse with the increasing difficulty of accessing IVF – free at the point of delivery. And where one door to pregnancy closes, another is already gapping wide open, and it can be accessed from the comfort of one’s own home (workplace, café, etc.), without GP appointments, and the unforgiving financial costs associated with HFEA fertility clinics for donor insemination.

The cultural and media representation of sperm donors as altruistic and only too willing to help women realise their dreams of motherhood is a significant factor that leads women en masse into cyberspace to locate the future father of their children. Like many facets in our cyber-driven age, things are not what they first appear to be when one takes the plunge into this murky world of unregulated sperm donation; it is a cyber and cultural milieu where pregnancy and babies can be had for a price. That transaction is often financial and it is also frequently a trade in gender based abuse. Whichever way one looks at unregulated Internet sperm donation, it is a boundless trade; what legislation does exist, goes woefully unenforced by the HFEA. This is not “donation” in the altruistic sense; it is a trade, which is premised upon the exploitation of women with the inevitable winners and losers.

The Sperm Donor Abuse Foundation is Launching a Helpline

Unregulated Internet Sperm Donation is Far Removed from the Glossy Brochures of IVF Clinics

Claire McQuoid

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