Selecting a Sperm Bank - Part 2

The first part of this post can be read here.

Once I had eliminated all but three sperm banks, I took a closer look at the leftover sperm banks. Not all sperm banks offer the same services or have the same policies. Your selection of a sperm bank kind of depends on what is important to you as the customer. So, here are some criteria that are important to me and that I focus on as I am trying to select the right sperm bank:

Family Limit
Family limit refers to the number of families that they sell vials to before they "retire" the donor. Of course, these banks want to make as much money as possible, so they often have limits that are very high. For some it is about 40 families.

This only counts the families that register the births of their children with the bank. This is a very gray area, because the numbers are often not accurate.

Some families don`t register their births because they think the doctor does that for them, or because they are just too busy with their new baby. So, there might be even more families that get pregnant from a specific donor than the family limit states. In other cases, mothers said they tried to contact the sperm bank to register a birth, but the sperm bank did not take note or lost the information. So, when they contacted the bank later, they were told that they had no records of any births.

Once the donor hits the limit, there might also be some families who have bought sperm earlier and who are still TTC with the sperm. So, in the end, the number of families can be much higher than 40.

In addition, the family limit only refers to the family and not to the number of children. So, some families might have conceived twins or triplets. Or, if they want more than 1 child, the banks might sell them more sperm from that donor later.

As one of my SMC friends said: The family limit issue is an iffy topic. I know some people do not really care about this issue, but I do. For me it is important to choose a sperm bank that has a relatively low family limit and that I trust that they really enforce that limit.


Information about Donor Personality
A lot of banks offer you all kinds of things like audio interviews, essays, pictures, etc. but most of the time, you have to pay big bucks for these features. Some of the banks only offer a short profile and a brief medical history for free and that is just too little for me.

For me it is important, not only which information about the donor's personality the sperm bank offers, but also which information they offer for free. I decided that I wanted to have at least a tiny glimpse into the donors' personality before I committed to a bank. I am currently thinking about opting for a bank that offers you donor essays (which are actually short answers to a handful of questions) for free. I found it helpful to get a first impression. Unfortunately, you have to buy the complete access to get the audio interviews if (!) the donors have any available.


Number of Open ID Donors
Open ID Donors are donors that are willing to be contacted by the children when they turn 18. I will discuss this issue further in a future post when I will talk about selecting my donor. But for right now, I am looking at the numbers of Open ID donors that different sperm banks have to offer. It would be nice to at least have the option to pick an Open ID donor.


Donor Testing
All sperm banks that were on Dr. Stork`s list seem to test their donors for certain things. When you look through the profiles, all donors seem to test negative at all times. I assume that the ones that tested positive did not qualify as donors and were not included in the donor catalog of the bank. My next step is to compare the actual tests they did on the donors. I am not familiar with most of the things they tested them for, so this will still require a little bit of research ...


Customer Service
To me, the customer service that a bank offers, matters, too. About 5 days ago, I wrote an email to one of the sperm banks in my closer selection pool and I am still waiting for a response. Not a good sign... I am trying to find a bank that I can trust and that will help me and work with me not just now, when I am about to make a purchase from them, but also in the future, when I am no longer a paying customer. How will they react if I need their help to get in contact with the donor for medical reasons? I will discuss this and some additional issues in my next post.

To be continued... here.