What motivates men to offer sperm donation via the internet?

Abstract

To investigate why men offer sperm donation via the internet, a questionnaire was disseminated via 39 Dutch-language websites thought to be visited by potential sperm donors. Nine internet donors completed the survey, men who typically knew the women they were donating to. Their responses were compared with those of a control group of 35 general sperm bank donors who were recruited using flyers in Dutch sperm banks, and who were typically unaware of the identity of the eventual recipients. The findings shed light on the motives and attitudes of internet donors. Both groups of donors indicated that their primary motivation for donating was altruism (>80% of all respondents). However, internet donors had a more pronounced desire to procreate than sperm bank donors (6 out of 9, i.e. 66 vs. 22%, respectively) and more often felt that they had good genes they wished to pass on (5 out of 9, i.e. 55 vs. 31%, respectively). The main reason internet donors gave for donating via the internet was that they wanted to know the prospective parents and be kept up to date on the progress of the offspring conceived from their donations. This distinguishes them significantly from sperm bank donors. A further finding was that they were not prompted to avoid the formal donation circuit for which, by law in the Netherlands, pregnancies resulting from donations have to be registered in a central database. This study is subject to several, in some cases inevitable, limitations, but it provides an interesting starting point that future studies can seek to confirm and extend.

Keywords:

• Donor insemination
• sperm donor
• sperm bank
• Dutch donors
• internet
• informal circuit
• social motives
• motivation
• attitude
• altruism

Acknowledgements

We thank the sperm banks of the Reinier de Graaf Group (Voorburg), the University Medical Centre Utrecht, the University Medical Centre Groningen, the Medical Centre Kinderwens (Leiderdorp), the Isala clinics (Zwolle) and Rijnstate Hospital (Arnhem) for enabling us to distribute flyers asking donors to fill in the questionnaire. We thank Dr L. Roovers for help with the statistical analysis and Dr A. van der Horst for critically reading a draft of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This study was fully funded by a grant for legislative evaluation from the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw) [grant number 3400.3001].

Additional information

Funding

This study was fully funded by a grant for legislative evaluation from the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMw), [grant number 3400.3001].