Sperm donation: In a donating mood to the sperm bank

I thought it would be easier. A lunch break that I would spend very relaxed with myself. Afterwards: a wonderful, a good feeling – because I would have jacked off and done a good deed with it. Now I look back with some shame. How banal and arrogant at the same time. I don’t even know myself like that.

From the beginning. It starts: easy as pie. The seed bank I use for my venture is right around the corner from my home, which is also where I mostly work. The fact that I don’t feel a bit strange in the rooms of the European Sperm Bank must be due to the fact that the Hamburg branch of the Danish company looks and feels like a design agency with a visible laboratory area. The team is young and doesn’t give you a chance to be embarrassed. Hey, I think – hygge meets high-tech. What I want here is written everywhere – on the wall, on forms, on the employees’ T-shirts: “Give Life”. A stylized sperm winds itself around the slogan, and the logo immediately screwed itself into my head: give life, exactly. I’m in.

And for various reasons. In my circle of friends, I experienced how exhausting the road to having a child can be: A friend and her partner didn’t find out he was virtually infertile until he was in his 40s. It is thanks to a sperm donation that it finally worked out with her family happiness. And the idea that I too could help others to have a child is simply beautiful. Especially since a doctor once enthusiastically diagnosed how fit I was. After an extensive check and several blood tests, he decided that I should “please father at least ten children”, he had rarely seen such excellent values. Honest: I felt like Superman, but just to be on the safe side, I reminded him that I’m not into women. “Never mind,” he said. Well, this anecdote was ten years ago, the finding may have lost its meaningfulness. The fact that my semen was not even part of the examination at the time is only now becoming really clear to me. Today is the first time it’s been put under the microscope.

In the rehearsal room

That’s why I’m all to myself now, in the rehearsal room, so to speak – I have to put it soberly, because at first glance there is no eroticism here. But it’s not really clinical either: nice light, few, but comfortable furniture. I could get inspiration from a touchscreen monitor. To me it looks like a comfortably furnished waiting room. What am I waiting for?

I have often thought about the topic of fatherhood in the course of my life. Perhaps more often and more intensively than many straight men, who – at least that’s how I feel – often father children as a matter of course or casually. The idea of ​​me as a father flared up again and again throughout my adult life, mostly somewhat vaguely, because my partners were never really up for it and my independence was always important to me. I am currently single. And almost in my mid-40s. And the question of whether I will later be alone or lonely, the question of what will ever remain of me … is that more than mid-life brooding? In any case, it’s currently keeping me from my assignment in the rehearsal room. And such questions have no place here. Because – Roja Barikin, donor coordinator of the sperm bank and biologist, made this clear in the preliminary talk: “The men who come to us want to be donors, not fathers.” This is also prohibited by law: Since the Sperm Donor Register Act of 2018, a donor can no longer be identified as the legal father, i.e. never be subject to maintenance or inheritance obligations. However, he will receive an information letter if a child is born – in order to be prepared for a possible later contact. “We advise men,” says Roja Barikin, “to be open to a one-off contact. More can, but doesn’t have to happen.” In any case, only two out of 100 children want personal contact, they say.

Would I put this info letter at the bottom of a drawer? Or would it be framed on the wall? I have to grin. To immediately get sentimental about it: If a child is born. Will “my” child have a good time in his family? Would I count the years until it was big enough to be outside my door one day? Apparently I can’t keep the topic that abstract.

Sperm donation is not anonymous

At the age of 16, children are allowed to find out who fathered them – anonymous sperm donation is forbidden in Germany. Theoretically, one of my donations could even result in several children: Depending on the number of cells, several so-called straws are drawn from a sample. A straw is what is ultimately sold to the recipients – hetero couples, two women or single women – in cooperation with a fertility clinic. For around 900 euros. A bargain for my heritage, right? In Germany I could produce up to 15 children, worldwide even around 25 – provided I donate regularly, once a week, for which there would be 40 euros “expense allowance”.

I type listlessly on the touchscreen through the offers from Youporn and Tube8. Going to the sperm bank will definitely not be a job for me in the long term: The European Sperm Bank accepts donations from men between the ages of 18 and 45, because after that the sperm cells become weaker and, like their producers, more susceptible to diseases. So for me it’s close to being close to my age, and if I can’t finally concentrate or relax now, it won’t work.

I can. All these thoughts can be turned off for brief, valuable seconds and a dutiful orgasm. Look into the cup. Is that enough? “Please don’t stretch,” Roja Barikin had just said. Mannomann: “Some donors mix their sample with water. That kills the cells.”

Black on white

Now it’s off to the lab, I’m allowed to take a look, see a psychedelic bustle in black and white on the screen. “What’s that tangle on the right?” I ask, “a mutant giant sperm?” – “More like a little piece of fluff,” the laboratory manager reassures me. “We look at how many sperm are in the sample, according to the WHO recommendation we need well over 20 million per milliliter”, she explains. Then it is checked whether they are moving in the right direction. And whether they can be frozen in liquid nitrogen at minus 196 degrees Celsius and thawed again. Right next to us are tanks in which such samples are stored. Of course, cells are lost in the process. For her as a biologist, it is “a miracle that anything survives at all”. The close-up of my semen briefly makes me awestruck. There’s enough life in there at first glance, I’d say.

Give Life. Only around five percent of the candidates manage to become official donors here. For the complex process of “assisted reproduction”, the European Sperm Bank is looking for something like Germany’s Next Supersperm – to rule out diseases and for a high success rate. Like every candidate, I would also have to submit two suitable samples during the “casting”. Then fill out a questionnaire with information about hobbies and character traits. Then there would be the family history and a blood test for important hereditary diseases, drugs and psychotropic drugs, a full body check, and a personal interview.

Two days later I know: The first rehearsal wasn’t quite enough, the mobility rate is a tad too low. “Don’t worry, it often depends on the day,” I’m told. I am invited to a second appointment. I complete it in an exemplary manner – with less mental cinema and top sperm! So now I’m on recall for another rehearsal. But I can’t quite get my feelings together yet: There’s the somewhat strange relief that I could probably father – actually irrelevant because I’m not planning a family. And realizing how disconnected I would be from the whole process once I gave up my sperm – which would still be 50 percent involved in a child. Should it happen that I fill out the questionnaire, I would at least know what I would enter under the character traits: romantic, possessive and tending to be thoughtful.

The process the sperm donation is anonymous. That is why our author does not write under his real name

barbara