Watch Desperately Seeking Sperm on Tuesday at 9.30pm on SBS, and later on SBS On Demand.
American super donor, Ari Nagel, is about to reach a milestone: 100 biological children.
Also known as The Sperminator, Ari, 46, is part of a new generation of DIY donors; people find him via word of mouth or online.
He hands over his sperm for free, only asking recipients to cover his travel costs. Once he started donating, the New York-based maths professor says, it was hard to stop.
“I was getting asked for help to grow their family by lesbian couples, or heterosexual couples, or single women whose biological clock was ticking,” he told SBS Dateline from New York.
It was, he says, an easy decision to give them “a lifetime of joy and happiness with little or no effort on my part”.
Getting a donation from Ari is so simple that he’s done the handover in public restrooms.
He masturbates and hands the sample in a menstrual cup to the recipient, who then inserts it, before they both go their separate ways.
There are no contracts, and no expectations around the level of contact Ari has with a child.
Ari Nagel remains in touch with some of his children - others have no idea he exists. Source: SBS Dateline
In fact, he admits that some of his children don’t even know he exists: “I think that's often the case for heterosexual couples. They're not sharing and not truthful with the child”.
What Ari and other “super donors” are doing is at odds with a growing awareness around the rights of donor conceived children.
“Maybe it's a big ego trip for him,” says Erin Jackson, a San Diego-based advocate who runs a resource site called We Are Donor Conceived.
“If he was listening to the voices of donor-conceived people, he would've stopped a very long time ago”.
Erin, who found out she was conceived using donor sperm at the age of 35, runs an annual survey with donor-conceived people who use her website.
Ari Nagel believes he will have fathered 116 biological children by November. Source: SBS Dateline
There’s strong agreement on several points: limiting donors to ten offspring, and allowing children to have access to their donor’s identity from birth.
Erin says these are the basics for enabling donor-conceived people to “build meaningful relationships with the donor and with their siblings”.
There is now a movement calling for change, not just in the DIY donor market, but within the formal fertility industry.
Fertility clinics in many countries, including the United States, still allow anonymous donations, and are not required by law to place limits on donor offspring.
In New York, Nagel, who operates entirely outside any kind of regulatory framework, has just returned from a donating spree across Europe.
He has 97 biological children so far and says he’s on track to reach 116 children by the end of November. “People... might think I'm narcissistic," he told SBS Dateline, “but the women, they don't care. They just want their one child.”
