"I don't reckon I ever saw more than 10 people on [the donor bank website]," Melanie Saward says when reflecting on her journey to conceive using a sperm donor in Australia.
"Something has to be done about [sperm] donations in this country."
When the Bigambul and Wakka Wakka writer first approached a Queensland IVF clinic in 2018, she was seeking an Aboriginal sperm donor to maintain her family's connection. But she quickly discovered there were very few Australian donors, and no Aboriginal donors.
"When the Australian ones came on there, it was like eBay. You would watch the number go down really quickly. You almost don't have time to read their profiles — you just have to click."
Discovering there were no Aboriginal donors was deeply painful, and after a lot of deliberation she eventually chose a Native American donor via an international sperm bank, but experienced an early miscarriage.
"[Donating sperm] is always going to be a complex issue for mob because of things around family intergenerational trauma, not knowing where your kin's going to be. It can be really complex," she says.
Author Melanie Saward ended up pausing her plans for motherhood because she felt she would never find an appropriate donor.
Sperm in short supply as demand increases
In 2021, more than 3,300 sperm donor insemination cycles were reported across Australia and New Zealand — up 33 per cent from 10 years earlier. Many Australian IVF clinics maintain their own sperm banks and do not share donations between competitors. Some do not provide donor eggs.
The supply of donor sperm and eggs often does not keep pace with demand, and the shortage means some parents are faced with unexpected decisions around their child’s identity — all within a dwindling fertility window.
"There's very limited diversity in terms of differently racialised donors of different ethnic backgrounds, which creates quite difficult and painful circumstances for a lot of people of colour and women of colour," explains Dr Jaya Keaney, lecturer in gender studies at the University of Melbourne.
She says fertility treatment can bring people "face-to-face with the really intimate dimensions of what race, racial identity and racialised inheritance mean in their lives".
Melanie says she would have loved to have used an Australian donor rather than use international sperm. She has since paused her plans for motherhood.
"The finances definitely shut the door for me earlier than I would have done, which is really awful," she says.
"But also the fact that I didn't think I was ever going to find an appropriate donor.
"I had to grieve the baby that I lost. But I'm also now I guess grieving biological motherhood."
She says she has had many Aboriginal women contact her who are in the same boat.
Some parents feel the choice is so limited in Australia that they must look to international cryobanks. Source: iStockphoto / tonefotografia/Getty Images
Australian requirements can limit choices for parents
"The fact that I couldn't have an Asian donor took a lot of processing."
Anna (not her real name), a Chinese-Australian new mum, had been through three unsuccessful rounds of IVF at the age of 42 before she and her husband decided to use an egg donor.
Her meant the couple had been trying to conceive for almost 10 years. They had considered everything from adopting a child from China, to finding an unregistered donor on a Facebook group, or going to Hawaii for a fresh donor egg transfer.
In 2021 they decided to use an egg donor but their clinic did not offer donor eggs, and they felt there wasn’t enough time to find a donor via friends or online donor groups, so they approached an international egg bank.
But once Anna filtered the profiles for donors who would donate under the requirements of Australian law, there was only one Asian donor to choose from.
"It was at least six months to a year of me thinking, 'Are there any other ways that we could possibly get an Asian donor?'"
"'What am I going to be letting go of if we can't have a baby that's Asian?' And for me, it was more about the cultural side of things," Anna says.
She returned to the international egg bank and started looking for a donor with dark features instead — someone she thought she could be friends with — when she came across a woman who felt right.
"I just knew straight away that that was the person that I should choose," she says with a tear in her eye.
She and her husband got a loan of $30,000 to buy the eggs from the international egg bank.
"But then my daughter was born with blue eyes, so it's quite obvious that you've got a very white-looking child … Asian people in particular really get very confused," she says.
Anna is now teaching her daughter about her Chinese culture - feeding her (Chinese rice porridge) early on - and considering how she can teach her about her donor's Middle Eastern heritage.
IVF Australia says it can be hard to encourage Australian men to donate sperm. Credit: Peter Dazeley/Getty Images
Donating sperm and eggs can be an arduous task in Australia
Sperm and eggs are somewhat an unpredictable stock. Unlike in the United States, it's illegal to buy or sell sperm and eggs in Australia. All local egg and sperm donations must be exactly that — donations. And the process is extensive; every donor must attend a counselling session and have health tests and genetic screening.
Each jurisdiction also implements family limits on each donor — a donor in NSW can donate to five families (and that count includes their own family) whereas a donor in South Australia can donate to 10.
Last year, the Victorian Government launched a public sperm and egg bank to 'give more Victorians the chance to start a family'. The Feed has spoken with one Victorian parent who crossed the border into NSW to get around Victoria's restrictions on international donors — they now have a baby.
"We've been advertising trying to encourage [local] donors to come along to donate sperm," says Dr Frank Quinn of IVF Australia, an IVF company.
"But it's hard to get men to come along and donate. Unfortunately, this has been an ongoing problem for the last 20 years."
While there is a shortage of sperm donors, there are far fewer egg donors, and the process of egg donation is far more arduous — including weeks of injected hormones and day surgery.
"We don't have a bank of women willing to go through two weeks of injections and an anaesthetic to collect eggs," Quinn said.
"So getting an egg donor is very difficult. And it does put a lot of pressure back on the intending parents to find someone to donate that egg."
Some IVF companies partner with international cryobanks to provide clients more donor options, but donors must still abide by Australian requirements, including consenting to being contacted by any offspring at 18. And international donor sperm and eggs can be significantly more expensive than using local donations.
The requirements of egg donation can be extensive, including two-weeks worth of injections, day surgery, counselling and health screenings. Source: Getty / Maskot
Sperm donor options can change on a "daily basis"
Brooke Bramley from City Fertility says the company doesn't have a shortage of sperm donors as they recruit nationally. At the time of writing, City Fertility had 133 local donors nationally — almost half were Caucasian. Bramley thinks clients expect to see hundreds of sperm donors on the website, similar to when they Google an American donor bank.
She says they can be disappointed when they filter the donor profiles for their requirements and "they come down to maybe five donors that are available for them in their state."
"We see the biggest demand for Caucasian donors — particularly to sperm and also for eggs. But … we do have a need for Indian egg donors and we don't have any — I've probably got about 15 patients who are ready to go to reserve an Indian donor."
And donors options can "change on a daily basis" as patients cycle through rounds of fertility treatment. If a patient has an unsuccessful IVF cycle with donor sperm, the donor’s profile might be automatically added back to the platform if they had previously reached they family limit.
"It's important for us to educate our patients that we can't pay donors to donate in Australia, and we have a smaller population than they do in the States.
Some specialists think paying donors could help fix the donor shortage — so why don’t we?
"We get a lot of phone calls saying, can I get paid [to donate sperm]?" Bramley says.
"And as soon as we say 'no', they drop off."
Janie Marsden, general manager of Demeter Fertility, thinks the prevention of payment is one reason why there are so few local donors. She believes it's reasonable to pay donors for their tissue, especially as the assessment process is extremely rigorous.
"If [the donor] will still have to go through the counselling and understand the implications of [donating] they still have to go through the genetic screening ... why not?" she says.
A federal parliamentary inquiry into donor conception published in 2011 noted that paying donors could have "a potential negative impact on a donor-conceived child or person to know that their donor was paid for a donation".
Bramley from City Fertility says some donors start the process but never complete it because they're dismayed by their identity being released to the donor-conceived children at 18.
"So maybe we need to look at reminding people that they have no legal or financial responsibility to donor-conceived children," she says.
"And just because your ID is released to donor-conceived kids at 18 doesn't mean that you have to have a relationship with these donor-conceived children."
Magdeline Parlevliet and her husband went through several rounds of IVF before they joined the waitlist for a donor embryo. Credit: Supplied
Hard decisions about embryo donations
Magdeline Parlevliet and her husband had done 14 rounds of IVF by the time she birthed their baby girl, whose embryo was donated via an IVF clinic.
During their journey the couple concluded that a genetic link wasn't vital to their role as prospective parents. They joined a waitlist to receive a donor embryo and were required to specify the ethnicities they were comfortable accepting a donor embryo from.
"It's the antithesis to how I go about in my daily life," she says.
"I don't seek to exclude, I seek to include and be inclusive."
She says the pair spent time examining their social contacts, their ethnicity and cultural backgrounds [Southeast Asian and European Australian] to consider what they could provide if they did not share their cultural background with the child.
"It really drove sharp focus as to who we are, what our values are, and what we could do justice by for our future child," she say.
"It was hard. It took a long time."
Roughly six months later, they received an email telling them they had four embryos to choose from four different couples.
"[I’m] very thankful to all the people donating, I don't think I could ever thank them enough," says Magdeline of the donors.
"I really hope we're able to meet and thank them in person one day."
