Trip Report - Sperm Donation Clinic

My alarm goes off and my beside table shudders as I slam down hard on snooze. Fuck. Sleep. Need, wait what. What time is it?

Its 6.40am, why am I awake this early?

Oh yea I have an appointment to jack off into a cup at 8.00am.

The traffic is eerily quiet yet unsurprisingly so due to the early hour, I divert from my normal route and venture onto the southern. Exiting at Greenlane I Iocate my destination and pull into their carpark.

I am ten minutes early so I sit and listen to some music, I’m a little nervous as a million and one thoughts fly through my head. What if they find out I’m infertile after the donation? What if I can’t perform? What the fuck is wrong with you? it’s just jacking off, ofcourse you can perform.

Its time; I go and wait at reception.

I look out of place, I’m 25 and in business attire. Everyone else is either in a nurses uniform or over 40 and dressed casually.

I’m greeted with a smile by the chief coordinator of sperm, Yolanda.

“That’s funny” I think to myself, I thought that’s what my testicles were for?
Perhaps I should issue them business cards with that title, ofcourse that would also involve paying them salary.

She launches into an introductory spiel and I’m immediately wishing I had brought a Dictaphone.

She flashes document after document under my eyes explaining what each is for.

· Information on the HART act: the what?

· Sperm donor information: 2 pages explaining how other people will use your jizz to make kids, they are grateful for this, the kids will want to know about you, awesome.

· Non identifying information: Fill out this form about yourself so the family and kid can know more about you.

· Permission to donate: Sign this form to sign away your precious man juice.

She then proceeds to detail the general timeline for the whole process (no not that process), all and all it can take up to six months as you are required to first make the initial donation. They then test this to make sure your boys can survive carbon freezing.

Apparently not all donations can survive the freezing process and they have to turn away half of all potential donors despite having a two year waiting list of childless unhappy parents.

Sperm donations in New Zealand are purely that, donations.

Because of the laws surrounding the donation and artificial insemination process the donations cannot be paid for. You are reimbursed for any travel costs you made to get to the clinic but after that it all comes from the goodness of your heart or urethra if you are looking at it figuratively.

I agree with this in a way, by not paying people for their sperm you are culling those who would donate for the wrong reasons and by that I mostly mean crack addicts.

I myself decided to donate because I wanted to help other people and at this point in my life; wasn’t entirely sure if I would ever have kids of my own.

At least this way I would be ensuring my base natural instinct of breeding would be satisfied while helping others at the same time.

She details the rest of the timeline, if my boys survive the freezing they will require me to take a blood test to ensure I don’t have AIDs, other STDS or any hereditary diseases such as Cystic Fibrosis. I would also need to attend a full doctors physical examination as well as a counselling session. If I pass all of those tests they will then proceed to request additional samples or “get banking”.

I queried her on the use of the word “bank” and she laughed.

“Well I think they should replace the ‘b’ with a ‘w’ but it’s just what we use to refer to the procedure”

Yes, banking indeed.

Amongst the papers she gave me before setting us off down the hall was my “donation vessel”.

In preparation for this service I had held out for 5 days as recommended by their website and looking at that thing the first thing I thought was “lady I’m going to need at least two of these”.

She lead me to a room marked “Room 1”, I immediately thought of 1984 but realised that Room 101 probably didn’t contain dirty magazines and lotion.

She made sure to remind me to make sure the door was shut properly and locked before leaving me to my own devices.

After shutting the door and locking it, I took in my surroundings.

A plush leather lazy boy sat at the opposite side of the room, I wonder if they chose leather because it would be marginally easier to clean semen from. I set my papers and “cup” down on the table and brought out the “material” I had been given to work with. There were five magazines in total; one of each non-descript playboy, penthouse and some other one. Standard stock. Young flesh, perky breasts etc etc. The token gay magazine, young naked guys looking unenthusiastically like they didn’t want to be there. Then the last one made me wonder who the fuck had requested it. It was a cross between fat chicks and older women. Basically if Rosie O’Donnel did porn. Yea not pretty.

I wont go into too much detail, basically set about my business trying not to think about how many other bare asses had sat in the exact same chair doing the exact same thing I was doing at that moment in time.

And despite being in a weird little room somewhere in Greenlane where everyone in the building knew exactly what I was doing at that point in time, it was surprisingly normal.

The only difficulty came (no pun intended) when the actual “finish” approached. I suddenly realised how small the container was.
“Oh Fuck, how am I going to aim it in ther…shit too late”

This momentary bout of confusion ensured I didn’t quite finish properly and did not produce as much as I had thought I would. I hope this did not hamper my boys chances. After all; safety in numbers.

I took the container back to the desk where she thanked me and handed me more papers and another vessel for a urine test to be completed at the same time as the blood tests. However I would not need to take these tests if my boys did not survive their magical trip to Antarctica. She would call me the next day with the results and would keep me updated there after.

As I drove home I couldn’t help but contemplate what I had just done. If all went well, that little “contribution” I just made could some day turn into children. I wondered around the complexities of conception.
Is life created and influenced by what the individuals were thinking about at the time of conception? If so; was the fact that I was thinking about something possibly perverted going to mean the resulting kids would be messed up?

The next morning went as normal, no call and I wasn’t really anxiously watching my phone, though I was a little worried that Id be told some really bad news. Something along the lines of “you are completely infertile but thanks for trying anyway”.

As it was I got the call at work, at about 4pm.

She started with “its all good news, your specimen passed all of our tests and with flying colours”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes, here is what we normally look for…”

She then proceeded to rattle of a bunch of statistics which were all very surprising to hear, I had no idea my guys were that good, I’ve never been that good at anything in my life. I later asked her to email me the results so I could post them in this article and here they are below:

FA Semen analysis Fez

Date 28/10/2008

Time to analysis 40min

Sample collected by: Masturbation

All ejaculate collected: Yes

Consent for partner to receive results: No

Number of days since last ejaculation:5

AnalystNF
Viscosity 2(1-4) 2

Volume 2.1 ml > 2

Sperm conc 77 M/ml > 20

Total motility 61 %

Rapid (a) 41 % a > 25%

Slow (b) 19 % or a+b > 50%

Non-prog (c) 1 %

Conc motile 47 M/ml

Total # motile 98 M > 20

The most surprising statistic there is the last one, notice the “>20”.

This means that the minimum they look for is 20 million.

I had 98.


I can only assume this means that I can get women pregnant simply by sneezing on them

(a doctor friend has recently disproven this theory but I dont believe him).

So I took my sheet of paper and my cup full of urine to a med lab in Epsom where a nice old lady took my arm and proceeded to pump a staggering amount of blood out of me.

I had taken blood tests before as a matter of course when about to sleep with a new partner: but this was different. At one point I looked over to find some 8 or 9 vials full of my blood and another larger currently being filled.

I suddenly felt very woozy.

The next point of the process involved a visit to the doctor for a health check.
I thought this meant a free physical and was looking forward to it since hey, Doctors are expensive.
I had arranged the best appointment I could in terms of minimum time off work, 9am on a Thursday morning. It was interesting telling my Boss why I had a doctor’s appointment, I decided to be honest and up front since he is a cool boss and when I told him I was rewarded with an “Awesome! How much do you get paid?”

Seems most people I tell ask that question.

Getting there early again I waited in the car reading the information documents given to me a few weeks earlier.

The HART Act turns out to be the legal guidelines surrounding the act of sperm donation and conception via donation.
It all seemed pretty straightforward to me, the only thing that really worried me was the excerpt stating that I needed to disclose any and all knowledge of my own and family history of medical complications otherwise a future child could sue me for damages. I queried this during my visit with the Doctor and they told me not to worry, so long as I did not outright deny having something that I knew that I did have then I would be ok.

For those of you wondering about the legal complications surrounding the kid(s) being able to find out about me:

Parents/Guardians may request information (including identifying information) from Fertility Associates about the donor, which we are required to provide under the HART Act, when their children are aged under 18 years.

Once a person conceived from donor gametes is aged 18 years or more the parents/guardians are no longer able to request information about the donor – this is up to that person themselves to pursue.

Other interesting facts about accompanying information and agreements.

Once donated, stored sperm cannot later be claimed for my own use.

I could also choose who is able to use my sperm and who is not.
This list of “who can” and “who cant” is laid out as such:

· Heterosexual couples

· Single women

· Lesbian couples

· Overseas patients

I thought about saying no to lesbians because I still felt a little bitter about the first girl I had ever loved whom ended up dumping me rather painfully for another woman but in the end decided that it wouldn’t be very fair or mature of me to discriminate against all lesbians because of one particularly evil one.

Oh and another interesting note:

I acknowledge that the Ethics Committee on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ECART) states that if I die, my stored sperm should still be available to any women who already have a child from the use of my sperm and who wish to try for another child.

Oh your Dad? Yea he died before you were born. Nay conceived even! So technically your mum is a necrophelliac, now run along Jimmy!

Then there was the personal identification form; believe it or not answering some of these questions was harder than answering some short answer questions on a university Pysch exam.

I had to weigh up exactly how specific I wanted to be yet also wanting to hold something back in case I somehow ended up to be some famous person some day and had a bunch of kids tracking me down looking for favours. In the end I decided to go open, honest and as specific as possible. Me become famous? Yea right.

Here are what some of the questions were like:

“How do you get on with people? (E.g. parents, friends, work mates, etc.)”

Erm ok I guess? Not really sure how they expected people to answer this one.

“Oh everybody hates me but its cool they can all go to hell because I live in a basement with pieces of their hair and flesh”

“Donor children are interested in you as a child. Please describe what sort of child you were, e.g. interests, activities, sports, personality, etc. How would your parents describe you as a child?”

“I routinely trapped small animals and performed experiments on them involving vinegar and baking powder, other than that I mostly kept to myself”

But in all honesty I answered the questions as best I could, I guess in the end I probably sounded very very boring. I got my mum to help me out on that last one. She said, “Well you were a quiet child, very very quiet, no trouble at all”. Yea, treat. I guess that whoever reads my information form is going to jump at that.

When it came time to go in I gathered my forms and headed toward the building.

The doctor who saw me was a very kind looking man who reminded me a lot of my high school guidance counsellor not only in looks but in quirks of advice.

The “physical” actually only involved clarifying my complete medical history by going over a list of medical conditions while answering a few questions. I did not understand what some of these were and when I did not he would explain it in simple laymen’s terms.

For example, some weird condition where you have more than one urethra he described as “being a real problem when you are a kid at primary school because you can’t pee up the wall like the other kids can”.

Somehow I think not being able to pee the highest up the wall would be the least of the kids worries.

I let him know about my families medical history; a few cases of Cancer here and there, some late-in-life diabetes and parkinsons but other than that all was hunky dory.

I seemed to pass his tests and was a little disappointed to discover I was not actually going to get the full deal.

“Well you can get on the table if you really want but this was only about making sure you were clear on your personal and family medical history, unless you were physically looking ill I wasn’t going to actually examine you”

Oh ok then.

It was a good exerience though, he was a really nice guy and kept thanking me profusely for doing what I was doing as it would make a few if not more families very happy.

With that out of the way the next appointment I had was with the clinic counsellor so that I could be cleared of my sanity and also made abundantly clear of the extent of the seriousness of what I was doing.

This occurred a week later at 6.45 on a Thursday night. My counsellor’s name was Leena. We started out with idle chitchat, and then the first thing she asked was my motivation for wanting to do this. I’m pretty used to people asking me this so I let loose with my usual:

“Well I’m not sure if I will ever have kids of my own some day and I wanted to help someone else out at the same time”

She then enquired as to why felt I may never have kids of my own, to which I explained my history of luck with women which is to say; not much at all.

She then asked about my personal life.

“Do you have a girlfriend or partner?”

No

“If you did have one or eventually obtained one and they were not happy with your donating, you are able to stop this process at any point, its up to you”

If I had a partner that felt that they could control or tell me what to do in that instance of my life then I wouldn’t want to be with them.

“Fair enough”.

She was sympathetic the whole way through my rants and crack pot theories on why I felt I could probably never marry a New Zealand woman. She also seemed to be genuinely surprised and impressed at my ability to maintain such a positive mental state given all that I have been through. After talking for half an hour she said she had run out of questions so I began asking about the general process of donating and its complexities.

Who would typically be using my donations?

“The majority of people that use our services are single women who have reached that age where they feel time is running out and who now face the uncertainty of never meeting a husband. Others are lesbian couples and heterosexual couples where the man cannot conceive for whatever reason. But the majority are single mothers to be.”

Has anyone ever been turned away at this point in the process? Have you ever determined that someone is unfit for being a donor while assessing them via a counselling such as this?

“Yes, we do get the occasional person we have to turn away. There have been some who appeared to want to claim responsibility for the child after birth and there were those who did not appear to have enough human social interaction in their life and were using this for a sort of ‘reaching out’”.

So what about me? Do I pass?

“[laughs]yes you are fine”

I didn’t really have any other questions after that so we just chatted about me for a bit. Before I knew it we had been there for well over an hour and I’m pretty sure she was starting to second-guess her previous answer to my “Do I Pass?” question.

It was time to go.

Surprisingly this wasn’t to be my only counselling session, I had one more compulsory one later on in the process “after all the banking has been completed” to be certain I was still sure about wanting to go through with this and my situation had not changed.

A week later I got the call from Yolanda; I had passed all the tests and it was time to begin “banking again”.

Over the next month or so I would become regularly acquainted with a small room and equally small plastic cup. I wondered if I should enter into some sort of pre-nuptial agreement.