Thursday, March 28, 2024

There’s a Shortage of Black Male Sperm Donors in America | Video

sperm donors needed
 Urologist or fertility specialist holds enlarged sperm model /Istock

*The Black sperm donor shortage in America is forcing Black women hoping to start a family to choose a donor of another race.

According to The Washington Post, “Black sperm donors represent less than 2 percent of all sperm donors at the country’s four largest cryobanks,” the publication writes. The severe shortage is forcing Black women who need donor sperm to conceive to make a tough decision: raise a biracial child from donor sperm of another race or buy sperm from male friends or the Black market. 

Additionally, the reasons for the shortage range starts with the selection process “that demands a three-generation medical history (which may be challenging for Black men who may not have access to quality health care) and excludes donors with felony convictions; mistrust of the medical profession by Black men because of a legacy of historical discrimination,” per The Washington Post. 

“Over the years, we have spoken to African American fraternities and student organizations to try to increase our number of applicants. This has not been very successful,” said California Crybank’s chief medical officer Jaime Shamonki.

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Shamonki added: “It’s proven to be challenging to hit the right tone and appeal to these donors rather than further alienate them.”

“We continue to work hard to recruit more Black donors,” Morgan Barker, senior marketing manager at Fairfax Cryobank, said in an emailed statement via The Post. “There are several in the pipeline who should be available at the beginning of next year and a few more are in the screening process.”

Single women and same-sex couples of all racial groups are seeking sperm donors to start a family. The main issue for sperm banks is that the fertility industry has primarily been marketed to White people. This has proven to be quite challenging in efforts to recruit young Black male professionals to be potential donors. 

“If you went to any website for any fertility clinic in the United States before 2020, you actually very rarely saw any evidence of people who just by sight looked like a person of color on their websites, and there were no babies of color,” said Cindy Duke, a reproductive endocrinologist and virologist in Las Vegas. “There wasn’t much thought given that there may actually be a Black intended single mom or a Black same-sex female couple that’s in need of a Black donor,” Duke said.

During the COVID pandemic, Cryobanks reported an increase in the number of Black women seeking their services but the lack of Black donors has made the experience quite numbing.

“It has been drilled into their psyche that Black men are not good fathers, they’re absent, they don’t go to the doctor, and now you turn around and tell them that they should now trust the medical industry with their genetics, and help create children they aren’t going to see. That’s a big obstacle,” said Regina Townsend, founder of the Broken Brown Egg, an infertility nonprofit organization for Black women.

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