Sperm Donor Selection Helpful Hints

Things to consider when looking over donor information

Photo Matching

We offer a one time free photo matching service!

You submit the photos and we will match physical facial features to our donors. We request that you submit two color photographs for optimum matching, a full face close up without sunglasses or hat and one close up facial profile. As most of our donors are in their twenties, a photo of the person you submit for matching at a similar age works best if available. If you want us to match to multiple individuals, only the first match is free, with each additional match at $20. You must be registered (have your required client paperwork on file) with us prior to having photo match work done for you. (There is no charge or obligation for registration)

You can submit photos with your initial client paperwork, or by mail or email at anytime. If emailing photos, we prefer to receive JPEG or GIF files, but can work with most formats. (We will provide one additional free photo match if more than six months has passed since your initial free match as donor selection changes considerably.)

Family Longevity and Cause of Death

Donors do provide age and/or age of death information for their entire direct family back through grandparents so that you can consider their longevity and ultimate cause of death. (Unfortunately, everyone has to have one.) In general, you want to avoid donors that may have family histories of having some health ailment (especially at an early age) that also runs in your family as well. Some of this information requires a bit of interpretation. Having a donor that has someone in the family that shows a cause of death to be cancer is not necessarily worse or better than a donors family that does not. If the family member has cancer at an advanced age as opposed to someone that has the same problem in midlife or an early age, well those situations are not of equal concern. One should have life expectancy data for each generation to better evaluate that information. The following information was taken from the US National Vital Statistics System.

In general this data shows that women outlive men and that each successive generation has had a higher life expectancy than the previous one. If a donors maternal grandmother was born in the 1920 to 1940 date range and she died at age 55, she would have died earlier than was the expected average for a woman, but if she died of any cause at an age above 60.9 years she would have outlived the average of her similar generation females. If a donors grandfather died of a heart attack at 65 and didn't have a history of heart disease, then he really died of old age related heart failure, and does not indicate that the family has a history of heart problems.

Physical Characteristics

Most clients find this information to be at least part of the consideration, if not the most important part in selecting a donor to use whether the client is trying to match a spouse or not. Ethnic background, basic body build, (height & weight), eye and hair color are readily accessible and useful. The donor listing has a search function to quickly access only those donors that meet a clients certain basic criteria in these aspects. It can be very useful to know some basic genetics when selecting a donor based on eye and hair color.
Certain pigmentations are either dominant or recessive, and only by looking back through the donors family history can one get more of a feel for what characteristics may be obtained through the use of a donor. A donor with brown hair could be carrying a recessive gene(carrier) for blond hair that could be expressed as blond hair in a child if the mother was also a carrier. A donor with brown eyes (dominant) could father a child with blue eyes if he were heterozygous.

The height of the donor and his parents and/or siblings can give one a general expectation of family growth patterns, but once again you can't count on a child growing to 6'6" just because the donor was. You can reasonably assume that the probability of the donor child growing to a comparable height is higher than the odds of him being of shorter stature than the average.
Demand for shorter donors is much less than it is for taller donors. In general, taller is seen as a desirable trait. As a result of this, most donor banks lean more towards recruiting what the customers want, which is taller donors.

Donor weight can be important or less so just like any physical parameter. We do not recruit donors that have an obvious mormid obesity problem or appear extremely obese for their build. With young men there can be a real difference in body build due to muscle mass differences and vary from being pretty thin to muscle man. The general population in the US is heavier now than ever before, so we do accept men carrying a bit of extra body weight if they are otherwise healthy, pass the donor physical, and don't show a major weight problem throughout their family and family history that would indicate a genetically linked weight problem. .

Blood Type Consideration of the donors blood type can be of high importance or of almost no importance.Please follow this link to additional information on blood type.

Identity---"known donors"

Donor identity can be extremely important to some clients, while of little or even no concern to others. Some clients feel that they have a right to know everything about a donor including their identity before they use them, some would like the donor child to have access to the donor when the child becomes an adult, while others wish the donor to be as anonymous as possible, and to keep the use of a donor a well guarded family secret. All of these positions are understandable and reasonable depending upon circumstances and the ability of the parties involved to understand and deal with the possible consequences of knowing or not knowing donor information. At the very least, we think most everyone agrees that having a basic medical-family health background on a donor can be very helpful, so that information is always available on all donors.

Donors are on the other side of this equation. When a donor completes information for participation in our program, we ask the potential donor many questions regarding how he feels about releasing his information to recipients of his donations. These questions are meant to reveal the donors attitude towards future contact by recipients and the progeny produced through the use of his donations. In order to recruit donors with the highest quality sperm, we target younger men with our donor advertising. Most of our donors are college aged, 18-26 years old, and none are recruited above the age of 35. Many donors have yet to find or marry spouses and or establish families of their own. As a donor in this age group, most have no idea how a future spouse, child, or other family member may react to the knowledge that the donor may have unknown children in the world produced through what the donor saw as his generous act of donation years ago. Many donors participate in the program for the money while attending school, many because they have known someone with a fertility problem, some because it just seems like the generous thing to do. No donor can actually know what the implications of his participation can be to him or his family in the future, so the act of donation is indeed a very, very generous act, even with the minimal monetary reward.

Just as our clients have many different positions on donor identity release, so do the donors themselves. Many donors want total anonymity, and indeed, many donors would not ever participate without this level of security. This option of anonymous participation, if unavailable, would shrink the donor selection pool very considerably. Other donors may be open to the idea of revealing their identity. Revealing ones identity to recipients can be very satisfying for both parties when reasonable demands for information are involved and left at that, or it can turn into a nightmare if either party would make unwelcome contact or demands from the other. In some ways, donor identity release can be a can of worms. Once opened, there is no way to stop the information from being provided to others that may have other than reasonable motivations and actions. So even though we occasionally have donors that are open to release of their identity at any time, the actual release of this information is restricted by NW Andrology & Cryobank to the children produced through the use of their donations once the children have reached legal age. This is currently termed "known donor", or "identity release" donor by many in the donor industry. Because a donors' personal situation will indeed change over the years, there can be changes in the donors attitude and openness to future contact. In general, past experience has shown that many donors become more open to contact with children as they age and become more mature, established, and stable in their own lives. Of course there can be no guarantees that a donor will even be alive or available for contact 20 years into the future.

In order for a legal aged donor child to initiate possible contact with their donor, they must approach NW Andrology & Cryobank with the donor ID number and other information that can be used to authenticate the request. We are not able to reveal information in client charts to third parties for any reason unless specifically authorized to do so, so we would be unable to refer to charts to reveal donors ordered by their parents. The cryobank will at that time make a reasonable search for the donor, and if the donor is found, to then inform the donor of the contact. At that time the donor would then have the option of reciprocation to that contact and to choose the level of contact that he is comfortable with at that time. If the donor can't be easily found, the donor produced child would have the option of paying for a more exhaustive professional search for donor contact information, but this search would not be guaranteed in any way and would still be run by NW Andrology & Cryobank as the third party.