Advocates: Sperm bank industry lacks oversight
You might think that sperm
banks are regulated like your doctor’s office. But there is actually limited government
oversight, which some consumers say has led to unpleasant surprises and
heartache.
Aaron and Sarah Robertson.
High school sweethearts Sarah
Robertson and her husband, Aaron, had always planned to have children. But in
2004, at the age of 29, Aaron suffered a fatal stroke.
“He was the best
husband that any woman could ever want,” Robertson said.
As he lay
dying in the hospital, Robertson made the decision to harvest some of his
sperm. “I was thinking
that there is a very good chance that my husband is going to die,” she
told correspondent Anna Werner. “But I’ll have this, and I can have a
child that will have his likeness, or his laugh to bring with me, and that gave us
all so much comfort and hope.”
She selected a clinic in the Los Angeles area to
freeze six vials of Aaron’s sperm. But when she was finally ready to have a
baby, in 2014, she got a shock.
She said the clinic, which
had changed hands and was now known as Reproductive Fertility Center, couldn’t
find the frozen sperm. All six vials
were gone — and with them, her hope for a baby from her husband.
“It was a like a
nightmare,” she said. “Like, how could this be happening?”
Robertson has filed a
lawsuit. Hers joins legal action taken
against other sperm banks.
Several families have
sued a Georgia-based company over its sales of sperm from a donor it claimed
was a neuroscientist, but who court papers allege was schizophrenic and did not
even have a college degree.
“When you have a
multibillion dollar industry with no oversight, what could possibly go wrong?”
said Wendy Kramer, who runs the Donor Sibling Registry, a group that connects
donors and their genetic family members. “What
we’ve come to realize is that these sperm banks are sperm sellers, first and
foremost. They’re a money-making business.”
FDA regulations only require testing for eight diseases. No one regulates
how sperm banks keep track of biological materials, or do genetic testing or
other vetting of donors.
“Without regulation,
without anybody watching, the sperm banks can basically say they test for
whatever they want to say.”
Some sperm banks disagree: California Cryobank, one of the country’s
largest, says it performs expensive genetic tests and rejects many potential
donors.
It
told CBS News, “To accuse the industry of not caring about the well-being
of the individuals we are servicing is simply illogical.”
But even Albert Anouna,
who runs the New Jersey-based sperm bank Biogenetics Corporation?, told CBS News,
“Buyer beware. That’s what I talk about all the time.”
Anouna says for his
sperm donors, he verifies college transcripts and does extended genetic and
health tests, nearly all of them voluntary. He says there is no requirement for
other sperm banks to do what Biogenetics does.
He says there is a need
for more regulation. “You can achieve that. It will take monumental
task on a national level,” he told Werner. “Because you have to
invite a lot of sperm banks and invest time in creating proper legislation.”
“Do you think they
want legislation?” Werner asked. “Do they want regulation?”
“I don’t know that,”
Anouna replied. “I may be the only one that welcomes that type of
oversight.”
Robertson says it’s
needed, because she has another worry — that the clinic may have given her
husband’s sperm to someone else, who may not know a piece of critical medical
information: that the stroke that killed
him was related to an inherited genetic disorder from which he suffered, called
marfan syndrome, something they had planned to test for before she got
pregnant.
“I lost my whole
future, for me everything that I had planned and my children that I was going
to have,” she said. “But almost worse than that is living and knowing
that there may be children out there that have this horrible disease and they don’t
know.”
The clinic she’s suing had
no comment.
Its attorney told CBS News
instead that the facts will come out through court proceedings.
And the attorneys for the
sperm bank sued in Georgia told us donors’ histories are provided by the donor
and “cannot be verified for accuracy.”
But they said, in addition to following FDA regulations,
the company tests for “common genetic conditions.”