A Needless Sperm Shortage

It takes real political ineptitude to create a shortage of something many (most?) men are more than willing to give away for free.

Government plans to make fertility treatment more accessible to single women and lesbian couples are likely to be ineffective because of a severe shortage of sperm donors, a leading fertility expert has told the Guardian.

[...]

Bill Ledger, who runs a fertility clinic in Sheffield, said the government's proposals were laudable but unlikely to be effective because of legal changes in April that removed the status of anonymity from sperm donors. Under the new law, any child born from donor sperm can request to know the identity of their biological father when they turn 18.

"We are seeing longer and longer waiting lists because of the loss of anonymity," Prof Ledger said. "The situation has become so bad, that we are looking at importing anonymous sperm from abroad."

Any fool with an elementary understanding of market forces could have seen this coming from a mile off, but the Labour Party is apparently stocked with fools who lack even that much understanding of how the world works. Worse yet, they're on the verge of compounding their initial error with another.

The proposals, which are the result of a Department of Health review to bring the 1990 HFEA Act up to date, will also outline plans to clamp down on internet websites such as Man Not Included and SpermDirect offering courier services that deliver fresh sperm samples directly to women's homes.

The websites have thrived partly because the change in anonymity law applies only to sperm that is frozen and stored, allowing donors of fresh sperm to retain their anonymity. Many fertility specialists have deep reservations about sperm-by-post websites, arguing that they do not have strict enough controls in place to screen donor sperm for diseases such as HIV.

Professor Ledger argues that the websites should be regulated to ensure they provide a safe service but not banned outright. "Using these services has got to be a step better than asking some half-drunk man to have unprotected sex, which is presumably what happens otherwise," he said.

The Department of Health confirmed it was keen to rein in websites offering sperm. "There's an issue with the websites because they're a loophole and that's what we want to clamp down on. The original HFEA Act was drawn up before the internet was being used to offer services like this," a spokeswoman said.

Why even bother to regulate them at all, when it's both easy and completely legal for any half-presentable woman to walk into a pub and find several men willing to give her the goods under condition of anonymity, even simultaneously if she wants? If "safety" is such a concern, why not make it a crime for men to ejaculate without condoms after a random hook-up? All this rubbish about "safety" is nothing more than a cover for the clinics' desire to limit competition and a regulator's desire to expand its empire, and it wouldn't even have been necessary to begin with if Labour hadn't been boneheaded enough to insist on a child's "right" to know its biological father - a "right" perhaps 1 in 10 of all British children conceived the normal way already lack. Talk about epicycles on epicycles!