The Days of Anonymous Sperm Are Over

My life choice to become a serious journalist has led me here, to a sperm concierge service in New York City. In 2024, anonymous sperm is out—and in are coming companies like The Seed Scout, which rigorously vet the credentials of donors before pairing them with couples. 

Lawyer Danielle Winston and her wife, pediatrician Paige Kennedy-Winston, founded The Seed Scout after going through the traditional sperm bank process themselves and surmising that what they experienced first-hand would likely lead to generational problems for donor-conceived children, their parents, and their offspring.

What makes The Seed Scout different is that it acts as a matchmaking service between mostly (though not exclusively) queer donors and recipients.” “Gay men still can’t donate to most sperm banks,” explains Danielle, “which is just a drop in the bucket of the discriminatory practices sperm banks are engaged in.”

I first heard about the company a while back. It enjoys a funny ubiquity among gay men in New York City. Over the last several months, it’s DM’d a bunch of my gay friends on Instagram, so I was almost hurt that I had to seek them out myself. Eighty percent of Seed Scout donors are gay, a crucial counterbalance to traditional sperm banks, which still routinely bar gay donors as a matter of outdated, discriminatory policy.

Oh, and there’s one other reason that could explain The Seed Scout’s popularity among NYC’s gay community: You can make up to $15,000 donating your sperm to it.

For each “match” made between a donor and recipient family, the donor receives $5,000. Unlike traditional sperm banks—where donors can theoretically produce hundreds of offspring from a single sample—the number of recipient families is capped at three.

But it’s not as easy as just rocking up, firing off into a cup, and leaving with a wad of cash. The Seed Scout process is decidedly more rigorous and intimate than in traditional sperm donation. The first portion is a probing Q&A session on my physical and mental health.

Do I have any history of heart disease on my mom’s side? What about my paternal grandmother’s pancreatic cancer? When did she die? Do you have any history of diabetes, substance abuse, or mood and mental health disorders, I am asked—“besides the usual anxiety we all have?” I offer my mother’s occasional eczema as an incorrect example of an autoimmune condition in the family. 

Next comes the section of the questionnaire relating to my life and the decisions that I have made over the course of it.

What sports did you play in middle and high school? I plumb the depths of my mind for athletic achievements, which are few and far between. I take a moment to wonder whether my biological offspring will inherit my poor hand-eye coordination.

It is a pleasure being interviewed by Danielle. She is warm, intelligent, and fiercely passionate about her work. In truth, our back-and-forth felt far more personal than interrogative. There were gentle inquiries into what I wanted to get out of the process, whether I understood how I would be helping families, and what I’d need to provide as a potential donor (besides my seed). I was most encouraged by the wealth of Instagram testimonials she showed me; handsome gay guys thrilled to share their stories and discuss the rapports they’d built with donor families.

Following the Q&A is a genetics test, which will arrive at my house in the coming weeks. I will spit in a test tube and find out if I have any recessive carrier genes. This is to prevent the nightmare scenarios that occur too often with traditional donor conception. “We sometimes find [from traditional sperm banks] a donor pod of dozens of half-siblings with life-shortening conditions,” I am told. Donor information is entirely confidential; without the ability to access their genetic origins, many donor-conceived people spend their lives investigating their health, a devastating outcome of an industry that’s gone improperly unregulated for over 50 years.

After this, comes the social part of the initiation process.

Once a “donor profile” is generated for you, and the potential family “matches” with your profile, you can either meet up with the family in person or convene on a series of video calls.

The recipient family will then hire you a lawyer and a therapist, the latter of which you’re mandated to meet with twice to make sure you’d definitely like to go through with all this. It’s an involved process, one that many donors proffer glowing testimonials of on their pages: effusive accounts of love for the recipient families and, in response, happy families with babies that they understand far better than ones that emerge from some unknowable sperm-tank ether. When the child is born, donors are expected to, at the very least, give the birth parents yearly health updates. These can be as short as a text from the donor but rarely are; I get the sense that typical Seed Scout donors want their progeny to be happy and healthy.

All this makes me wonder what could preclude someone from making the cut.

“What would get me axed from making a donation to The Seed Scout?” I ask Danielle.

“I’ll give you an example. A guy applied to us… His sperm count and health were largely good. Then we looked up his Instagram and found hate speech and rifles in like, six of his photos.”

Thankfully, this is a bar I feel confident of clearing.

With myriad horrific instances of fertility fraud, and reports of donor facilities with outdated racial and sexual criteria (one sperm bank in the Midwest, Laura tells me, once categorized a mixed-race donor as “Mulatto”) the time feels ripe for trad sperm bank practices to improve.

What Danielle and Paige offer is a new frontier (albeit an expensive one) for donor-conceived children, and families who want what the vast majority of us want for our kids: the absolute best.

Follow Matthew on Instagram @matthersky