What’s In A Number

Originally posted March 8, 2025

“How Many Successes Have You Had, and Do You Have a Limit?” –
 

That is one of the most common questions that I get, and also probably the most common reason that a certain class of recipients decides against working with me. As of this writing (March of 2025) I guess that I probably have, or have on the way, around 40 donor children. But I really do not know for sure. There have been many times that a recipient just tells me that she got a bfp. Hopefully all those times resulted in live births but unfortunately some chemical pregnancies/miscarriages are likely. Some of my recipients might secretly have been using multiple donors. Sadly, I also would not be shocked if occasionally the carrier had sex with a man behind her wife’s (who is likely my point of contact’s) back. So all those things would reduce my real count. On the other hand, there might have been times that I successfully donated where the recipient preferred to ghost rather inform me and I’m not super organized about tracking things in general.

So any count I have is at best approximate. That said, clearly I’ve had some successes, and will hopefully have many more in the future. That brings us to the question, do I have a limit to the number of children I will help produce? For that, the answer is an emphatic no, as it has always been. From my first donation to the most recent one, I have always been clear that I am an unlimited donor and recipients who desire a tiny sibling group should look elsewhere.

I’d like to point out some advantages and disadvantages of working with a prolific donor.

Advantages: A prolific donor is:

1) Not Infertile – If a man doesn’t have any recent successes there is simply no way to know if he is fertile. Yes you can do a semen analysis, but all that can tell you is whether there are motile sperm. Male fertility is not that well understood and there are guys with a lot of swimmers who still have poor fertility for reasons we don’t understand. For example, see the active debate on things like DNA Fragmentation. Ultimately the proof is the pudding , a man is not infertile if he has recently gotten someone pregnant and he might be if he has not. While you shouldn’t necessarily assume that a donor who has had a lot of successes is extremely fertile (you would need to know A LOT about both the number of times he tried as well as his recipients’ medical information to do that), at the very least you can be confident that he is not infertile.

2) Unlikely To Be Intrusive – Most recipients want their donor to have no role, or at most a relatively small one, in their child’s life. An over-involved donor is one of recipients’ greatest fears. I do not think this winds up being a common problem, but it is definitely a bigger risk for donors with only one or a few donor children versus those with many.

3) Not gonna flake – Men who have not donated before frequently get cold feet. They start to worry about child support payment or their girlfriend gets mad at them or they don’t realize that is often a marathon not a sprint.

4) Experienced with the process – Getting pregnant is not easy. If you are doing NI, e.g having sex, this might be a less important concern. Most men have some experience with intercourse but even there reading ovulation testing to figure timing takes practice. A new donor might have unrealistic expectations about how (un)likely pregnancy is in any one cycle and not be able to talk their recipients through initial disappointments.

And in AI (which is my only donation method) there is more of a learning curve. It’s not rocket science but practice does help with things like producing the sample, not mishandling or spilling it, and delivering it to the recipient in a usable form. Put simply, an experienced donor is less likely to fuck things up. This is especially the case with shipping where it is very unlikely to work if you do not use one of the few donors with prior shipping success.

5) More Likely to Have Testing – If a donor is only going to donate very occasionally, it might make sense for them to go through the (literal) pain-in-the-arm (and wallet) of getting regular STD tests. And it certainly would not make sense for them to do the type of comprehensive genetic screenings that I and other repeat donors have done.

6) Will Help with Siblings – A donor who is unconcerned about his count is less likely to get cold feet in the future and refuse donations for a sibling.

7) It’s Needed Due to Shortage – This last argument doesn’t so much apply to you as an individual but to society large. Some people argue that there should be a limit on the number of children any donor can produce, and some countries have (very misguided in my opinion) regulations to that effect. But there is a shortage of donors which is likely to grow over time along with the share of lesbians and SMBCs (single mothers by choice) in the population. Unfortunately few men want to be sperm donors. Personally I’ve tried to talk numerous friends into it and have had zero express interest. So without prolific donors with many donor children, there would simply not be enough donor sperm to go around. More ladies would be forced to choose between not having a child or engaging in unwanted sex. This donor shortage will persist until either donating becomes much more socially acceptable or advances in genetic engineering make designer sperm practicable.

So there are numerous advantages to using a donor with many prior successes. On the other hand there can be downsides as well.

Disadvantages: Real and Perceived

1) The Donor Is Less Likely to Be Involved with the Child – This is the flipside of #2 above. If you want your donor to be personally involved with the child than a less prolific donor who desires that kind of relationship is probably best (although there are some mass donors like Ari Nagel who seem fairly involved).

2) A Kid With A Bunch of Donor Siblings is Less Unique – I think some people feel that a child with a bunch of donor siblings is somehow less “special”. This is just silly though. Any child is unique whether they have none, or ten, or five hundred donor siblings. Every child is more unique than a snowflake, as every parent with full-sibling children knows. There are 8.4 million different combinations of chromosomes that a single man’s sperm will contain with the actual number of gene combinations in the hundreds of millions taking into account the gene crossing over that happens on most chromosomes. And that is just on the sperm side. Half of the nature (genetic components), and all of the nurture will be coming from the mother’s side. 

3) The Incest Thing – This is the thing that really bothers people, the idea that somehow two half-siblings are going to unknowingly have sex. And I get that there is a tremendous “ick” factor here. But the odds of this happening are extremely low and the worry is totally out of proportion to any actual risk or problem. The math is complicated (involving the so-called birthday paradox) but even if a donor had 1,000 children, the odds that ANY of those children would wind up with each other are only around 2%. Each child’s risk would be roughly 1 in 40,000. That is less than half of the chance of getting struck by lighting! And that is assuming that the kids do nothing to prevent this from happening. In reality, most donor kids these days are cognizant of their status and often know who their donor is. And genetic testing makes it easy for any couple to find out if they are related.

In sum, I think there are advantages and disadvantages to using a donor with both high and low numbers of donor kids. Personally, I think for most couples who do not want their donor to be involved in the child’s upbringing, a mass donor might more sense all things equal. I recognize that most women will probably disagree. But I would just ask you to consider to what extent that aversion to mass donors is really based on some jealousy or a hetero-normative feeling that the man should be “providing” for his own small family.