Putting ‘Daddy’ in the Cart: Ordering Sperm Online

Abstract

Like a birth announcement or a product launch, this happily punctuated description, found on the Fairfax Cryobank Facebook feed,¹ conveys the excitement of a company that is introducing brand new inventory. A click away, the YouTube channel for Cryos International offers ‘what you need to know’ videos about the intricacies of home versus intrauterine insemination and fertility timing. Shifting to a different computer screen, the California Cryobank’s Facebook page displays users’ photographs of adorable cryobabies and provides a venue for questions about donors, such as ‘Anyone else use donor 11397?’ Social media’s commercial thrust has entered the reproductive marketplace, and these examples attest to the fact that purchasing human semen is not as unusual or uncommon as it once was. As businesses, sperm banks must contend with competition — competition for the best and brightest donors, and more importantly, competition for market share, otherwise known as customers, users, or recipients. The growth of social media outlets has spurred the development of new competitive strategies available to businesses, a development that has influenced the practice of several cryobanks. As a result, the use of these websites has begun to reorient social norms surrounding the procurement of semen. These shifts have created new frontiers for parents and have modified the ways in which reproduction, masculinity, and kinship are understood in the early twenty-first century.