The global sperm donation industry is booming, and it all leads back to one country: Denmark.
If you had to pick a celebrity for your baby to look like, who would you choose? A brunette Aaron Carter with brown eyes? A young Josh Brolin? Ben Affleck? What if I said your Brolin baby probably wouldn't be that tall, because the donor was only 5'11. Would that put you off? Would you go for Affleck instead?
It sounds like a Margaret Atwood novel for the MailOnline generation, but this isn't fiction. Nowadays, you can pick potential donor sperm based on which Hollywood A-lister you'd like your child to resemble. You might not be able to have the real Ryan Gosling's babies, but you can have the next best thing: An anonymous sperm donor who looks like him.
The global sperm donation industry is booming. Cryos International, a for-profit organization that runs the world's largest sperm bank, now delivers to more than 80 countries globally, employs 61 people, and estimates that it has been responsible for the births of up to 70,000 children. In the US, reports estimate that around 30,000 to 60,000 children are born yearly through sperm donation. The true figure may well be much higher, as the US fertility industry isn't required to report on how many children are being born each year.
Shifting social paradigms—greater acceptance of lesbian couples wanting to have children, career women delaying pregnancy and suffering fertility issues, single women deciding to have children on their own—have all contributed to a lucrative international industry. In the UK, figures from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) show that there was a 24 percent increase in the number of lesbian couples undergoing donor insemination in one year (2010-2011).
Denmark is the epicentre of the donor sperm market. According to one report, the Danish "fertility cluster" turned over 1 billion Danish krone ($152m) in 2012, with the value of exported goods and services estimated at 700 million krone ($105m) in the same year. One-third of all the sperm imported into the UK is of Danish origin....MORE
