Blog US Sperm in Demand

To those who worry that American-made goods aren’t doing as swell as they might in the global marketplace, tut-tut, never fear! There’s one market we Yanks have cornered: sperm. No one can beat us there. Our lil swimmers are on the world’s most-wanted list.

It’s kind of funny that U.S. semen should be so prized. After all, on the list of things you might try to get out of an American man sperm is probably the easiest, with opinions on movies and advice about your car tying for second. And yet, it seems, our semen has something in common with the commercial food industry in that what we throw a way in a day might be more useful than we imagine. Here’s the skinny.

Alex Dickinson at The Daily reports that demand for American sperm has gone up 40% in the last five years. In talking with Scott Brown of California Cryobank, the world’s largest sperm bank and Trina Leonard of Fairfax Cryobank, the second largest facility in the U.S., Dickinson found that among the reasons U.S. sperm is so popular globally is more liberal attitudes.

“It’s driven by the social changes — single women and lesbian couples being recognized around the world as people that should be able to have children and raise families,” Brown said.

The U.S. also allows men to make donations anonymously, has a good network of sperm banks already and men get paid well for their donations (up to $500 a shot, so to speak). Also the U.S. sets the golds standard for screening procedures, like testing their donors for communicable diseases and providing donor profiles. Leonard says she knows less about her husband of 20 years, i.e., what his SAT scores were and what his grandfather died of, than clients do about their donors.

That $500 isn’t standard, by the way; it’s dependent on your “education, height, and family history,” just another reason to tell your sons to get into a good college.

American sperm sells best in the UK, Canada, France, Israel, Australia, Chile, Spain and Sweden, Dickinson writes and it’s likely to only become more popular.

“There will be an explosion in demand, no pun intended, around the world as other countries become more accepting of the nontraditional family,” Brown said.

See? No matter how tough things get no one can say we don’t have spunk.