What is a sperm bank? What do sperm banks do? You may have heard of sperm banks or sperm donors but most people have no idea what a sperm bank really does. You may have even seen a local sperm bank in your home town or State capitol but can you really answer the question, “What is a sperm bank?”.
A basic definition for sperm bank comes to us from the WordNet Search tool at Princeton.edu which defines “sperm bank” simply as “a depository for storing sperm”. Of course thats overly simplified and most sperm banks provide much more than cryopreservation services for sperm.
We are given a more expanded definition of what a sperm bank is and quite a lot more about what sperm banks do on the Sperm bank page at Wikipedia which states:
A sperm bank or cryobank is a facility that collects and stores human sperm mainly from sperm donors, primarily for the purposes of artificial insemination.
Thats a bit more helpful but still overly simple. Do sperm banks only collect and store sperm or do they offer any other services? How do they store sperm at a sperm bank? Do they only accept anonymous donors and where do the sperm donors come from? These and many other questions are asked about sperm banks each and every day and the answers are never really that simple. A reputable sperm bank should provide these services and more, they should publish a list of services offered and the steps they take in providing them safely.
Most USA sperm banks not only store sperm but they collect donor samples from pre-screened sperm donors and match clients to donors based on the characteristics their client desires in their sperm donations for use in artificial insemination or invitro fertilization. Invitro fertilization has become a popular option in the case where a woman’s male partner is infertile or where he carries a transmittable disease or genetic disorder and is therefore unable to impregnate her. In vitro fertilization is also becoming increasingly more popular as an option for single or lesbian women without male partners to procreate with.
Most sperm banks not only collect and preserve sperm from anonymous donors for use in artificially inseminating female clients who are unable to conceive with a male partner but they collect sperm from male clients that want to preserve their sperm for various medical reasons. As an example men about to enter chemotherapy treatments for cancer will often store a semen sample for possible use at a later time in order to preserve the sperm in a healthy state before the chemo procedures.
The steady growth in the use of anonymous donor sperm or sperm secured from an identifiable or known sperm donor through a sperm bank is directly related to the fact that the procedure has been accepted as a safe and reputable method of achieving a pregnancy in couples with fertility issues. A sperm bank should take a number of steps to ensure the quality and health of the semen samples which it supplies it’s clients. Most sperm banks place stringent requirements on sperm donors to be certain they secure only the highest quality semen samples. Some sperm banks advertise “genius sperm” secured from top level donors such as doctors, professors and other “geniuses” but studies have not shown that use of sperm from highly intelligent donors will produce highly intelligent children.
More important than a donors accomplishments or intelligence quotient is the need for the donor sperm to contain a high number of viable sperm cells because the cryopreservation process will damage or destroy a high percentage of available sperm cells and having a high sperm count helps ensure proper insemination when the samples are ready to be used. Donor sperm with a low sperm cell count is less likely to produce a pregnancy during the invitro fertilization process and the huge expense in collecting and storing sperm requires that all sperm samples meet minimum sperm cell counts before being preserved.
Sperm donors are not only tested for a range of diseases and disorders to provide the highest quality semen samples possible but they will also test the sample quality to ensure that the sample is able to be stored and used in an invitro fertilization procedure some time in the future. Not only must the sperm donors undergo the stringent testing requirements before making a donation but the secured sample has to be re-tested after select time frames to ensure sample quality. As an example all semen samples are tested after six months of storage for HIV virus which causes AIDS and may go undetected in fresh samples. Only after a sample has passed these additional tests can it be considered as viable sperm for artificial insemination in a client.
Sperm samples are stored in a cryopreservation technique that allows the sperm to be thawed at any point in the future and used for the artificial insemination process. The cryopreservation procedure is a lengthy and detailed process that we will tackle in future articles. For now understand that all sperm samples are protected from “freezer burn” during the freezing process to ensure top quality semen samples and offer a better chance at securing a pregnancy when the sample is used.
Many sperm banks also offer egg donor programs and human egg storage as well as cord blood storage and other cryopreservation or sperm bank patient services. Matching donor sperm samples to the traits or characteristics desired by a client is one of the top services offered by sperm banks online today. Sperm donor profiles with photographs from both childhood and adulthood, a donors family medical history, educational background and of course physical traits are ever more important in the donor selection process. More parents today are becoming concerned not only with having a healthy boy or girl but they desire certain characteristics such as hair and eye color so the child appears more like their own family or blood type for better family medical matching or even educational background where a parent hopes to have an intelligent college bound child through the use of sperm from intelligent college graduate donors. Sperm banks provide these donor selection services at additional costs to the client and the selection process has become as financially important as the donor sample services.
Think you understand what a sperm bank is now? Got any questions on what a sperm banks does? Let us know and we’ll see if we can answer them for you in our forums. Visit this topic in the Sperm Banks Discussion Forums today!
Tags: Cryopreservation, Fertility, In vitro, Insemination, Sperm Bank, sperm bank, Sperm Bank, Sperm Bank Information, Sperm donor, sperm donor, Sperm donor, xytex
0 Responses to “What is a sperm bank and what do sperm banks do?”