Who are all the
Sperm Donors?

Choosing to start building a family comes with all sorts of questions, surprises, and unknowns, no matter who you are.

But neither my wife nor I produce sperm. And like lots of queers, single parents by choice, or any hopeful parent grappling with any number of fertility issues, we are starting to think about the bazillion extra decisions we have to make in the world of assisted fertility.

Foremost of which is...

Who's gonna be the sperm donor?

Phew, good thing sperm banks promise high-quality options.

The sperm banking business is a $3.5 billion market, and when people use sperm banks, they are buying DNA. That means you can select by genetic traits like hair color, eye color, and skin color. But you can see more than just the basics. Most sperm banks let you see baby photos, hear audio interviews, read written samples and staff impressions, and see all sorts of family medical history.

We’ve been fortunate enough to know some other folks who have chosen donors through a sperm bank already, and we asked them about it. They said yeah, it can feel a little weird to sift through donors who have been categorized by what they look like and their education level and their medical history. But they also say that when the option is there, all those things can feel like important information to help them make a big decision.

To me, it still feels weird that all this personal information is publicly available.

It's weird, but intriguing. So I wanted to explore it.

I made free accounts on five of the biggest sperm banks in the world - yes, all this data was available for free in January 2020, and probably still is.

Then I instructed a little web-scraping bot to crawl all over these websites and gather whatever information about each individual donor was easily findable, and fed that data of over 1,600 donors into a force-layout diagram where each circle is encoded with the donor's height and weight like the diagram to the right.

Use the buttons below to sort, color code, track, and reveal more information about the donors themselves. And click the spermies to track them and reveal more information about that donor.

This whole thing is pretty weird.

But also important and necessary for how lots of folks - including me and my wife - are going to create a family.

Sure we'll think long and hard about this. But in the end, the kid is going to be their own person. We get to use as much or as little information as we want, and nobody gets to judge us for it.

I don't think, once we do decide, that we'll ever tell anyone the exact details of it. Because in the end, everything becomes such a crap shoot. Ultimately, how important is it to pick the "right" donor? How much of our future family will be nature versus nurture? We have no idea, and no way of checking. It’s a mystery.

After all, my siblings and I are all genetically of the same stock, but you could not pick three more different people. So what the heck.

Let's do this, baby!