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Some banks go even further, differentiating themselves by offering “known” donors: men who have agreed to let their offspring contact them after they turn eighteen. For example, Xytex, a large bank based in Georgia, provides its clients with photos and the names of their donors. Rainbow Flag Health Services makes its transparency explicit, promising potential clients, “Your child will grow up without secrets. They will not grow up fantasizing that their ‘father’ is the lost King of Bavaria or Charles Manson.” [19]

All these banks, however, operate along similar financial lines. Donors are wooed through promotional material scattered around college campuses or other attractive locales. They contribute a fixed number of times over a relatively short period and receive around $75 per specimen. Each specimen yields between three and six vials of sperm, and each vial sells for $250 to $400—a gross markup for the banks that averages roughly 2,000 percent. [20] Much of this revenue goes to covering the banks’ fixed costs: donor screening, specimen storage, and the paperwork involved in tracking large numbers of anonymous, identical-looking “products.” Today, the breakeven point for a sperm bank is approximately ten thousand units a year, and the smaller banks—those linked only to a particular clinic, for example, or a small cluster of doctors—are facing increased financial pressure. As these pressures mount, and as the banks jostle to provide a growing array of donor types, the sperm bank industry is likely to proceed even further down the paths of specialization and consolidation. And in the end, predicts Dr. Cappy Rothman of California Cryobank, “only the biggest will survive.” [21]