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The donors of this raw material typically were students or young professionals, men who were reviewed by the sperm banks and chosen by virtue of their physical and genetic characteristics. Some of the banks prided themselves on providing particular types or quality of sperm; the Repository for Germinal Choice, for example, offered only the sperm of exceptional donors, including Nobel Prize winners and Olympic athletes. [12] Others carved more discrete niches, such as selling primarily to lesbian couples or providing more information (photos, videos, personal notes) about particular specimens. In 1988, the U.S. government conducted its first and only survey of the artificial insemination market, finding that nearly eleven thousand physicians provided artificial insemination services, 22 percent of whom employed commercially purchased semen. [13] By 1999, there were more than one hundred sperm banks in the United States alone, few of which retained any direct link to the clinics that had spawned them.

Medically, artificial insemination is one of the simplest means of addressing male infertility. Commercially, it is also one of the most straightforward operations, a standardized procedure in which the customer—a straight couple, a lesbian couple, or a single woman—chooses a particular donor from an array of possibilities. Most sperm banks charge a standard fee for each specimen (usually $200–$300) and reveal a set list of their donors’ characteristics. California Cryobank, for example, provides twenty-four pages of information, including religion, hair texture, occupation, and years of education. For an additional $20, recipients can purchase an audiotape of the donor answering questions in his own voice. Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia offers extended donor profiles for $7 to $15, with health histories that span three generations. It also provides a personal shopping service in which clients send photos of the person they’d like their child to resemble. [14]

Although the process of collecting sperm is low tech, the storage side of the equation is considerably more complex. After it has been collected, sperm is washed and then frozen to minus 80 degrees Celsius. Then it is flash-frozen to minus 196 degrees and suspended in a tank of liquid nitrogen. Under federal regulation, all sperm must be kept in storage for at least six months while the donor is repeatedly tested for HIV, hepatitis, and other sexually transmitted diseases. The costs associated with these procedures are significant, as are the resulting economies of scale. The business of sperm banking, therefore, has tended to be dominated by a small number of relatively large firms, each armed with a sizable donor base, highly specific technical expertise, and an inherent interest in expansion. In 2000, the Wall Street Journal estimated the global market for sperm exports to be worth anywhere between $50 million and $100 million a year. [15]