Mail-order sperm sales

Press, 9 March 1982, Page 16

Mail-order sperm sales

HUGO DAVENPORT.

By

“Observer.”

An American company which sends frozen semen by mail order to doctors carrying out artificial insemination of women is planning to expand its market into Europe. The Xytex Corporation, based in Augusta, Georgia, supplies doctors with regular catalogues listing donors by number and giving details of their ethnic origin, height, weight, hair and eye colour, ‘skin-tone’ and blood group.' Mr Donald Zeh, assistant laboratory director for Xytex, said recently: We’re more or less getting our foot in the door in Europe right now. We would very much like to. increase our market to include the. European countries.’

The company has received about 20 inquiries from Britain as a result of advertisements placed in American professional journals with international distribution. The advertisements which recommend Xytex as ‘the effective tissue bank,” have brought in firm orders from South American countries, such "as Mexico and Venezuela, and Africa.

New's of the company’s activities will intensify the debate in Britain about the ethical, social and legal implications of rapidly developing “birth technologies.” These include techniques for artificial insemination, freezing embryos, test-tube fertilisation and surrogate motherhood.

Controversy has heightened since Mr Patrick Steptoe and Dr Robert Edwards, the test-tube baby pioneers, disclosed plans to set up banks of frozen eggs and embryos which could be implanted into unrelated mothers at their private clinic near Cambridge. The council of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists met recently to. decide whether to set up a new ethical committee to consider the issue; the British Medical Association’s ethical committee is also discussing the issue. •

Xytex is one of about a dozen similar organisations

operating in the United States. v l '

According to Mr Zeh, the catalogue is designed to enable doctors to choose a donor .who corresponds as closely as possible to the husband of an inseminated woman, • The company's sperm bank includes samples from between 20 and 50 donors of varying racial origin and physical type, though the “donor panel” changes all the time and includes up to 200 different donors a year. Up to 100,000 inseminating units are. sent out annually. Mr Zeh said its charges to doctors are “confidential,” adding that the service costs “well under $100.” Donors are paid between $2O and $4O per sample, and the company’s annual turnover is not far off $1 million.

Mr Zeh said it did not operate at a profit because it was > primarily a service organisation. Donors are found mainly among medical students, through advertisements in professional journals. “We evaluate them for intellectual and societal achievement, and we take a genetic, medical and social history,” said Mr Zeh. Only 30 to 40 per cent of potential donors were ac-

cepted, the reasons for rejection including semen which did not freeze well and medical and genetic factors. According to the B.M.A; organisations of this type do not exist in Britain. Semen is collected and frozen by doctors on a more or less “ad hoc” basis; B.M.A. guidelines on AID stipulate that a doctor practising the technique “cannot act merely as a technician — he should be satisfied that the people concerned have considered all the implications.” A spokesman said the B.M.A. ethical committee would not call for a moratorium on the freezing of eggs or embryos, in spite of the fact that its chairman, Dr Michael Thomas, had urged a halt in the test-tube baby programme until the moral issues had been discussed. Mr Feroze, president of the R.C.0.G., said his proposal for a new ethical committee was not specifically a response to the plans of Mr ~ Steptoe and Dr Edwards, ‘ though the freezing of embryos would be first on the agenda. “There are increasing ethical matters arising out of modern techniques and methods of treatment which particularly apply to obstetrics,” he said. '

“In the past one has been able to make a' balanced judgment, given time; now the development of new techniques happens so rapidly that one really needs to think about it at the onset of research.

“We .can’t be the keepers of other people’s consciences, but we can give advice to our members. I hope we will be able to give a balanced statement on what we think — thereafter it’s a public debate.” s ;• “There are increasing ethiof thought which holds that the issues raised. by such techniques cannot be left solely to the discretion' of doctors working within guidelines set by their own professional bodies. Dr Robert Snowden, director of the Institute of Population Studies at Exeter University, and the .co-author of a book on artificial insemination, believes that an interdepartmental inquiry, involving doctors, lawyers, clergymen and academics, should examine the question. He has said that a system of licensing and registration of licensing and registration should be developed to control the setting up of sperm banks and AID centres, testtube fertilisation, and surrogate motherhood,