Male Order BBC Radio 4

In the final episode of her ten-part investigation of the online sperm donor marketplace, Dr Aleks Krotoski looks for a way to make this network safe for the recipients, the donors, and ultimately, the donor-conceived children.
The internet has opened up the door to these informal connections, and so who is responsible what happens there? Is it Facebook, where the majority of the exchanges take place? Is it for the regulator to crack down on illegal trades? Or is it up to the criminal justice system to draw boundaries around this activity?
Aleks discovers that, as with so many aspects of our lives, the digital revolution has pushed us right up to the boundaries of what we can and cannot do - and how quickly good intentions combined with tools to rule the world can get lost in selfish goals.

The online sperm donor marketplace operates across websites and social media, but most of the matches are made on Facebook Groups. Adam, ‘Kyle’ and Christina are three of the people in charge of the world’s biggest donor groups who spend their free time trying to keep the peace.
But numbers have grown exponentially over the last two years of lockdown, and they are swimming up a current of consequential decisions. Does the technology give them enough to keep out the bad apples?
Presenter: Aleks Krotoski

Beth Gardiner knew what the problem was with the online sperm donor marketplace - there was no community. People looking for sperm connected with people offering it on personals ads or email groups. There was no information - about fertility, about cycles, about problematic donors.
And so, when she started the Known Donor Registry in 2010 as a hub of information for people who wanted a known donor, she included two technological features of great online communities - a forum and a real-time chat. And for a while, it worked wonderfully.
But Beth’s online passion project was interrupted by a technological glitch. And at the same time, a Goliath of the social networking world was tempting everyone away.
Presenter: Aleks Krotoski

In the UK, any man who donates sperm through a licensed fertility clinic in the UK must waive his right to anonymity. Any children his donations produce can find out his identity when they turn 18.
When this law passed in 2005, donor numbers dropped by almost 90%. Men, it seemed, didn’t want to be known. They flocked instead to the online sperm donor market, where another kind of donor was looking for the opposite. They wanted to be known from the time a child was conceived, but the new law didn’t let them.
In this episode, Dr Aleks Krotoski meets Louise McLoughlin, a donor-conceived child whose biological father had been told by the clinics where he donated in the early 1990s that he would always be anonymous. She campaigns for the rights of donor-conceived children to know the identity of their genetic parent from birth.
Louise has a conversation with donor Alex, who’s looking for a recipient on Facebook to help him achieve his family dreams.

‘James’, ‘Kyle’, Adam and Tyree are sperm donors who advertise themselves on unregulated online donor exchanges. They are some of the more prolific donors on the scene - they have at least one hundred between them, but some of them likely have many more.
They say they are driven to help women create babies through a sense of altruism - giving the gift of life. But after their first few donor-babies were born, these men began to optimise their bodies and their methods of donation to be a product that gives results every time they are asked to help. It’s a hobby that can take over a man’s life.
But why, when they are supposed to be “known”, are prolific donors less likely to meet their donor offspring? At what point do the children that prolific donors help create become a photo that can be used to advertise for the next recipient who comes along? When do these kids become another line in a spreadsheet in a game of numbers donors play one another?
In this episode, Dr Aleks Krotoski speaks with these men to understand the motivations of prolific donors, and to try to get to the bottom of where they think other donors’ bad behaviour comes from.

The online fertility marketplaces promise free access to sperm and the opportunity to include a donor in a child’s life from the beginning, but they come with dangers too. Women report harassment, sexually explicit messages and pressure for sex. But because they are asking for sperm, some say they feel powerless to report these activities to the authorities.
Drew, a long-time donor, tries to raise awareness about the few problematic donors who harass and abuse women in the online donor network, and hosts a support group on Facebook where the women can share their stories of less-than-positive experiences. Meanwhile, former recipient Veronika lurks in the online groups and sends private messages to women she sees speaking with the donor she claims attacked her.
But the way the online marketplace is set up favours the donors, rather than the women who seek them and the people who speak out.
Presenter: Aleks Krotoski