No Silly Questions: Why Shouldn’t I Find My Donor on Social Media?
Read this week’s No Silly Questions blog to find out more about why you should find a donor through a cryobank versus social media.
Why should I use a cryobank for donor sperm when it’s less expensive to find a donor via social media?
In a word: safety. When you use a reputable cryobank like Fairfax, you know exactly what testing and screening has been performed on your donor and you also know an incredible amount of information about your donor’s personal, medical, and family history. Donors are regularly tested and screened during their participation in our donor program in compliance with FDA regulations and our own rigorous requirements, which include psychological evaluations and a criminal background check. Our donors’ personal information, genetic testing results, and medical histories are available for download from our website, and their current infectious disease testing results are sent with every shipment of their specimens. If you find a donor on social media, you typically have to take their word about their testing results, and you don’t have the peace of mind of knowing that they were fully tested and screened prior to giving every sample.
We have all seen the recent headlines about donors found via social media who did not disclose key pieces of their genetic history or who brag about providing samples to hundreds of different recipients. When you use Fairfax Cryobank, you know exactly which genetic conditions your donor was tested for (up to 502!), and our genetic counseling team will work directly with you to ensure that you understand what these test results mean and that your sperm and egg source are not carriers of the same conditions. In addition, when you use Fairfax Cryobank, you also know that the number of families created by each donor is limited by our family unit limit policy and by our partnership with the other major cryobanks. We work hand in hand with the other reputable cryobanks to identify serial donors and prevent the same donors from donating to more than one of our donor programs.
We understand that it’s tempting to use a donor from social media because it can save you money in the short term. We urge you to think carefully about the many personal and safety benefits that come from using a reputable cryobank and the significant risks you might face from using an unvetted, unregulated donor. Fairfax Cryobank is trusted by clinics and clients around the world because of our high-quality, carefully screened and tested donors.
To keep up with more No Silly Questions, follow the Fairfax Cryobank blog.
