Inside Facebook’s Free-Sperm Economy
Frustrated with the industry’s high fees and forced anonymity, some women have gone online to match with men eager to donate their semen.
Angela Deliso and her wife talked about having children for years before they began trying to start a family. “I always wanted kids,” Deliso tells me over Zoom. “I just thought it would happen sooner.” After five years of dating, the pair married, and a year after that, their plans turned to action: They bought 11 vials of frozen sperm from a sperm bank. Deliso, who wanted to carry the pregnancy, underwent intrauterine insemination in a doctor’s office. Sperm banks can charge up to to $2,000 per vial of frozen sperm, and in-office insemination typically costs between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. All in, the couple spent $10,000 over and above their health-insurance premiums and almost two years on the effort. They made ten attempts. When Deliso finally became pregnant, she miscarried at eight weeks.
Their doctor suggested moving on to in vitro fertilization. “But that was $30,000 for a 50 percent chance,” says Deliso. (Insurance benefits for fertility treatments vary. Twenty-one states and D.C. have laws that require some form of coverage, but even so, it’s common for families to spend thousands out of pocket.) Neither Deliso nor her wife wanted to dip into their savings. Deliso hoped to be a stay-at-home parent when her child was young, and the pair intended to use their savings to fund that time.
Friends of theirs had conceived a baby with a free-sperm donor they found in a Facebook group that connects prospective mothers with willing donors. There are dozens of these groups; the biggest have tens of thousands of members. Some are regional; some serve specific demographics, like queer or Black families. Deliso didn’t know why she was struggling to conceive, but she wondered if she would have more success with fresh sperm, as her friends had. “In most situations there is enough data to show fresh sperm may be preferable to frozen,” explains Dr. Michael Guarnaccia, medical director of Pinnacle Fertility of New York. But, he says, the research is evolving, and the comparison pertains only to intrauterine insemination — in which sperm is “washed” (removing debris and less able swimmers), placed in a sterile medium, and shot through a catheter directly into the uterus.
Deliso and her wife worried about the legalities and emotional entanglements that could come with nontraditional paths to conception. They had considered asking someone they knew to give them sperm, but they were concerned that whoever they picked might try to “butt in” on the child’s life. “We wanted the full parental rights,” says Deliso. Ultimately, their friends talked them through the Facebook process and helped them weed out guys who seemed “creepy.”
One guy “was like, ‘I want to be in the room while your wife inserts the specimen because I want to make sure it goes in you and not her.’ I was like, ‘no,’” laughs Deliso. Another “would state how he finds it sexy, he wants to watch. No, that’s not going to happen.” She also rejected anyone who was angling for natural insemination, better known as sex. “No shade,” Deliso says. “Some people want sex because they think it gives them a better chance. Kudos to you; I couldn’t do it.”
Eventually, Deliso settled on Kyle Gordy. Gordy, slight with large, dark eyes, is famous in the sperm universe. Many “known sperm donors,” as they’re called, are in competition with one another, kind of like the little swimmers themselves. Some of the most prolific, such as Gordy, have robust social-media influencer presences with websites and podcasts and Instagram accounts. The half-dozen known donors I spoke to claimed to have fathered up to 180 children each, sometimes on several continents.
Gordy is only 33 years old and has been doing this for a decade. In that time he has been partly responsible for the conception of dozens of children. He no longer likes to talk about the exact count, though he told a documentary film crew three years ago that he hopes to hit 1,000. In 2022 he was detained by immigration authorities in Fiji on his way to inseminate multiple women in New Zealand. (Now he’s starring in the current season of 90 Day Fiance, and his history of sperm donation is a major and controversial plotline.)
None of this deterred Deliso or her wife. “One of the reasons we picked him was that he was so well known — and the successfulness,” says Deliso. She thought Gordy’s public profile, while a bit bombastic, made him less likely to be a scammer, and his dozens of offspring made him look more viable. Also, with so many kids, it seemed unlikely that he would want to horn in on their son in any way. She hasn’t watched him on 90 Day Fiancé. “I really try to form my own opinions about people,” she says.
Gordy showed Deliso fresh STD tests, for safety’s sake, as well as sperm-quality tests, both of which he undergoes at his own expense. He told me he takes over a dozen daily vitamins and supplements to keep up production. Gordy didn’t push the natural-insemination option with Deliso, though he says he will provide it if requested: “On a rare occasion, there’s a woman who wants it the natural way.”
Gordy met Deliso and her wife outside his apartment in L.A. with a fresh sample in a sterile cup. Deliso got into her car, poured the sperm into a soft menstrual cup, and inserted it. She left it in for 12 hours — a process known as intracervical insemination. Other women insert multiple donations over a few days of their highest fertility. A cottage industry of at-home-insemination kits has sprung up to assist in this do-it-yourself process. Mosie Baby markets its kits as the “first and only FDA cleared at-home intravaginal insemination kit with a slit opening.” It comes packaged with two collection cups and two syringes designed to widely disseminate sperm. Frida, a brand most famous for its baby-snot sucker, also has an entry in the market: an at-home-insemination kit that claims to make the process as simple as “collect, insert and wait 5 to 15 minutes,” according to the company’s website.
Dr. Guarnaccia says some of his patients have opted out of IUI in a medical office because New York State has especially strict regulations about the sperm that’s used. If you are a single mom by choice or a lesbian couple and want an IUI with sperm from someone you know (or just met in a Facebook group) rather than from a sperm bank, the sperm has to be quarantined for six months while the donor goes through multiple rounds of STD testing. “Do some women who hear about the quarantine instead decide to go home and do it themselves? Absolutely,” he says. Still, he discourages his patients from acquiring sperm from what he calls “untested sources.”
Two weeks after her day wearing the cup, Deliso was pregnant with her son.
Her success underscores why activity in these Facebook groups has, anecdotally, picked up since the pandemic. Sperm donations to traditional banks slumped during lockdown, and the banks themselves have weathered a plethora of problems, not least among them a donation shortage from Black men. Just over 4 percent of sperm in the four largest U.S. sperm banks were from Black or African American donors, according to 2023 data. Sperm banks also lack the transparency some families prefer. A prospective mother can choose “open” donation at a bank, but that only means the offspring will have the right to contact the donor after they turn 18. The donor has no reciprocal rights, not even the right to know how many children he’s helped bring into the world. The mothers often lack access to that information too, which can preoccupy them a great deal. And in an economy stymied by inflation, finances have become a dominant motivation for going the known-donor route — either directly or after dropping serious cash on traditional fertility treatments.
With hindsight, Deliso says they wish they’d chosen fresh sperm much sooner. “With the IUIs, It was just, you know, try after try after try, and disappointments. This took the first time, and nothing was wrong, and so it just was like, Why didn’t we do this in the first place?”
Questions of openness, anonymity, and social stigma are thorny ones in the world of sperm. In previous generations, when medical students were commonly tapped as sperm donors, absolute secrecy was the rule. But with the spread of DNA testing, it’s not always possible to keep the facts of conception under wraps. More and more donor dads and half-siblings are getting discovered by chance.
The donors I talked to have all met at least some of their kids. Many have Facebook groups specifically for the half-siblings’ families to connect with one another. There’s a donor in Australia, Adam Hooper, who runs the podcast Sperm Donation World; he told me he holds barbecues for his donor families and babies every few months. A mom from Sweden flew to meet him in Paris a little while ago, and he took her toddler boy to Disneyland.
Deliso and Gordy keep in touch, exchanging baby pictures and messages. The boy hasn’t met his biological father yet; his parents want him to be able to grow up and make his own choices about whether to pursue a relationship with Gordy or with any of his dozens of half-siblings. Gordy estimates he’s met about one-fifth of his biological offspring in person.
When I joined a Facebook donor group, a guy named “Jim” sent over a long list of stats, unprompted, and an all-caps exhortation. “If you’re having trouble getting pregnant? It’s GONNA HAPPEN!! - IF YOU USE ME AS YOUR DONOR….If you wish to have TALL CHILDREN, that are SMART, ATHLETIC AND ATTRACTIVE,, WITH BLUE EYES and BLONDE/REDDISH HAIR, then I’m the guy you’re looking for. I can deliver GREAT GENES & SUPERIOR DNA for your Child to have a huge advantage in life,” he wrote.
Hearing from men like Jim at times made me a bit nervous. I wondered about the mental health and neuroses of these men, a sentiment I posed to Rosanna Hertz, co-author of the book Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin. “I think Facebook donors are quite problematic and tricky,” she told me. “Some lonely guy doing this out of his basement, using it to meet friends — it’s a problem.”
Gordy has a different view. “How can anybody who’s normal donate to a sperm bank and not know your children?” Gordy says. “To me, that’s crazy.”
Deliso’s conception and pregnancy went exactly according to plan. Other mothers and donors I spoke with told a different story.
When families seek out a sperm bank, they are paying the bank not only for semen, but also to act as a legal intermediary that launders the sperm of both the rights and the responsibilities of fatherhood. “In the U.S., there’s no overarching regulations surrounding anonymous donors,” says Hertz. What worries her the most about known donors, she says, is that when donors meet mothers informally, children are being created with no clear lines of responsibility for their health, safety or happiness. “Children have no rights in this matter.”
Diana Adams, an attorney in New York, has drafted hundreds of sperm-donation agreements over nearly two decades, typically among friends or acquaintances. Whether it’s a “godfather” or “special uncle” situation, Adams says there can be conflicts, hurt feelings, and kids left feeling abandoned when their trusted adults make changes to their relationships. “I’ve been involved in a number of the disputes that happen when people do not have a sperm-donation agreement,” she says. “Those situations can be fraught and dangerous for the children.”
“Joe Roderick” — his nom de sperm — has 72 babies to his credit, along with 21 or so more on the way. He’s well built, due in part to a career as an exercise physiologist. He also freely admits that he was born in 1968. No sperm bank will take deposits from a man his age, but there are no rules like that online.
At 19, Joe fell into an affair with a recently divorced 42-year-old woman. “We began having sex, and she … As I tried to pull out of her, she pulled me into her. It kinda scared the hell out of me at first.” They talked about it, and the woman said she wanted to use him to try to get pregnant. “I found the experience, to be honest, intoxicating in a way. Just the thought of my DNA mixing with her DNA.”
Joe went on to get married, father three sons of his own, and then divorce. Around 2008, he was approached by a lesbian couple, friends of friends, to be their donor. They let him know there were others who might want his help. Joe turned to the internet. “I have a number of Craigslist babies,” he says. “The Facebook groups took off around 2012. I moderate half a dozen or so myself.”
But in 2014, trouble struck. Joe, like many known donors, used to sign contracts with the mothers. He hoped these would protect both parties by spelling out that he didn’t intend to support any children nor seek custody of them.
Instead, one of those contracts had the opposite effect. A couple in Michigan split up, and the birth mother applied for state assistance. She tried to use the contract to prove that Joe had no responsibility for her child, but a family court instead took it as evidence of Joe’s paternity. After a DNA test confirmed it, Joe was stuck with monthly child-support payments. “That child is now 12, so I still have six years of child support to pay,” he says. He doesn’t blame the mother, though. “She was mortified. She thought that contract was protection.”
Adams confirms that a contract can’t always stop child-support claims. “The state really wants to look for somebody else to pay rather than having to provide parental benefits to a mom,” Adams says. “The U.S. is in a patchwork situation about what’s considered a legal parent and whether intention can override biology.” In New York, California, and Massachusetts, for example, where there are donor-insemination laws in place, contracts between a mother and a known donor are generally upheld. But in red states without legislation, if a mom goes on public assistance, the donor is at risk of having to pay child support. If a donor and recipient have sex, Adams adds, that could invalidate almost any donor contract.
In addition to the Michigan child-support case, Joe has been dragged into court in Indiana and Ohio, and in Michigan for a second time. In each case, the stories were similar: “A lesbian couple was splitting up and they couldn’t agree on parental rights. The birth mothers wanted to cut the ex out of the scene, so they tried to draw me into the middle of it by declaring me the father.” Joe has had to hire lawyers out of pocket and travel out of state five times to renounce his claims to paternity.
Legal complications caused Joe to take a five-year break from inseminating women he meets on the internet. But sometime around 2020, perhaps due to the loneliness of the pandemic, the siren song of donation called him back.
“These Facebook groups have exploded,” he says. “I’m just making contacts left and right. I’m donating basically nonstop. I can’t remember the last time I masturbated for fun.”
Latrice Lyles is one of Joe’s satisfied “customers” (though she’s never paid him a cent). She and her wife each had a teenager from a previous relationship. When they decided to have a baby together, her son’s father offered to donate sperm. On one hand, she liked the idea of having two children who were full genetic siblings. “There’s a stigma, especially with Black women, having multiple ‘baby daddies.’ That’s what people call it,” she says. But on the other hand, her ex’s genetic material came with potential strings attached. “I don’t believe he would have been able to donate and detach from that situation. He would have been like, ‘Oh, that’s my baby,’ even though it’s not.”
She and her wife attended a webinar hosted by a sperm bank. But they were put off by the cost — $1,700 to $2,000 for two vials — and wanted to think it over. That evening her wife was watching sneaker videos on TikTok and a known-sperm-donor video randomly came up in her feed. “I remember it was a Black lady and she had twin daughters. She said, ‘You don’t have to spend thousands.’ I typed in ‘sperm donors’ on Facebook.”
Lyles says that Joe seemed genuine from the start. “He didn’t ask for anything. He was very professional — I didn’t get weird vibes from him.” She liked that Joe had a successful track record, and she wasn’t bothered by his age. “If he’s able to produce, he’s able to produce. He’s not going to be an active father in my son’s life. So his age didn’t bother me at all.”
Lyles and her wife wanted a white donor because she has darker skin and her wife has lighter skin. Their little boy, she laughs, “came out super light skinned. But whatever, I’m Mommy and that’s all that matters. He looks exactly like me, just a lighter version.”
Maintaining ethnic and racial diversity has always been an issue for the cryobanks, Dr. Guarnacci says. It’s yet another reason some women turn to Facebook groups; many cater to those looking for Black, Hispanic, East Asian, and South Asian sperm donors.
Joe and Lyles text occasionally, like on her son’s birthday and on Christmas. She’s also active in a Facebook group for her son’s half-siblings. “We communicate, share pictures. It’s really nice seeing some of his half siblings and chatting with their moms and getting updates on them. We’re doing a Michigan park meetup soon.” She is close with her own older brothers, and she likes the idea of having a bunch of siblings for her son, if he chooses that one day. Meanwhile, he’s getting spoiled by Lyles’s older kids. “They’re both really great with him. My son carries him around the house like a football.”
Because of his past legal trouble, Joe doesn’t sign contracts anymore. In fact, in a bid to keep his anonymity, he doesn’t give out his real name to the women. I asked him: Why do you still do this? He used the term “intoxicating” again, then said: “It’s maybe an addiction, almost, when you feel that gratefulness come through.”
He also insisted that his basic instinct is not weird at all. “Procreation is a natural human motive. Not everybody has that — certainly millions don’t necessarily want to have kids — but a lot of us do, and even when you have high-volume donors like myself, that’s the main motive behind all of it.”
For some women, the transparency of a known donor isn’t about their race, ethnicity, or track record: It’s about their vaccine status. Dani, who asked to go by her first name only, was set on acquiring the sperm of an unvaccinated man, but donor vaccine status usually isn’t tracked at sperm banks. “I didn’t want the COVID vaccine, and I didn’t want a donor who got it,” she said. “We’re pretty libertarian.”
On the phone, Dani is warm and friendly — an open book. She lives in an old farmhouse on six acres with her husband, Rob, and her two sons, ages 3 and 1, down a dirt road in North Carolina. Her mother lives in another house on the property and helps out with babysitting. Her older son came from a past relationship. Her younger son is the product of a donor from Facebook. Rob had a vasectomy at 27, before they were married, and his attempt at a reversal failed.
As a pro-life, born-again Christian, Dani opposes IVF. She also ruled out going to a sperm bank from the start. “I don’t want to buy a baby. I didn’t want to look through a folder and pick out who I wanted my baby to look like. It seems like shopping,” she says.
But, like Deliso and Lyles, she felt it would be too awkward to ask someone she already knew for sperm. “ I would have loved it if we could have had a friend, but it’s weird asking your friends. I didn’t want anyone to feel obligated to say ‘yes.’” She also knew they couldn’t afford private adoption, which typically costs between $30,000 and $60,000, according to the federal Administration for Children and Families.
So Dani started researching what she calls “underground donors.” She found a Facebook group that specialized in the unvaccinated; demand for this kind of sperm has risen in the past few years as misinformation surrounding the COVID vaccine’s impact on fertility swirls online.
Dani posted a brief message in the unvaccinated-donors Facebook group and ended up connecting with the “least pushy” man who responded. She asked for references and talked to two of the other women who had conceived with him. “He has healthy, pretty, perfect little babies. The funny thing is they’re all boys. And he has giant boys! All of them are like ten to 11 pounds at birth.”
When it was time to conceive, she got a hotel room in Durham, North Carolina, where the man lived. She stayed there for five or six days, applying fresh sperm every day.
“It was so easy and really comfortable. No hiccups. Not weird at all. He would meet me in the mornings and go in the bathroom and leave the soft cup on the counter. Meanwhile, I was making him coffee. When he was done, we would chitchat. It was very personable. It wasn’t weird,” Dani repeats. “It kind of felt natural. He and I both spoke about having pro-life values. He has three kids of his own and he values his own family so much.”
Dani says the donor dad “is kind of like part of the family now,” even though “we don’t know a lot about him.” Like Lyles, she keeps up with her baby’s half-dozen half-siblings on Facebook. “I’m an only child and I always wanted siblings, so I think it’s kind of cool for him to have these kids out in the world that he’s related to.”
Dani says it took her husband, Rob, some time to bond with the new baby. “In all honesty, it wasn’t easy at first. He was a little bit distant during the pregnancy, but he has really grown to love the baby. And it’s actually kind of funny; he’ll post videos and pictures of the boys and people will comment, ‘Oh, he looks just like you.’”
Rob’s family of origin, however, has not come around. “His family disowned us over it. Totally cut us off because we gave the kids his last name. My husband’s aunt just thought I slept with somebody else to get pregnant.”
Deliso’s son is almost 3 years old now. She’s a stay-at-home parent, just as she planned. “It’s a lot more challenging than I expected, but I love it,” she tells me over Zoom from her cozy house in Los Angeles with toys and books piled on the floor. Wearing a gray hoodie with dark hair pulled back over a high forehead, she looks like any other tired mom. “He loves swords, loves to play rough. He’s a bulldozer. He’s amazing.”
She tells me that over the past two years, she has advised other women to go on Facebook to find their sperm donor. “Do a lot of research. Know what you want. You’re going to have to weed out some interesting people,” she tells them. “But to save a lot of money and not go through the medical route, I highly suggest doing this.”
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