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One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor
A writer found that buying sperm is like shopping at Costco
Harlyn Aizley rejoiced when she saw all the choices that sperm banks offered to people like her — “Jewish gay Gemini neurotics” in their late 30s, as she puts it in her memoir Buying Dad: One Woman’s Search for the Perfect Sperm Donor.
Leafing through books of donor profiles, she found that “buying sperm is much like shopping at Sam’s Club or Costco.” Not that the process lacked detours and speed bumps.
Aizley and her partner, Faith, believed they were ready to have a baby. Both Jewish, they also thought they wanted a Jewish donor (an issue that would come up later when they learned of a promising non-Jewish candidate).
But before approaching a sperm bank, they’d had to decide: Should they go with a donor they knew or an anonymous depositor? After Faith came to share Aizley’s preference for anonymity, their search began in earnest.
The two women downloaded the catalog of a California sperm bank and chose a donor they nicknamed Baldie. They had vials of his semen, preserved in liquid nitrogen, shipped by Federal Express to their Boston-area home.
