The commodification of sperm

Capitalism, patriarchy, and technological reproduction

“Could sperm donor be America’s finest part-time job? … It’s just a little spare part they’re delivering.”

(Claus Rodgaard, CE of New York Cryos sperm bank, Sep 2024)

Egg donation is extremely invasive, and involves considerable health risks to the woman. Men who donate sperm have it easy in comparison, but sperm donation raises issues which deserve consideration - not least the way it, like egg donation, is becoming commodified, and contributing to an increasingly widespread dissociation of technologically assisted conception and procreation from actual sexual relationship.

Sperm donation has moved on from the relatively innocent and altruistic days when a lesbian who wanted a child could self-inseminate with the aid of a turkey baster and sperm gifted by a gay male friend. It has, since the development of In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF), become big business, even in countries like the UK with extensive public health provision. (Although IVF is available on the NHS, access to it is not guaranteed, and more than 60% of it in the UK is privately funded).

Fertility clinics, established initially to help infertile heterosexual couples conceive, now cater for a number of different markets, including lesbians and single women who want to conceive, and gay couples and single men who want to father children.

Surrogacy widens the market and intensifies the exploitation by adding a ‘surrogate’ mother to the equation. Surrogacy is banned in many countries. Here in the UK, it is not available on the NHS (except in limited circumstances in Scotland), and the private sector is at present lightly regulated to avoid extreme commercialisation (though surrogacy agencies have lobbied hard to remove this restriction, and are bypassing it by arranging for commissioning parents to access unregulated services abroad). Globally, surrogacy is a huge business opportunity. It often matches sperm, eggs, and wombs from different countries, a global division of reproductive labour (in places slave labour) that reduces costs, maximises profits, and ensures that the mother/child bond is severed at birth.

The global assisted reproductive technology market, valued at $34.7 billion in 2023, is projected to grow by 6.9% per year, and reach $62.8 billion by 2032. The global surrogacy market, valued at $22.4 billion in 2024, is projected to grow by 24.6% per year, and reach $201.8 billion by 2034.

Sperm deposited in a sperm bank or fertility clinic is now tested for infections and some inherited conditions. It is often frozen, to allow for greater flexibility over when it is inseminated. Sometimes sperm and eggs are mixed in a lab dish, but where low sperm quality is an issue Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), where sperm is injected directly into the eggs, may be used. Already, AI can be involved at each stage of the ICSI process - “In one step, the machine uses an AI model to select the healthiest sperm cells for fertilisation based on their appearance. In another, the machine immobilises the sperm by zapping their tails with a laser so they are easier to pick up. It later injects the sperm into already-collected eggs.”

While artificial insemination has become high tech, collecting the sperm remains stubbornly no tech (masturbation). Alienation and objectification are ensured by providing pornography that abuses women’s bodies, to stimulate donors who would otherwise be insufficiently aroused. Back in 2015 a male researcher at Manhattan Cryobank explained how important it was to cater for its increasingly diverse donor pool - “Before, most of our DVDs had featured Caucasian individuals engaged in straight sex, so it was not much diversity. We wanted to get variety: Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians. By giving out multiple pornos with characters from different racial categories, we’re able to give our patients what they want to see. Now that we have more people from different orientations, we have to provide something that gets them in the mood. That’s important to us.” I dread to think what abuses may be needed to get today’s donors, 10 years later, “in the mood”.

Motivation

Interviews undertaken as part of a Manchester University research study revealed significant differences in motivation between sperm and egg donors. While most of each group claimed they were motivated primarily by a desire to help others, many also admitted an element of self-interest. For egg donors this was primarily financial. For sperm donors it was primarily a desire to procreate - “Donation was presented as either an ‘insurance policy’ against not achieving, or an alternative to, ‘real’ fatherhood, enabling the fulfilment of a desire to procreate, while not becoming a parent in the more established sense of the word.”

It’s not easy to judge from interviews the relative strengths of altruism and a desire to procreate. Developmental psychologist Patricia Hawley is suspicious of claims to altruism:

“I do not tend to see these ‘donations’ as acts of altruism. Most obviously, for the most part, semen is sold and not donated. But even more importantly, the person selling their seed is also being paid to have other people raise his genetic offspring … Welcome to the modern age where effort and risk are no longer required! We have built handy workarounds: Semi-anonymous sperm donation in a poorly regulated industry, easy-to-create websites, aliases, Venmo and PayPal, international travel at our fingertips, and so on, That is the recipe for someone swamping the human gene pool and making money doing it.”

(Pauline Hawley, Sperm donation, Narcissism, and the Evolutionary Bonanza, Psychology Today 28 Jul 2024)

Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins made a similar point later that summer. Taking a break from his farewell tour of North America, he visited a New York sperm bank, and questioned why it needed to pay its sperm donors:

“A naive Darwinian might say they should pay you because the one thing that every animal that’s ever born in this world is set up to do is pass on his genes. This is a fantastically efficient, trouble free, expense free way of passing on your genes.”

(Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary biologist reacts to sperm bank, YouTube 4 Sep 2024)

Claus Rodgaard, the sperm bank CE, disagreed with this, and Dawkins rowed back, acknowledging that the Darwinian imperative has traditionally been linked with the “urge to copulate and the urge to make a home together”. Dawkins went on to suggest that before long sperm banks will be able to meet a demand for designer babies - “Instead of just giving them a few details of the donors you give them the entire genome. In 100 years it will be cheap and quick.”

Tech billionaires, pro-natalism, and eugenics

The decoupling of procreation from sexual relationship may not have become mainstream yet, but it’s certainly a big part of the transhumanist project of tech billionaires such as Elon Musk. A few days after I posted about Musk’s pro-natalism, here, a Wall Street Journal article exposed his secrecy over how he puts it into practice. It seems that Musk, who believes that civilisation will collapse unless supposedly super intelligent men like him father lots of children, has fathered many more children than the usually quoted 14. He prefers that they are conceived by IVF, possibly because that enables him to determine their sex (most of his offspring are male).

Musk asked one of the mothers, conservative influencer Ashley St Clair, to deliver their child Romulus by C-section, because of his belief that this boosts brain size. She refused. He texted her that “to reach legion-level before the apocalypse we will need to use surrogates.” And when she broke a non disclosure agreement to reveal that Musk was the father, he cut the child support to punish her.

The combination of technology and eugenics that inspires the pronatalist movement extends beyond reproduction, to childcare and education. Michael and Simone Collins, the founders of Pronatalist.org, not only use preimplantation genetic testing to determine the birth order of their embryos, they employ AI to teach their children:

“Now we have so many amazing tools to help us raise kids well. We have AI to give them elite educations … We’ve built a platform for our own children that democratises Socratic tutoring, so now we can give children the same kind of experience speaking with an interactive elite tutor.”

(Simone Collins, Can ‘Pronatalists save the West?, UnHerd 1 May 2025)

Virtual imitations of a Greek philosopher are not the only tech innovations that help pro-natalists care for their many children. Mattel had to withdraw its Aristotle digital baby sitter after parents objected due to privacy concerns - Aristotle not only provided artificial tutoring, entertainment and companionship, but it collected and updated the baby’s intimate data. But devices that confine themselves to substituting for human interaction have proliferated. Poe, for example, is an animated talking teddy bear that uses ChatGPT to tell children’s stories. And many devices harvest data in a subtler way than Mattel’s Aristotle. The SNOO ‘smart sleeper’, for example, soothes babies to sleep with calming ‘womb like’ motion and noise, and sends daily sleep reports to their parents’ smartphones, while the Nanit monitoring system offers ‘real-time sleep analytics’, enabling users to ‘parent like a pro’.

Capitalism, Patriarchy, or both?

Sperm banks and the porn industry are cited by Lacanian Marxist writer Tara van Dijk as evidence to support her claim that patriarchy has been destroyed by capitalism. She quotes from, and draws on, far-right philosopher Costin Alamariu’s belief that patriarchy, in its original sense of rule of the father, was necessary to ensure men’s control over women and that this was needed to achieve the levels of reproduction that civilisation required (Alamariu’s book title, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy, is revealing - his perspective on eugenics and pronatalism is even more extreme than that of Elon Musk).

Building on Alamariu’s belief, van Dijk sees pornography not as reinforcing male power but as offering men an escape route away from committed relationships with women and children. Sperm banks, she suggests, developed because of a male “exit from reproduction” and fewer men’s willingness to “play the paternal role”. What the porn and fertility industries demonstrate, she concludes, “isn’t the persistence of patriarchy. It’s the death of it. This isn’t a story of reconstituted male power. It’s the collapse of the entire sexual contract.”

There’s much in van Dijk’s account that is illuminating. But her suggestion that pornography and sperm banks destroy patriarchy rather than reinforce it relies on her narrow interpretation of patriarchy as rule of the father, a rule that was smashed by capitalism. Elsewhere, here and here, she dismisses contemporary interpretations of patriarchy as a system of male dominance and female subordination that operates in society generally, one that is still based ultimately on the exploitation of women’s unique capacity to create new life. Instead, van Dijk dismisses contemporary references to patriarchy as fantasy, “keeping the ghost of the despotic Father alive”. It’s a fantasy that feminists need, she suggests, because they get addictive pleasure from fighting it. “Without patriarchy to fight, blame, and endlessly complain about,” she claims, “feminism loses its reason to exist.” Patriarchy in the original sense of father rule, van Dijk suggests here, benefitted women because it secured what they most needed - “male commitment and control”, and it was capitalism that tricked them into foregoing this, and accepting a shift “from reliance on fathers and husbands to dependence on the market and the state.”

Patriarchy 1.0 may have provided an element of security for women and children (including security against other men, it should be said), but it also entitled men to control them within the home. Capitalism freed men from the responsibility to provide security for women and children, but it also provided them with new opportunities to extend their control outside the home. It’s clear that pornography and sperm banks are manifestations of capitalism’s dependence on growth, and its discovery of the human body (not just its labour) as a resource to colonise and exploit. But it’s also clear that how that’s expressed is distinctly patriarchal, in the contemporary sense of the term.

Pornography is not neutral - it is based overwhelmingly on men abusing, degrading, and torturing women. It teaches men that brutalisation and strangulation are appropriate sexual behaviours, and teaches women that this, rather than intimacy, is what they should accept from male partners. Surrogacy denigrates motherhood by defining mothers as ‘surrogates’ or ‘gestational carriers’, it severs the mother/child bond, and it entitles men to harvest women’s eggs, rent their wombs, and take their babies. And the gender industry’s creation of synthetic sex identities has resulted in men feeling entitled to mimic women’s bodies and invade their spaces. Even within the family, it is often forgotten that in the UK it was only in 1992 that rape in marriage became a criminal offence, and it was only in 2015 that coercive control became one too.

Capitalism and patriarchy 2.0 are working together to develop technologies that exploit human biology. Their technologists hope that by building on the foundations they have already put in place they will one day be able to replace mothers with artificial wombs. If they succeed, it won’t usher in the feminist revolution that, 55 years ago, Shulamith Firestone imagined it would. Instead, patriarchal capitalism will have seized from women the power to create new life and it will have deprived children of human contact at the start of their lives. Freed from the need to ensure women’s participation, it will be enabled to accelerate its destructive pursuit of growth. The transhumanist dystopia will have arrived.