Israeli sperm donor crisis

“And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them and God said to them: ‘Be fertile and increase, fill the earth’” (Genesis 1:27-28).

The night before his former spouse underwent artificial insemination by donor, Gil Kidron went to the sperm bank where he received a closed container (“like a container of uranium,” he jokes) in which was a unit of sperm from another man. Kidron didn’t know the man’s name, and in fact knew very little about the donor. This donor would become the biological father of Kidron’s daughter. Kidron, who wrote a Hebrew-language book on the issue titled ''The Sperm of Calamity," traveled home with the sperm-filled container resting on the seat next to him. He went to sleep with the container next to his bed, and the next morning he brought it to the hospital for the procedure. This is the somewhat slipshod way in which Israel’s health establishment carries out a most sensitive, silenced medical procedure.

This is no coincidence. Donor insemination in Israel is still a quasi-covert process despite the fact that “it is no longer the way it was in the 1970s and 1980s, when it was totally uncontrolled,” says professor Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, a sociologist affiliated with Haifa University’s nursing school. “At that time, a donor would come to one room and a sterile couple to another, and the container with sperm would be transferred from one room to the other. Sometimes this was done without any record keeping,” she says. In those years, rumors were rampant that most of the donors were medical students and even the attending physicians themselves.

This might have inspired Milan Kundera's hero, gynecologist Skreta, in The Farewell Waltz (in Czech), who used his own sperm to help couples overcome their infertility problems. Despite all the rumors in Israel, no one conducted any kind of supervision over the process.