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A dad who used Facebook and Instagram to find surrogate mothers for his children has set up a website to ‘matchmake’ other people needing help to make a baby. But a fertility expert says people going down the DIY route are taking huge risks.
Christian Newman and husband Mark turned to Facebook in 2016 to help them find an egg donor and a surrogate mother. Since then, they’ve had two “amazing” children; one surrogate came via Facebook, the second they found on Instagram.
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Newman told Kathryn Ryan that their experience showed there was a huge gap in the market for people struggling to find sperm donors or surrogates. He’s set up a free-to-use website that operates as a matchmaking platform.
“It's not necessarily same-sex couples, because this isn't just a same-sex issue. This is an everybody issue, and it's a fertility issue. A lot of people can't get pregnant. I've spoken to people that have had cancer or hysterectomies or numerous other issues from a health perspective, as well as those that just can't fall pregnant from fertility reasons.”
Newman said his website brings these people together with “these amazing angels” offering sperm or egg donation, or surrogacy. The website has around 700 members so far.
“Basically it's open to the world, but mostly we've got New Zealanders and Australians on board. And so far we've had a handful of successful cases of people meeting and having children.”
Newman said his site encouraged people to use a clinic rather than navigate a minefield of health and legal issues on their own.
“If you're a surrogate or an egg donor or a sperm donor, that's up to you to vet those people that are you're going to be donating to.
“There’s a lot of people that are really desperate. There’s two-to-three year waitlists, and there's people that are meeting on random Facebook groups. And they're just having people come over… so there's massive risks around that as well.”
Dr Andrew Murray, group medical director of Fertility Associates, said there are multiple risks in the DIY approach.
As well as screening for sexually transmitted infections or other health issues, clinics also held knowledge about donor medical history – and could control where the sperm went.
“Just in the last year or so we've had previous donors contact us to let us know about particular health conditions that they've subsequently developed that they didn't know at the time of donating. We can then provide linking services to the offspring of those donations to provide them with the important health information they might not otherwise have access to.
“I'd imagine most children or individuals don't want to find out that they've got 50 other siblings in the world. With clinics providing that oversight, we help control where the sperm’s going, and and how many families are coming from that.”
Murray said that donors who don’t go through a clinic are also potentially exposing themselves to being approached to provide financial support for the offspring later on.
Murray said the Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Act of 2004 protects sperm, egg or embryo donors.
“It states quite clearly that the donor doesn't have any financial obligations, nor do they have any custodial rights. I think that's an important thing to acknowledge that there are some well-publicised cases where a woman has had a donor recruited through Facebook, and this particular donor made a bit of a nuisance of themselves wanting to infiltrate his way into the life of that woman's family.”
DIY treatment is also less successful than clinic treatment, he said.
“If we take the example of a 40-year-old woman who is trying to conceive naturally through just artificial insemination, DIY at home, the chance of a baby per attempt per month would be about 5 percent. A single IVF cycle for that woman would give her a 25 percent chance of a baby.”
Murray said that Fertility Associates, which provides the majority of donor and surrogacy services in New Zealand, currently has 1200 women wanting sperm donors on its wait list. Clinic insemination, and donor fees, cost about $3,600 for a single cycle, whereas an IVF cycle costs closer to $20,000.
Murray said he hoped current reviews of the surrogacy laws would also include donor compensation.
“We don't necessarily want outright commercial sperm donation or egg donation or surrogacy, but we certainly don't want our donors to be financially worse off. We think it's reasonable that that they're provided with some form of financial recognition for the time that they're giving up.”
Murray said he was “on the same page” as Newman’s website, which encourages people to meet and directs them to a clinic.
“We want there to be more donors. We want these couples and families to become possible.”
He said he had more concerns for people becoming, or seeking, donors or surrogates via social media.
“If someone's thinking of being a donor, whether it's a sperm donor, egg donor, or perhaps even putting their hand up for surrogacy, we want to hear from them… We just want to provide a safe framework for that to happen.”