Have Sperm, Will Travel
Amidst a historic shortage at sperm banks nationwide, a new means of donation is on the rise: Facebook groups. Elaine Byrd got involved in the community first as a moderator, then as a recipient. That’s how she met Ari Nagel, aka the Sperminator, a superdonor with nearly a hundred biological children and counting. But could he possibly live up to his own hype?
By
Rachel Monroe
Oct 20, 2021
Oct 20, 2021
Ari Nagel has biologically fathered nearly one hundred children around the world. He offers his services free of charge.
ANDREW HETHERINGTON
Elaine Byrd wanted a second child. The longing began after a hectic period in 2015, when she’d cared for three children under the age of two: her daughter, Ember, and a relative’s infant twins. Fortunately, Elaine, a kindergarten teacher in the suburbs of Memphis, liked babies. Years earlier, she'd fostered several children. At least with infants, there were no midnight calls from the police, no fights in the street. Instead, there were court dates, doctor appointments, paperwork. Elaine needed more help than Ember's father was willing to give, and after they'd had the twins for a couple months, she left him. Caring for the children was easier on her own, which didn't mean it was easy. One day she drove by a church whose lawn was studded with crosses representing the souls of aborted fetuses. She called the pastor. "In my house there are a couple of babies that could've been aborted," she told him. "Now they're here, and I have to go to work." The next morning at 6:30 sharp, a lady from the church showed up to watch them, and she came back every day after that.
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After the twins were returned to their mother's care, Elaine was eager to get pregnant again. By now she knew she didn't need a man to raise a child, but she did need one to help her start the process. She spent a year and a half trying to meet someone the old-fashioned way but didn't have much luck. She asked Ember's father if he'd drop off some sperm at a nearby fertility clinic, but he asked too many questions about custody and child support. There were sperm banks, of course, but to Elaine they seemed so impersonal, not to mention expensive. As her fortieth birthday approached, she worried that her time was running out. Then she remembered this cute girl she knew from the beauty-pageant scene, where Ember had become a top national competitor. Elaine was friendly enough with the girl's mothers, so one day she asked, "How did your baby get here?" She glanced from one woman to the other. "Because I think you had to have some kind of help."
"And she just took me under her wing and told me everything," Elaine said. "All the real, raw details."
Like mattresses and houseplants, sperm donation has been disrupted by the Internet. The market demanded it: Supply at sperm banks is at a historic low, in part because average sperm counts have steadily declined for more than four decades—probably due to environmental factors—and now many men no longer meet the banks' strict standards. And nonwhite donors have always been underrepresented.
As an alternative, many people are turning to social media for direct-to-consumer sperm via Facebook groups like USA Sperm Donation, Real Sperm Donors, and Miracle Baby. Their members include potential donors as well as people who want to get pregnant but don't have ready access to viable sperm: infertile couples, queer couples, trans men, single mothers by choice. In the groups, they seek donations from people like Kristian (six-foot-one, slender, hazel eyes, excellent sperm count, recent STD tests) and Alex (six-foot-three, perfect SAT scores, athletic). Compared with sperm banks, which keep donors anonymous, the men on Facebook are much more open: A donor might show a potential recipient pictures of other children he's conceived, chat with her via DM to see if they vibe, and invite her to join a private Facebook group for the parents of the children he's fathered. And unlike sperm banks, where a single specimen can run upward of $1,000, the Facebook donors generally provide their sperm for free, other than reimbursement for travel and other expenses.
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In the Sperm Donation USA group, Elaine Byrd learned things about sperm that amazed her.
ANDREW HETHERINGTON
The idea of a known donor appealed to Elaine. Ember knew her father, even though she didn't live with him; Elaine wanted her future children to have that opportunity, too. Ideally, she decided, she wanted a donor who would remain in friendly, loose contact with his offspring. By 2018, Elaine was spending hours each day in the Facebook groups, considering potential donors. She learned the subculture's argot and saw hints of the complications that the pageant mom had warned her about. AI meant artificial insemination, typically performed using a soft cup, a vessel that looked like a diaphragm, into which the donor ejaculated. NI stood for natural insemination—i.e., sex, which some donors insisted was the more effective method, since some sperm die when exposed to air. Other donors shipped sperm, but that got expensive: dry ice, overnight delivery. One guy in Atlanta was known as the Uber Donor: He'd jerk off into a cup and send the sample via car service.
Though the groups had tens of thousands of members between them, the donor pool wasn't as big as it initially seemed. Three quarters of Sperm Donation USA's members were people seeking donors, just like Elaine. She discovered that finding the right candidate among the limited options was tricky. There were donors who struck her as genuine: They talked about how they'd joined the groups after watching their friends or sisters struggle to conceive. But some had murkier motivations. From other women, Elaine heard stories of guys who'd ghosted, or turned creepy, or refused to take an STD test. Some would pretend to be okay with AI but, at the last minute, insist on NI.
And then there was this one white man whose name kept popping up. Ari Nagel, forty-six, was tall, with blue eyes, a wide smile, and soft, graying curls. Over the past decade, he'd had more than fifty donor children and was something of a celebrity in the world of sperm donation. He didn't offer his services in the groups because he didn't have to; women sought him out. Dozens of mothers vouched for him online. Elaine, who is Black, appreciated that he was a math teacher and didn't mind that he was white—so was Ember's dad. She looked Ari up on Instagram, where his handle was CuteProfessor, and on Facebook, where it was NicePerson. Almost all the photos featured his donor children—so many beaming, beautiful babies.
In December 2018, Elaine messaged Ari on Facebook. When he didn't reply, she reached out again. "Hey, I've been trying to get up with you for a minute," she wrote. She told him that she had some questions for him.
"Sure," he replied. "U can ask anything."
Rest of article:
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a37982793/sperm-donor-shortage-facebook-groups/