Increasing Use of Imported Sperm Donations – The Trend of the Last Years

Introduction: Importing sperm donations (SD) from overseas has become common.. Recently, more treated women prefer the usage of non-Israeli donors.

Aim: To evaluate the tendency of increasing demand for foreign SD and to characterize the sub populations which wish to have this option available.

Material & Methods: The regulations permit the import of SD from abroad, by approved Sperm Banks. The increasing demand of treated patients for overseas SD brought us to adapt our service, accordingly. We collaborate with two sperm banks in the US and two in Europe. A computerized system has been installed in our sperm bank in 2009, enabling the tracing of data and results of the patients. The registry of pregnancies is cumbersome since patients often do not update us with treatment results.

Results: During the years 2009 and 2016, 17174 donor sperm samples were used among 13160 patients. Patients were subdivided according to their age into 4 groups: ≤30 years (7.9%), 31-35y (18.6%), 36-39y (29.4%) and ≥40y (40.3%). The desire for foreign sperm sample was 38.4%, 30.4%, 32.3% and 28.7% among the corresponding age groups. 56% of the patients performed IUI and 44% used it for IVF\ICSI. Those with IUI achieved 7.5% pregnancies per treated cycle. Patients performing IVF\ICSI achieved 17.3% conceptions. 67.4% of the samples were from Israeli donors and 32.6% were foreign samples. In 2009 foreign sperm samples were 24.9% of the total samples in that year, in 2016 their proportion increased to 41.1% (p<0.001). The pregnancy rate among the different age groups was 15.5%, 12.1%, 13.3% and 7.6%, respectively. The pregnancy rate with foreign sample was significantly higher, 11.3%, compared with Israeli donors, 7.6%, p<0.001.

Conclusions: Possible reasons to explain the increase in foreign samples are: 1) more patients have concerns about insect probability. 2) patients get more information about donors. Sperm banks abroad demand the information about the outcome of treatment and patients intend to respect it, which they do not with Israeli donors.