“I’m Swedish-Norwegian and really wanted to have a gene pool that was similar to my own,” Peterson said. “I wanted a baby that looked like me and wanted to share my heritage with my baby.”
When Julie Peterson decided to have a baby on her own two years ago, she picked a tall, blond, blue-eyed Danish engineer as a sperm donor to match her own Scandinavian heritage. But when she went back to the sperm bank to use the same donor to have another child, she was stunned to discover that the federal government had made it impossible.
“I just cried,” said Peterson, 43, who lives in North Carolina. “I was in complete shock. I hadn’t thought about anything but having another baby with this donor. It was just so surprising and bewildering.”
The sperm bank had run out of vials from Peterson’s donor and could not replace them, because of restrictions health officials have instituted to protect Americans against the human form of mad cow disease. Since May 2005, the United States has effectively barred sperm banks from importing from Europe for fear it might spread the brain-ravaging pathogen that causes the affliction.
Now, as the remaining vials of Nordic semen frozen in U.S. sperm banks are running out, a small but desperate number of would-be parents are frantic. Peterson has flown repeatedly to Denmark, and went again this week, to try to get pregnant with sperm from the same donor. Others are going to Canada or Mexico, or haggling with other American women who have leftover vials.
“I think it’s outrageous,” said Laura, a Los Angeles lawyer who asked that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy. She decided against paying a New York woman more than $2,000 for a few vials from a donor she nicknamed “Sven,” whom she used a few years ago to conceive a son. A vial usually costs less than $500. “I’d love to give him a full sibling. But I just couldn’t do it. It’s so unfortunate.”