Our Co-Founder, Darlene Pinkerton, on why she and her daughter, Kaitlin Locher, are creating a new model for sperm donation that puts donor-conceived people at the center of the equation.
Every week brings more scandalous stories about deception in the fertility world. We’ve heard of sperm donors with a thousand offspring and genetic origins kept secret, revealed only by a home DNA test. Sadly, many of these reports are true but they are sensationalized, leading to mistrust of the fertility industry. This further stigmatizes donation and the good that results when people seek the help of a trusted sperm donor to create their families.
Traditionally, sperm donation has been mired in secrecy and a lack of transparency, woefully lacking in forethought on the impact to donor conceived people. Donors and their contribution are seen as ‘inventory’ and having vital information, like donor profiles, are often limited to baby photos and few details about who the donor is as a person.
We now know how damaging that is. Every donor conceived person deserves to have vital information about their medical and genetic history. Their creation story should never be a secret.
The Approach To Sperm Donation Needs To Change
Through my 25+ years of experience in egg donation and surrogacy through A Perfect Match, I’ve learned that earning the trust of my clients is the number one factor in not only my success, but the positive outcome of a fertility journey.
Together with Tom Pinkerton, a 35-year reproductive attorney and pioneer in this field, and Kaitlin Locher, our daughter via surrogacy, who is the CEO of Coast to Coast Sperm Donation, we founded C2C to set a standard for a new approach to sperm donation. Our mission is to serve the needs of recipients and donor-conceived persons who want a connection to and a commitment from their sperm donor to provide opportunity to the adult donor-conceived person to know who he is.
Don’t the people who are born through donation deserve access to their own history? Absolutely!
This is why 70% of Coast to Coast sperm donors will meet recipient parents via video or phone to answer questions, and 100% of our donors agree to releasing their information to the donor-conceived person at the age of 18.
For many of our donors, limiting the number of families they help is their number one reason for donating through Coast to Coast instead of a sperm bank. C2C agrees to limit the number of families who will match with a donor to no more than 6 family units, worldwide.
Trust. Transparency and a commitment to donor-conceived people is what makes Coast to Coast Donation different – the next generation sperm bank.
If you know me, you know I won’t settle for anything less.
