The Spermbar project focuses on the sperm bank business in the United States.
In Denmark, for example, you only have access to limited donor information such as eye color, hair color, skin color, etc. Whereas in the U.S., much more information and many more services are available (for more money).
Here are some of those services:
In addition to the donor’s eye color and ancestry, you can also have access to his Religion. Is there a Religious gene?
If you want an intelligent donor, check to see if he is a Graduate Donor. Learn whether your donor choices are athletes, musicians, artists, or scientists by reading their Donor Personal Essays.
Look at the donors’ Childhood Pictures, knowing how meaningful it may be one day when your son or daughter recognizes those big brown eyes as their own.
If you’re a big fan of Johnny Depp, be sure your offspring will resemble him by buying the Donor Look-a-Like option. And if you want a mix between Johnny and Orlando, don’t worry; the site links directly to photos of the 2-3 celebrities the staff has deemed each donor most closely resembles.
If you have a person or picture you would like your donor to resemble, like that friend in college who married your best friend, call to schedule a Donor Matching Consultation or use our online Face match, based on technology that uses sophisticated mathematical formulas to compare two facial images.
Sperm banks use Federal Express and UPS to ship your vials into specially designed shipping tanks; you should plan on receiving it two days prior to your insemination.
The Spermbar project takes the online sperm-bank shopping experience and brings it to the main street using the emblematic New York style food cart. Inspired by her happening, The Procreative Dinner, Prune Nourry will collaborate with a top New York based mixologist, Cristian Molina, to mix unique juice cocktails in order to recreate the experience of sperm donor application process and selection.
Through this website, participants are solicited to symbolically donate their sperm by filling out a donor application form online. Each trait is linked to an ingredient. Each symbolic sperm donation will produce a unique and random flavor.
Then, on the day of the event, the cart will be placed in a busy street corner where pedestrians are prompted to select a sperm donor, using a database on an iPad to search for an ideal candidate. Will the juice satisfy their expectations?
Here are some links to leading US Sperm banks where you can find those services:
To read:
The Genius Babies, and How They Grew, a series of articles by David Plotz, journalist at Slate
The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception by Debora L. Spar, President of Barnard College (Harvard Business Press, 2006)
Excerpts from The Baby Business by Debora L. Spar:
“The Respository for Germinal Choice for example, offer[s] only the sperm of exceptional donors, including Nobel Prize winners and Olympic athletes” (Spar, 37).
“In Denmark and most of its export markets, Cryos competes on the quality of its product and the anonymity of its donors. It identifies them only by number, sells sperm only to doctors, and reveals nothing except the minimal physical characteristic of its donors: height and weight, hair and eye color” (Spar, 38).
“Rather than limit the information they disclose, [American] firms such as California Cryobank and the Genetics and IVF Institute instead provide potential recipients with a veritable smorgasbord of detail: hobbies, family history, favorite foods, handwriting samples-'everything,' says Dr. Keith Blauer of the Genetics and IVF Institute, 'except their address, telephone number, and name'” (Spar, 39).
“California Cryobank, for example, provides twenty-four pages of information, including religion, hair texture, occupation, and years of education. For an additional $20, recipients can purchase an audiotape of the donor answering questions in his own voice. Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia offers extended donor profiles for $7 to $15, with health histories that span three generations. It also provides a personal shopping service in which clients send photos of the person they'd like their child to resemble” (Spar, 37).