This is the Guardian today. Why aren’t there more black sperm donors in the US? Me and my wife, we celebrated our five year anniversary this past summer. We met in 2017. I was the principal of one school and she worked at the other school, and we met at her supervisor’s birthday party. I asked her out, and then she got me a trip to Cuba for Valentine’s Day. And I was like, jeez, if this is my Valentine’s Day present, then I have to propose in Cuba, because what an opportunity. I proposed to her in Cuba, but they have serious restrictions around homosexuality. And so we just kind of looked at each other really delighted, and there was no big embrace until we got back to the hotel room. So five years later, we’re still in it. This is Angela Stapansic, who’s speaking to me from her home in Washington, DC. After that proposal in Cuba, she and Sahida got married. And in 2020, they started looking at the possibility of having a child together. She had always wanted to be a mom. I would say that desire didn’t really lie too deeply inside me. It’s not something that defined me as a woman. I was going to be just fine without kids. But when you meet someone and you love them, and then you love their dreams and hopes, and you’re like, oh, yeah, why not? Okay, let’s do this together. Let’s embark on this wild journey together. They had a few options. Firstly, adoption. But Sahida wanted to carry, so that was out. IVF was another that had involved getting someone they know or someone they don’t know to donate sperm and for one of their eggs to be fertilized with it in a lab. They decided instead that IUI would be their best option. That’s when sperm is inserted directly into the womb. And so they started searching online for a sperm donor, someone who would match as much as possible their backgrounds. I think the speed bump or huge cathys that we didn’t predict was just the lack of diversity in sperm donors. Out of the four main cryobanks in the US, they found just a dozen, a dozen black sperm donors. And that’s a problem that black women, single, in same sex couples, and in straight couples across the US are facing where black women are twice as likely to suffer from infertility than white women. Where do they go if they need help? From the Guardian, I’m Hannah Moore. Today in focus the fertility crisis for black women in the US. Angela, what sorts of conversations, then did you start having with your wife about the type of donor you were looking for me and my wife. We’re both black, but we’re also very fair skinned. And so we wanted to ensure that our donor was browner than both of us so that our child would actually be brown also. And so we were definitely looking for an african american donor or Afro Caribbean, someone in part of the diaspora. And obviously we started out looking know, tall, dark, handsome. All of the ones that were like, yes, I look just like Denzel Washington. We were like, oh, give us two of those. What was it like searching for a sperm donor? I mean, a lot of people listening to this will have never been on the website of a cryobank. So can you just explain what it’s like to go on those websites, what you’re seeing as you’re scrolling through? Oh, yeah, I know a lot of people haven’t scrolled through a cryobank website, but a lot of people have scrolled through a dating website. And honestly, it is so similar. You’re really like, you look at and then you check one box and then people get eliminated. You check another box and then another subset of people get eliminated. And there’s pictures and sometimes even writing samples and even voice notes, right. I had a look on the four big cryobank websites and I was surprised at the level of detail some of them gave out about these men. And I was scrolling through. I found myself imagining who they are, what they’d be like to talk to. Did you and Sahida find it an emotional experience because there were so few black donors? I think it was instead of a connection, we felt kind of a disconnection. And so I think that might be what we felt when looking at it, because you start to look. And of course, when you get to a website, like, some even have 299 right now, and you go and you think, wow, there’s so many. Then you click the African American and it drops down to like seven. And then it creates a little bit of emptiness. It was less a personal connection to the donors and more a question, curiosity, wondering that then turned to kind of sadness. Tell me how things progressed then, for you and your wife. How did you go about finding a sperm donor? Who did you choose? As soon as black sperm hit the market, they really are like, zipped off almost instantly. Even sperm banks do things called, like, buyouts, where you can buy all of the sperm available from one donor. And so when we were looking, there were about twelve donors. Our genetics basically knocked that down about 50% to 70%. And we ended up going with a latino donor, a white, venezuelan, Latino, because my wife is dominican, and we felt that that was close to where we were headed. And so once you’d made that decision, did you manage to get pregnant on the first try? It ended up working for us on the third try, which was wonderful. And what was even more special about getting pregnant with that last vial that we had was that shortly after that, our donor was removed from the market for having too many successful pregnancies. We would have had to go back and start deciding all over again from the start. Third time’s a charm, right? So removed for having too many successful pregnancies. Exactly. And this is a little bit controversial right now. There’s a lot of policies that are trying to come out in the US, but you can only have a certain number of successful pregnancies so that there aren’t too many siblings running around, which would increase the possibility of accidents. Yeah, accidents. When you have a successful pregnancy, you have to report back to the cryobank so that they can ensure that they keep track. There is no regulation for this. Currently, there are men who, while they were told they only had 25 successful pregnancies, 21 in me has shown them that they have 71 children. Oh, wow. So you had a daughter. Tell us about her. How old is she now? What’s her name? What’s she into? She’ll be two in February. And her name is Lola. Oh, my God. She’s into everything. She right now has really learned to exercise the word no. And so that is very strong in this house. She’s very independent. It’s when you think about all that you went through to have a kid, everyone will say, it’s always worth it. Why would I have ever wanted another baby but this gorgeous one that I have, right? So no matter what choices I did or didn’t have, it’s just like, now we have her, and she’s just our perfect little girl. Lisa Armstrong, you’re a reporter and you’re an assistant professor of journalism at UC Berkeley in California. You’ve written an article for the Guardian about the barriers that black women in the US are experiencing in getting fertility care. What first got you thinking about that as an issue? This is an idea that came actually from the editor, Lauren Williams. But in talking with her about the story, she’s a black woman, I’m a black woman. We It’s something that hadn’t really been talked about, like, within our own circle of friends and family, that you would hear about people who are struggling with infertility here and there. And it’s not something that’s really talked about in our communities in general. A lot of women will need a sperm donor to go through IVF or IUI. For men who are hoping to become donors, what do they have to do to get themselves listed on one of those cryobank websites? So for a lot of these cryobanks, there’s an extensive questionnaire, and it looks at people’s educational level, it looks at people’s psychological profile. They require three generations of medical history. So there’s a lot of information that is required. And in a lot of instances, you, for instance, have to have graduated from high school. You can’t have. There’s a thing here called a ged, which is the high school equivalency, but you should have graduated from high school. There are a lot of barriers, and I think in talking with people, one of the biggest ones is this idea of having three generations of medical history, which is something that I’m guessing maybe not a lot of people have, period. But especially for black people who have often not been given the best medical treatment and have not had access to the best medical treatment or any medical treatment in some instances, some of these requirements can serve as barriers. And there’s this notion that you’re giving a part of yourself to an entity, that you have to have some sort of trust. If there’s this invasive process, and if there’s this notion that if you have a tattoo, or if you don’t have a graduate degree, or if you can’t go back three generations and talk about your family’s medical history or if you’ve been incarcerated or any of these things, I think it’s off putting because it suggests that these things that may not actually say much about who you are or whether you are worthy of having children, essentially, is what it boils down to. It speaks of eugenics in the sense that only these kinds of people should have children, only this kind of sperm is good enough. It’s off putting in a country where black people have been subjugated in so many ways. So that leads to situations like Angela and her wife had, where at the time they were looking, in 2020, they could only find twelve available black donors in the whole country. Does it seem that the cryobanks are trying to do anything to sort that problem out? I think they would say that they are. One person from a cryobank and executive director did say, we’re aware of the shortage. And I think that they would say that they’re trying to find people. But I think the thing is, how are you trying? Where are you looking? What are you doing to make sure that you are removing barriers? And I think, like so much else in the United States, there is this structure that is put in place that is built on a foundation of racism. And you can’t, within that structure, then say, well, we’re trying to get more people to donate sperm. You kind of have to examine the structure. Going through the process with my wife and trying to find a black donor, I started to go to the webinars that the cryobanks were having to learn more about their screening process. At the end of one of the webinars, there was A-Q-A and I asked, well, why isn’t there more diversity in the donor pool? Why don’t you have more black donors? And when I asked that, the woman replied, she said, well, we don’t know where to find them. That really struck me, and I was completely taken aback because I thought that was just a really lazy answer. And so when that was the answer, I really said, you know what? Instead of me helping point people in that direction, we need to do this for ourselves. And I think that we can. I had the experience. I know so many others who had this experience on their journey, and if no one has really taken a moment to deeply investigate the problem, then let me be the one to do that. Let us do this for ourselves instead of waiting for someone else to do it for us. So you’ve decided to completely change your career to start your own cryobank. For black, brown, and indigenous people, it’s called reproductive village. We’ve talked about some of the barriers that people are facing in trying to get fertility treatment. How’s your service going to be different to the way things are done at the big cryobanks? What we really want to do is kind of change the experience of the fertility journey for everyone. And so something that I mentioned earlier was the loneliness. Right? Like the transactional nature of cryobanks, and that sense of community was missing. Not only do we want to engage the families and the women who are on their reproductive journeys, but we also want to engage the black men who are donors. A lot of times, a donor might be turned away due to high blood pressure or something in their current health care. And what we want to do is actually have that conversation with the donor, educate them, and point them towards, this is how you can increase that work with this partner that we have who can provide these resources. And so we want to provide holistic care for both the clients and the donors. And historically, that hasn’t really been the case for black people or brown people or indigenous people when they interact with the healthcare industry in the US. Historically, there’s been systemic racism. There’s been a lot of black and brown people in America have been treated as the testers for different things. Or we can think of so many different industries who were built off of the bodies and the spirits of people being used through health care, and that’s in us. And so that a lot of times can deter people from not only getting help or getting consultation, but also it deters black men from even donating sperm altogether. If you go back to the days of slavery, where black women were seen essentially as almost like livestock to be bred. So the idea of having a black woman who’s enslaved and having her have as many children as possible, so that therefore, there would be more enslaved people to work. So it sort of started there. The idea then, obviously, is that black women can reproduce easily, and they have a whole lot of babies that then carried over after emancipation and further on in american history, where there was a switch, where it was like, okay, well, these black women, they’re hyper fertile. They have too many babies, and so we need to now stop them from having babies. There were states that actually forcibly sterilized black and other women of color. And this went up to as far as the 1970s. There were states that were still sterilizing black women, often, sometimes without their knowledge. Sometimes they were told that it was something that was reversible. If you think of a group of people as being hyperfertile, then you don’t necessarily think that infertility is something that would impact them. That history of black women being mistreated by the medical community and the government, how has that perpetuated the problems that some black women are experiencing today when they seek fertility treatment? Are there stereotypes that persist that are causing barriers? Well, there are several. I think one of the first ones is just the fact that there is this idea that black women are hyper fertile. There’s the stereotype of the welfare queen, black women who are having too many babies and are unable to take care of them. There’s the idea that infertility doesn’t affect black women. The way that people have been treated by the medical establishment historically in ways in which they were experimented upon, and then not really given adequate or any health care in some instances. What needs to change? So that women don’t feel that stigma and so that more black women can engage with this process of IVF if they need to and they want to. So I think the first thing is just having conversations early on, like normalizing the fact that all women have to deal with infertility and that it is something that happens. Understanding fertility, so understanding how your body works and at what age, it becomes more difficult to get pregnant through intercourse or even through IVF. One is having these conversations. I think the other thing is also for the cryobanks and reproductive endocrinologists and others who serve women to be aware that even in something as simple as advertising, if your advertising is showing white folks having children through whatever it is that you’re offering, that you’re excluding people, having black doctors and having black staff, so that people will see themselves represented when they walk into your office, like they will see black people like themselves there, because that’s something that some of the women that I interviewed mentioned, that they would walk into these offices and look around. There were no other black people, and there were no other black doctors. Making sure that the people who treat those who are dealing with infertility just are more mindful of the ways in which black women have been excluded in the past. Coming up, what are the challenges for Angela in setting up her cryobank? Angela, how far into the process of setting up your cryobank are you? So we’re actually hoping to open our brick and mortar in the coming year. We’re opening for our first round of capital investment this winter, and I’m really, really excited about all the media attention that we’ve been receiving so far that really lets us know that there’s a strong need for a place like us. We’ve spoken about how a lot of the barriers are intergenerational, the years of mistrust that have built up between the black community and the medical community. In some circumstances, the stigma, maybe, around not being able to conceive naturally. All the information that you have to give over if you want to be a donor are those things that you think, in time, you’ll be able to address through your work. I believe that black people, brown people, Latina, we’re a hopeful people. We believe in change, and we truly believe in each other, too. And so I think that once we start talking to people, and once you really answer a question that someone didn’t even know was deep in their spirit, like a black man even said to me after I had spoken on a panel somewhere, he said, why would I donate sperm? That’s basically just giving away my own children? And I said, yeah, the thing is, though, you’re able to have children, you’d be giving a child to a family that isn’t able to have children. And how much of a champ would you be to do that? That’s amazing work. And he had always thought about what he was losing and not the idea that there’s something that another family can’t do. Since I’ve even started doing the work, so many people have come out of the woodwork just to have more conversations about this, to say, we had no idea this was a problem. How do we fix it? How do we solve this? What can I do to help you move this forward? And it’s really like that field of dreams, old american baseball saying, where if you build it, they will come. How’s it all going to work? What’s most important is that the cryobank, or the outpost, is located in an area that actually has people whose sperm you want to receive. And so for reproductive village cryobank, that means doing research into where are these young, zero black men, what cities have most of them, and where should we locate? And so that’s why DC, Atlanta and Houston are our first three locations. And, you know, one element we haven’t spoken about is the cost of it, because it can be just so incredibly expensive, can’t it? Tens of thousands of dollars to go through IVF. And you obviously have to pay for the sperm as well, which can be a couple of $1,000 for a vial. Oh, yeah. You have to pay for shipping, for storage, for the sperm. Sometimes you even have to pay to get extra information about the donor. It really racks up. Yeah. Is there anything that you can do? And maybe this is too big of an ask, but to help people financially, because of know, healthcare in the US is privatized, not everybody has health insurance. Health care in the US definitely presents a lot of challenges. Sometimes IUI and IVF aren’t even covered by your insurance. And so along with purchasing sperm, you have to pay out of pocket for every single cycle. And sometimes the meds that come with the cycle. And so it can be very prohibitive. And so what? I can’t do a lot as the owner of a cryobank, but what I can do is put in place a sliding scale so that if there is a family who for some reason can’t afford donor sperm at the market price, we can work with you. Similar to the way that other organizations planned Parenthood for example, when I grew up, they had a sliding scale, and that’s how I was able to access healthcare. And so that’s what we plan to do to actually work and make it accessible. Angela, thank you so much. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Your questions were wonderful, and I appreciate your interest. That was Angela Stapansic and professor Lisa Armstrong. You can read Lisa’s article@theguardian.com. As I mentioned, it’s part of a wider analysis by the Guardian us about the barriers to fertility treatment for black women and couples. So do have a scroll around. Check out the other articles in that series. That’s it for today. I’m Hannah Moore, and this episode was produced by Hattie Moyer. Sound design was by Rudy Zagadlo. The executive producer was Elizabeth Catsen. We’ll be back tomorrow. This is the Guardian.