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Chloe met the donor in a car park and used the public toilets for insemination
You can hear Dr Faye Kirkland's report on Woman's Hour at 10:00 on Friday 26 February on Radio 4 Or catch up later online
Chloe's donor fathered 10 children via a fertility clinic before providing sperm online
If people are unable to get fertility treatment on the NHS they sometimes use unregulated Facebook groups to find men willing to sell or donate their sperm. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority says this carries significant risks - and it could also be illegal - but two women told the BBC they felt that they had no choice.
When Chloe and her partner had been trying to get pregnant for a year without success, their family doctor referred them to the local NHS fertility clinic. Tests showed that there was a problem with Chloe's partner's sperm and they would have to use a donor to have a baby.
The clinic gave them a list of sperm donors, but Chloe says there was only one available donor in their ethnic group who had not been chosen by other families. Excited and nervous, they embarked on their first round of IVF in October 2017. It didn't work.
The clinic suggested they move on to another form of fertility treatment, ICSI, where sperm is injected into the eggs. The treatment is more expensive than IVF and because they had already had one round of NHS fertility treatment they would have to pay for it themselves.
"We've got that disappointment that it hadn't worked, and if we wanted to try again, we would have to find thousands of pounds. We were getting married in three months so we'd ploughed all our money into that. It was just something we couldn't afford," says Chloe.
For a year, she battled with the clinical commissioning group to get more treatment on the NHS, arguing she hadn't been given a fair chance. But in the end, it was a firm "No".
It was then her husband suggested they should look for a sperm donor online.
She joined several groups on Facebook, using a fake name so her family and friends wouldn't find out what she was doing, and found a potential donor.
Once he had provided her with his medical and family history, and sexually transmitted infection checks, she arranged to meet him in a car park near his home, miles from where they lived.
"It sounds really not very ideal," says Chloe. "He would prepare the sample, meet up, hand it over. And then I would go in the toilet and do what I needed to do."
Chloe's husband came along to make sure she was safe, but waited in the car. They did this six times. Chloe did get pregnant once, but she miscarried.
On every occasion they paid their donor £50 for the sperm and £10 for travel expenses.
Regulated clinics compensate donors for their travel expenses up to a maximum of £35, but it is illegal for them to pay donors for their sperm, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the UK's fertility regulator.
When an individual rather than a business provides what the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 refers to as "non-medical fertility services" the rules are less clear, according to the HFEA. A person who sells sperm for £50 a time may or may not be considered a business under the law. No court cases have yet been brought that would test this, the HFEA says.
When the pandemic hit and travel restrictions made it more difficult to meet up, Chloe and her husband found a different donor, again via Facebook.
This one travelled to her home, which Chloe says made her feel more relaxed.
"I could just do it in my own time. There was no need to rush, not in a toilet where I needed to get in and get out. It was just a bit more comfortable because it was in my own environment."
And they were successful - Chloe is now pregnant.
"We're so, so happy," says Chloe. "We've been on this journey for a long, long time. And we're just so grateful now that we're able to have a child. We have a family, and that's something that we've wanted for so long."
They haven't told their family or friends that they used a donor, partly because they don't want people to know that Chloe's husband is unable to have children, but also because they know "there are going to be people out there that think it's really wrong".
Out of "courtesy" they have told the sperm donor that she is pregnant, but Chloe says that as far as she is concerned he has no rights to the child, and her husband's name will be on the birth certificate.
Chloe's donor previously made donations via a regulated clinic, but they restrict donors to a maximum of 10 families and he has already reached this limit. He has had three more children that she knows of with women contacted via social media.
Under a law introduced in 2005, children conceived from donated sperm have the right to contact their donor at the age of 18, but Chloe and her husband have decided not to tell their child how he or she was conceived, unless there is a medical reason.
"They don't need to know. We wanted a child, and this was our only option," Chloe says. "I feel that people shouldn't be put in this position, to go down this route, but there isn't much option if you can't afford IVF."
In the end Chloe had a good outcome, but she knows it wasn't without risk.
Through her Facebook groups she has heard of sperm donors who suddenly wanted to keep in touch or be part of the child's life, after finding out about a positive pregnancy. And she knows of women who have been asked to have sex instead when the donor comes to hand over the sperm.
The groups try to keep tabs on dodgy donors.
"There's risk lists, names of people to avoid, [but] they have multiple accounts," says Chloe.
Lorraine, another user of these closed Facebook groups, has had some bad experiences with donors.
She was 38 when she and her female partner decided to start a family, but same-sex female couples are not entitled to NHS treatment unless they have had at least six cycles of artificial insemination and failed to get pregnant - rules vary from one clinical commissioning group to another.
Private clinics were not an option for Lorraine and her partner, however. "It was far, far too much money, it would take me years to save up," Lorraine says. Obtaining sperm from a sperm bank costs between £600 to £1,300 pounds per sample, depending on the country of origin.
So Lorraine turned to Facebook, specifying on her profile that she wanted AI - artificial insemination - only.
Tracking her cycle, to work out when she would ovulate, she started having conversations with the 20 or so potential donors who got in touch.
"Some of them are lovely. Some of them are not. Some of them genuinely want to help you. And some of them end up being really sleazy," she says.
On one occasion after a donor promised to help he said, "I think you're beautiful," and asked for sex instead - so-called "natural insemination". He then sent an inappropriate photo.
Other donors were just stringing her along. She would spend hours getting to know them, having long chats on Facetime and gathering all the necessary medical information, but when she was ovulating and needed their help they would stop responding to messages.
"All of a sudden they would ghost you, right when you need it," she says.
"You feel so panicky that you're texting them every hour on the hour. 'Hello, are you there?' and then all of a sudden they will block you."
This happened several times. "I was heartbroken, I actually wanted to give up because I couldn't cope with it," she says.
Then one night, the day before she was due to ovulate again, Lorraine was scrolling through Facebook when she found a man who had posted a lengthy explanation of why he wanted to donate. His brother was gay and unable to have children, which spurred him on to help others in this situation.
Lorraine got in touch and this time he was the one asking all the questions, which she says was "refreshing". He had strict rules: he would only donate to established couples, non-smokers, no drug users and so on.
After chatting for three hours, Lorraine confessed she was due to ovulate in the next 24 hours.
The next day he got on a train from London. He did not want to be paid, and the couple only refunded his £36 train fare.
After three attempts Lorraine found out she was pregnant and she and her partner now have an eight-month-old daughter. She sent the donor a photo and with her permission he uploaded the fact she had given birth on his Facebook profile.
He does this every time he has a successful outcome. That's how Lorraine knew he'd had 14 other children by the time she had her baby. Since then she says there have been three more.
They plan to tell their daughter that "a special gentleman was helping other families like us". She has a picture of him as a child which she plans to give her daughter, along with the name he gave, even though she knows it's made up.
They signed a 16-page written agreement with the donor, saying that he doesn't want anything to do with the baby, and that they won't pursue him for any money.
However it may not stand up in court.
"It hasn't gone through any lawyer," says Lorraine.
Sally Cheshire, who chairs the HFEA, warns there is currently no law to protect anyone opting into such an agreement.
"If consent is not correctly taken and at the right time, then parenthood status may not transfer and the donor will still be the father in the eyes of the law, with all the parental and financial responsibilities that brings."
She also says that using a donor who hasn't undergone comprehensive health checks carries significant risks.
"UK regulated clinics are required to test the sperm for a wide range of diseases and genetic illnesses that even a conscientious unregulated donor might miss, putting mother and baby at risk."
The BBC asked the HFEA how many times over a five-year period it had reported concerns to police about people buying or selling sperm outside a regulated clinic. The HFEA said it held no information relevant to the request.
In a separate Freedom of Information request, the BBC asked all police forces how many times in the last five years anyone had reported concerns that individuals were breaking the law by buying or selling sperm without a licence. Over 90% of forces replied - and all of them said they had received no such reports.
A Facebook spokesperson said: "We allow people to discuss sperm donation on Facebook, but we work closely with law enforcement to remove content that breaks local law."
Lorraine feels strongly that the cost of sperm in private clinics is too high and that it should be available on the NHS.
"To me, it feels like it's a money-making scam, which is why people meet up with guys in toilets. Because we haven't got thousands of pounds to go to a clinic, we're having to revert to disgusting things."
The BBC asked NHS England to comment on the difficulties some people face accessing fertility treatment. A spokesperson said: "Ultimately these are legally decisions for clinical commissioning groups, which are under an obligation to balance the various competing demands on the NHS locally while living within the budget parliament has allocated."
When Natasha and her husband had difficulty conceiving a child, doctors gave her two pieces of bad news. The first was that she would need to find a donor egg. The second was that Afro-Caribbean eggs are rarely donated. But she hasn't given up hope.
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Are sperm counts really dropping worldwide?
(Image credit: Science Photo Library )
The shock conclusion of a study 20 years ago indicated that sperm counts had halved. But a closer look at the evidence then and now paints a much more complex story.
Ask someone what they know about men’s sperm counts, and the chances are you will hear that they are dropping. People will probably have plenty of theories as to why this is happening – perhaps because of herbicides, pesticides, or oestrogens in the water from so many women being on the pill. Or there are theories based on lifestyle – for instance, men are taking less exercise, eating more fast food and getting fatter. Some even suggest that wearing tight pants can cause problems.
But is it really true that sperm counts are in free-fall globally? To understand why this perception is so common, we have to go back to a paper published 20 years ago.
Elisabeth Carlsen and her colleagues reviewed 61 studies of semen quality carried out between 1938 and 1990, and their conclusions published in the British Medical Journal in 1992 were shocking. In 50 years sperm counts had halved. The authors were open in saying that the data did not indicate whether or not the decline was continuing. But the mass of publicity their findings received left many with the idea that it had been proven beyond doubt – sperm counts are not only falling everywhere, but will continue to do so.
However, there are a number of issues with drawing conclusions about trends from these 61 original studies, and these are worth going through in some detail. Starting with the participants, studies of the sperm count of the average man are supposed to preclude men with fertility problems. But getting volunteers to provide semen samples is not easy, so some subjects might enrol in studies because they are concerned about their sperm count, yet fail to divulge this to the researchers. Different studies use different methods of ensuring that fertility is proven, but if some volunteers suspect they might have low sperm counts this could skew the sample, if you’ll forgive the pun.
There are also other factors that vary from study to study, such as the length of time there has been between the provision of the tested sample and the previous ejaculation. Also, methods of analysing semen samples have changed between 1938 and 1990. The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends using laboratory techniques that do not rely on an individual making a judgement, but this wasn’t the case for the earlier studies, making it hard to compare them with measurements taken 50 years later. And it is not just the practical techniques that have changed; statistical methods of analysing data have evolved too. 
When you look at the set of studies reviewed in the paper in more detail, it seems that although sperm counts do appear to have dropped in some places, they might have risen in others, even in different regions of the same country. In Paris, sperm counts appear to have declined, while they remained stable in another French city, Toulouse.
Many of the original studies were too small to be considered as representative of a population. A re-analysis of the 20 largest studies found that the majority had been conducted before 1970 in New York, where sperm counts seemed particularly high. The later studies were from different places, which meant that sperm counts in one geographical location were compared with counts from somewhere different over a different period of time. Once these studies were removed, the picture looked a little different and sperm quality didn’t seem to be in decline. So perhaps the 1992 review was in fact highlighting differences between different regions, rather than differences over time.
Picking apart the studies in this review paper is one thing, but what does the research post-1992 tell us? The picture is mixed , with some studies still showing evidence for a decline in some places and others showing sperm counts have remained stable. To take two examples, a Finnish study published last year found that men born towards the end of the 1980s had lower sperm counts on average than those born at the beginning of the same decade. But Danish research that has been taking semen samples from young men about to begin military service has found no decline in sperm quality in 5,000 volunteers so far.
Geographical location seems to make a difference, but the lack of studies conducted in low-income countries makes it difficult to establish a full picture. A paper published this year highlights the fact that even studies from middle-income countries have rarely included the poorest people.
So, twenty years on from the BMJ paper we cannot say we have a complete picture about sperm counts globally. We can say that sperm counts are declining in some places, and this needs to taken seriously. But from the best evidence it seems this crisis is not happening everywhere. And without new and carefully controlled studies, we are likely to spend many more years in the dark over this issue. It is only by looking carefully at where counts are and are not falling, using the most accurate methods available, that we might find any clue to the cause.
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James MacDougall donated sperm to lesbian couples
Mr MacDougall advertised his availability as a sperm donor on social media
The case was heard at Derby Crown Court
A man fathered 15 children after advertising his sperm on social media despite having an inheritable condition, a court has heard.
James MacDougall has a genetic condition which means his children could have learning difficulties.
At the court hearing last week, he was told he would not be able to contact three of his children.
A judge allowed him to be identified to protect other people planning to use private sperm donors.
The 37-year-old's application to have contact with four of his children was heard at Derby Crown Court.
During the hearing it was revealed that he has Fragile X syndrome - an inherited condition that cannot be cured.
Despite knowing this, he still advertised his sperm for use by lesbian couples on social media.
In a written judgement, presiding judge Mrs Justice Lieven said he showed "fundamental irresponsibility" by acting as a sperm donor, adding he "took advantage" of the women's desire to have children.
She described him as a "complex character" who suffered from learning difficulties and was on the autistic spectrum.
The court reviewed Mr MacDougall's application to have contact with the four children, who are cared for by three mothers.
He regularly met with the first child - named as R - between October 2019 and March 2020, despite signing an agreement prior to donating sperm that he would not have contact.
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