"So how does this all work?"

As admin of several sperm donor groups on Facebook, including by far the largest donor group in the UK (and I believe it's still the second-largest in the world), the question I'm asked most often by new recipients is "so how does this all work?"  This is an extremely ambiguous question which can mean totally different things to different people.  For some, it might mean that they have literally no idea how informal sperm donation works, or have no idea about the terminology of the different donation methods.  But it might also mean that they know all of these things and are simply asking how I personally operate as a donor, or about any special rules that are followed on my own groups.  So I thought it might save some time in future if I write an introductory post for new recipients which covers as many of these points as possible.

The first thing to say is that Facebook groups are generally used for a very informal donation process that doesn't involve clinics at all.  Occasionally a recipient might ask for a known donor for IVF or something like that, and that's fine as long as you're clear about what you're asking for - but bear in mind that 99% of donors are not offering that and might be very surprised that you asked.

The abbreviations for the main donation methods are as follows:

AI (stands for Artificial Insemination, and is sometimes misspelled as AL): The donor provides you with a donation in a container and you subsequently inseminate yourself, usually with a syringe.  This might happen in your own home, in the donor's home, in a hotel room, or you might travel to a meeting point to collect the donation and then take it home with you.  (The latter process is the one I've personally used for AI donations for the last six or seven years.)

NI (stands for Natural Insemination): This is simply sex.  Again, it might happen in your own home, in the donor's home, or in a hotel room.  The biggest cause of misunderstandings and arguments on these groups is that 80% of recipients want AI only and 80% of donors want NI only.  The ground rules for navigating this problem are as follows: a) donors should not pressurise AI recipients into doing NI (and any attempts at coercion should be reported to the group admins), but b) recipients should understand that NI is allowed on the groups and not get angry simply because a donor offers it.  If it's not suitable for you, just politely say no and look for someone else.  Bear in mind that 10-20% of recipients actively prefer NI - sometimes that's because they think it will work better, or it might simply be that they want the process to be as natural as possible.

PI (Partial Insemination): This is supposed to be very brief sex, but in my view the concept is deeply unhelpful because no two people can agree on what the hell it actually means in concrete terms.  That's a recipe for disaster if a recipient thinks that PI is agreed, the donor then proceeds to do something indistinguishable from NI, the recipient complains afterwards, and the donor shrugs and says "that was PI, that was what we agreed".  It's best to just jump one way or the other - either AI or NI.

AI+ (Artificial Insemination Plus): Avoid any donor who suggests this - it'll be an attempt to "upgrade" the donation into sexual activity of some sort while still calling it artificial insemination.

Charging for donations outside a clinical setting is not illegal in the UK - people will tell you that it is and will get very angry with you if you disagree, but it's not.  The Sunday Times looked into this very thoroughly last year and concluded that charging is generally not illegal, although there may be some exceptions where a donor is storing their sperm in a manner analogous to a sperm bank.  However, it's definitely illegal to send sperm through the post in the UK, as a small number of American donors do.  (Posting sperm is essentially a financial scam in any case, because pregnancies very rarely occur.)

Donors to avoid: Facebook groups are the "Wild West" of sperm donation, so unfortunately they do attract some unsavoury characters, and it's important to keep your wits about you.  It's impossible to provide an exhaustive list of all the dangerous or dodgy donors out there, but here are three who should definitely be avoided - 

Joe Donor: American who openly admits he would be arrested if he ever returned to his home country.  He initially used Argentina as a refuge, but then tried his luck in the UK, probably because his Argentinian visa had expired.  It's believed he's pressurised recipients into putting his name on their babies' birth certificate to support his claim for extending his UK visa.  He once appeared on This Morning with a recipient he claimed to be engaged to, and it came across virtually as a hostage video - she looked deeply uncomfortable and seemed to be saying what he had instructed her to say.  He's been accused of leaving recipients in tears by doing NI when only PI had been agreed.  He also puts recipients' health at risk by donating to large numbers of NI recipients within a few days ("shagathons" as he calls them privately), thus rendering his STI test results completely meaningless.  

Simon Watson: This guy has devoted his entire life to donating since his early 20s, and is believed to have something in the region of 1000 donor-children.  He donates several times per day and charges at a very high level to maintain his lifestyle.  It is believed that only some of these "donations" are genuine - there have been persistent reports that many of his recipients find something in the container which is clearly not sperm.  This is probably because it is physically impossible for him to produce as many donations in a day as he is actually charging for.  He is deeply disrespectful about his recipients in private chats with other donors - he shares photos of his recipients without permission and insults them in the most horrific manner using sexualised language.  He also resorts to blackmail and threats in an attempt to silence people who criticise him or expose what he is doing (or even group admins who simply *allow other people* to criticise him).

Clive Jones / Carl Anderson (same person):  Holds extreme racist views, especially against Asians, and his motivation for donating appears to be to boost the white birthrate.  He describes himself as a "proud fascist", and has previously been both a BNP election candidate and a BNP local organiser.  His involvement in the BNP cost him his job as a teacher.  He has since left the BNP and joined an even more extreme organisation, which uses Nazi-style uniforms and salutes.  (The Mail on Sunday claimed recently that he is now the deputy leader of the organisation.)  Remarkably, just one year ago, This Morning conducted a fluffy interview with him to promote him as a donor, and his extremist politics were never even mentioned, even though the programme had been clearly warned about him in advance.  (Never mind Phillip Schofield - the real This Morning scandal is Clive Jones.)

"Jamal Bryant" (also known as "Daniel Sheehan", "Wales Donor", "Scott Newman", "Scott AI Donor" and other names): Has severe anger issues, seems extraordinarily paranoid, and has one of the shortest fuses I've ever come across.  Even for those reasons alone, he's probably best avoided, but there are a number of other very odd things about this individual.  He claims to have been around the donor scene for many years, and yet nobody actually seems to have received donations from him, or at least not under any of his known names.  He appears to have actually *bought* the "Jamal Bryant" Facebook account from a real person called Jamal Bryant, so that he'd be able to provide real identity documents if Facebook ever challenged him. (I know what his real name is, and it bears no resemblance to Jamal Bryant or Daniel Sheehan or any of the other names he currently uses.)  He told me that the Facebook group he now runs was going to be a project for his wife "to keep her busy".  He also said that the Jamal Bryant account is run by both him and his wife, and that if you talked to "Jamal", you'd never know which one of them you were talking to.  Whether the wife actually exists is hard to say.  He seems to have concocted a very odd world around him in which nothing is quite as it seems, but there's plainly an agenda behind it, and it's one that people are best not getting embroiled in.  As someone pointed out to me, he constantly demands to know what recipients look like and their real names, and yet he stays in the shadows and carefully deceives people about his own identity and the weird game he's playing.  The suspicion is that he's harvesting information about women using his "public profiles", and then using that information to target the same women in predatory fashion via accounts he keeps more secret.

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If you're looking for a genuine donor in central Scotland, my Facebook profile can be found here, feel free to send me a private message.