Virtually no rules govern sperm banking. The Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly planned and then failed to issue sperm-bank regs. Individual states regulate but very halfheartedly. The chaos of sperm banking means it answers largely to the whims of desperate customers and not to high medical or ethical standards. Fewer than a dozen of the several hundred sperm banks in the United States have bothered to meet the accreditation standards of the American Association of Tissue Banks.
Some sperm banks keep elaborate records.
Some seem to keep none. No sperm bank trade association exists, so no one even knows how many banks there are. And no one has the faintest idea how many sperm bank kids are born every year. The only reason the 1987 figure of 30,000 exists is that the federal government performed a onetime census as part of an effort to push the industry into behaving itself. Click here to read an interesting theory about why politics has made sperm banking so disorderly.