in demandDonorDaddy

• Date: 26 June 2021
• Published date: 26 June 2021

Hooper, 36, estimates he has donated sperm to 15 families resulting in 19 babies. He also has two daughters with his ex-wife. A Swedish woman is waiting to find out if she is pregnant after an embryo transfer using his sperm, and he has flights paid for to Mauritius to use when the borders open to help a local family there. Alaska-Rae’s Perth-based Kiwi parents also hope he will complete their family with two more children.

And that’s just his personal donations. Via Facebook pages he’s set up to connect other donors with women, he estimates he’s helped facilitate 5000 births over the past six years. Last year, 437 babies were born via his Australian group.

“I was happy to just donate to five families and that be it,” he tells the Weekend Herald. “I helped the majority of my families in the first couple of years and I haven’t really advertised since. But people ask for advice ... and then they go: ‘We’ve been at it with our donor for nine months ... do you mind if you help us this one time?’ And it works first go and all of a sudden I’ve got another family.

“Sometimes I get roped in, a bit of the emotional twist of the arm. But they are good people, that’s why I do it.”

Now Hooper is planning to spend August in a campervan travelling around New Zealand, which has a major sperm donor shortage, hoping to donate to women should their ovulation cycles line up with his plans. But he jokes they’ll only ever be eligible to play for the Wallabies.

“I feel that I’ve got enough children in Australia that I’m content with, so if I can help a few families internationally and inspire their country to get more donors there, that is a feel-good story for the community and also personally. It would be nice to go away with a child that’s born from a lovely couple and give me amazing memories of that town or city.”

A week after he put a shout-out on Facebook to Kiwi women, in which he boasts of a sperm count of over one billion (one of only two donors in Australia who has one that high, he says), he has had about 16 local inquiries. He is considering setting up a meet-and-greet in Auckland for them all.

An increasing number of desperate couples and single women looking for donors are moving into the murky world of private sperm donations, finding their suitors on social media, as a quicker alternative to fertility clinics where there are waiting lists of more than two years and big costs.

But being unregulated, there is no limit to how many families men can donate to, increasing the risk of siblings living in the same communities and unwittingly getting into sexual relationships. Experts also warn of custody issues, financial obligations, sexually transmitted diseases and genetic problems.

FORMER CONSTRUCTION worker Hooper was with his wife at a work function in 2014 when he got chatting to a same-sex couple who were looking at starting a family but were complaining about how hard it was to find donors. At the time, Hooper had one daughter of his own with the second on the way.

“It wasn’t until I became a father that I really knew how special being a parent was. And I consider myself pretty mentally headstrong so I thought this was something I could give back.”

A few months later he seriously started looking into donating, first via fertility clinics. “But there was no guarantee who would pick my sperm from a sperm bank, no certainty that I would ever find out who they were, or that my daughters would find out who they were. They could be walking around going to the same school as each other without knowing. That didn’t sit well with me.”

In New Zealand and Australia, children conceived using a clinic can request the donor’s information after they’re 18. That is, of course, if they know to ask. Hooper points to the case of ABC presenter Sarah Dingle, who at age 27 learned she was donor-conceived and, years later, that a friend was actually a half sister. Dingle uncovered that the Sydney clinic where she was conceived deliberately destroyed donor-conception codes, which were used to identify who...