It was when she opened the guest room door to a half-naked man that Christy* started to feel seriously concerned. The 30-year-old had met him on a Facebook group connecting willing sperm donors with those looking to conceive — a seemingly selfless act that promises to save hopeful parents thousands in clinic fees. The man, in his fifties, had volunteered to produce a sample that Christy could use to artificially inseminate herself. But 20 minutes later, after he failed to emerge, she feared that he was hanging around in the hopes of “NI”: online donor group parlance for “natural insemination”, or sex.
Worried for her safety, she asked him to leave her east London home, before swearing off donations from “philanthropic” strangers altogether. “You’re excited and you’re not thinking rationally,” she says of her attempts to conceive this way. “I was holding on to potential donors, thinking that they were a miracle — but then they ended up being a nightmare.”
