In those cases, the FDA prohibits sperm banks from accepting donations from any man who has had sex with another man in the past five years. The reason for the rule is ostensibly to keep the sperm banks free of HIV. That being said, modern testing is extremely effective in identifying HIV shortly after infection. Further, the new policy is identical to blood donor eligibility criteria finalized in May 0f 2023, as well as tissue policy from the United Kingdom.
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Man who wanted to be a sperm donor to help Black and LGBTQ families describes shock at receiving rejection email because he's gay, report says
A 26-year-old gay man was shocked to receive a rejection email from a sperm bank after he provided a semen sample, according to The Washington Post.
The reason TreVaughn Roach-Carter was prohibited from donating his sperm was that he said he is gay.
On the FDA’s standard donor eligibility form, any man who has had sex with another man in the past five years is automatically considered “ineligible.”
That word sounds final, but in practice, it isn’t. This policy was first introduced during the height of the HIV epidemic and hasn’t been fully updated to reflect modern science and public health advances.
The Role of PrEP and Modern HIV Prevention
Today, many gay and bisexual men take PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), a once-daily oral medication (or injectable) that reduces the risk of HIV transmission by more than 99% when taken consistently, making it even more effective than condoms.
Not only is the policy discriminatory, it’s ineffective- a third party is expected to know a donor’s comprehensive sexual history for the past five years.
If a potential donor’s next of kin was remotely unsure of the donor’s sexual history over the previous five years, tissue banks would be forced to assume the donor was ineligible.
One of the larger barriers to advocacy with the tissue ban was public awareness. "It's unsafe and unfair to allow a straight man who regularly has unprotected sex with multiple partners to donate sperm, but not a gay man who practices safe sex within a monogamous relationship," said Joe Solmonese, former president of the Human Rights Campaign, per a 2005 press release.
The Post notes that donor sperm is quarantined for six months and tested for HIV before it reaches the market.
The FDA told the newspaper that it has no immediate plans to eliminate the ban.
“Storytellers and television have a powerful ability to help enact social change by first reaching people through entertainment. This followed a similar policy, which introduced a lifetime deferral (or ban) for MSM blood donors in 1985.
However, while organ and blood donation policies were eased through the 2010s and 2020s, tissue eligibility failed to follow in the footsteps of scientific advances.
The processes for organ and tissue donor registry are one and the same, but the two classifications of biologics are regulated separately.
There is a risk that the medications would prevent the viral load within an individual from replicating to the point of infection, but remaining at a non-zero undetectable level. The program also featured a storyline in which a transgender woman, played by Candis Cayne, is in a legal battle with her in-laws over her deceased partner’s property.
“While gay men are disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic, the majority of gay men across the country are HIV-negative. Despite this, the FDA’s sperm donor policy still uses a five-year sexual history window, which does not take into account PrEP use, monogamous relationships, or regular HIV testing.
This is one reason many LGBTQ+ advocates and fertility professionals are calling for reform of the donor eligibility criteria: to ensure the policy reflects current science rather than outdated assumptions.
Quarantine Requirements for Directed Donations
Another common misconception is that sperm from directed donors must be quarantined (frozen and held for a waiting period before use).
For more information, please visit www.glaad.org or connect with GLAAD on Facebook and Twitter. In truth, the only basis for the FDA restriction is homophobia,” said Drop Dead Diva creator and executive producer Josh Berman. With the exception of reproductive tissue, tissue donors are deceased requiring a potential donor’s next of kin to identify potential risk factors.
While we had testimony from potential donors who were turned away with blood donation, tissue donors are almost always deceased at the time of eligibility determination and unable to share the experience of discrimination.
Pride and Plasma researched the policy, tissue donation regulation, global policies, the effectiveness of testing mechanisms and scientific advances over the past 30 years.
We compiled this research into a brief and submitted it, with subsequent updates to the FDA’s Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee, three times between 2023 and 2024.
The updated policy makes significant progress and is directly in line with Pride & Plasma’s recommendations submitted in our research briefs. The reasoning was that the medical literature, citing data from the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, said that gay men were at a higher risk of HIV.
At the time, human rights groups challenged the logic behind it.
The FDA does not require a quarantine for directed donors, but the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) encourages clinics to observe a 35-day quarantine. Organs include larger parts of the human body like the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. However, for directed donations, when the donor is known to the recipient, it is allowed, as long as specific steps are followed.
What the FDA Rules Say
Under FDA regulations, all sperm donors must be screened for infectious diseases like HIV, hepatitis B and C, and others.