History

THE SPERM BANK OF CALIFORNIA (TSBC) began operations on October 5, 1982 in Oakland, California. We began as a project of the Oakland Feminist Women's Health Center, a family planning clinic. The clinic offered fertility awareness classes intended to help women prevent pregnancy.  However, women trying to conceive at home with known donors were also attending the classes.  Since in the early 1980’s, there were no sperm banks who would serve unmarried women, TSBC was founded to provide a legally protected and medically safe family building option to all women regardless of marital status or sexual orientation.

TSBC and Oakland Feminist Women's Health Center shared facilities until 1988, when TSBC split off to incorporate as an independent nonprofit corporation and move to a larger site in Oakland. In 1995, we moved to our present location in downtown Berkeley.  

TSBC has a history of ground-breaking work in the field of reproductive technologies. We are the first sperm bank in the United States to:

• provide donor-conceived adults the option to obtain their donor’s identity (our Identity-Release® Program)
• serve lesbian couples and single women
• provide extensive personal and family medical histories on donors
• conduct research on the wellbeing of donor-conceived families and donors
• document conceptions and monitor birth rates
• track and limit the number of births per donor
• operate as a nonprofit organization
• offer instruction on how to perform inseminations at home