Vision

The Sperm Bank of California is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing ethical family building options to our diverse community. We have an unwavering commitment to the well-being of parents, children, and donors.

The Sperm Bank of California has been making the dream of family a reality since 1982 when we established as the first sperm bank in the US to serve all women, including lesbians and single women. Rooted in this history and always looking forward, The Sperm Bank of California provides services to individuals and partners creating or expanding their families through donor conception and sperm storage.

Values

  • We provide ethical and visionary leadership in donor conception through our policies, published research, and by working closely with reproductive health professionals and community members.
  • We support open communication in families, provide access to donor information, and offer options for mutual consent contact.
  • We offer unwavering support to our families and our donors, now and in the future, through our ongoing family services and our resources for parents, donor-conceived people, donors, and the donors’ families.
  • We consider the long-term implications of our policies for parents, donor-conceived people, donors, and the donors’ families. For this reason, we track pregnancies and their outcomes, limit our donors to 10 families, and store all records indefinitely.
  • We value diversity, equity, and inclusion in our approach to services for our community and in our staff. We show this through our Equity Policy and our programs supporting LGBTQ+ intended parents and families.
  • We provide high quality services in a supportive and nonjudgmental environment.

History

The Sperm Bank of California (TSBC) began operations on October 5, 1982 in Oakland, California. In the early 1980’s there were no sperm banks who would serve unmarried people.  TSBC 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 people prevent pregnancy.  However, lesbian couples and single women trying to conceive at home with known donors were also attending the classes.  TSBC was founded to provide a legally protected and medically safe family building option to all people 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 with the option to obtain the donor’s identity (our Identity-Release® Program)
  • serve lesbian couples and single people
  • provide extensive personal and family medical histories about 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