Meet the People Fighting the “Crisis in Sperm”
One man journeys through the many movements—sci-fi startups, DIY donor clubs, group masturbation retreats—urgently attempting to address the impending spermpocalypse.
By Rosecrans Baldwin | March 11, 2025
Sperm are stupid. They’re among the smallest cells in a man’s body, single-minded and unwavering. (Women’s eggs are among the most complex human cells—read into that what you will.) A typical fertile, healthy young man produces over 100 million spermatozoa, or sperm cells, in his testicles every day—if he doesn’t ejaculate, the sperm eventually die and get reabsorbed—and that can be frightening, if you’re trying to avoid having children in a country hell-bent on making pregnancy high-stakes. Sperm also can be an ick: For months, when I told people I was working on a story about the state of sperm, I watched women roll their eyes, and I heard a lot of men make jokes—usually the Monty Python bit: Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great—before asking in a more serious tone, But wait, why?
Because sperm may be stupid, but current research suggests their situation is no joke. In the United States, sexual activity is down. Pregnancy and fertility rates are down. The amount and quality of sperm in American men’s semen is believed to be down—experts I spoke to generally agreed on this, though they said more research is needed—a state for which studies have implicated things like ultra-processed foods, forever chemicals, and air pollution.
Big names around the world have been sounding an alarm about a fertility crisis, though some seem to be, characteristically, pursuing individual solutions. Earth’s wealthiest man, White House influencer Elon Musk, reportedly has had at least 14 children. Last September he appeared to publicly offer to impregnate fellow billionaire Taylor Swift, to gallantly save her from a childless cat lady’s fate. Telegram founder Pavel Durov, who has claimed to have helped more than 100 couples conceive through sperm donation, has reportedly offered to finance in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment at a Moscow clinic for any eligible women who agree to use his sperm. A lot of men, it appears, are obsessed with disseminating their stuff, and thanks to technology and a lack of regulation, even nonbillionaires can realize paternal fantasies once reserved for kings and warlords.
At the same time, even those with no desire to reproduce need to be more vigilant about sperm than ever, due to the spotty and precarious state of reproductive rights. Look in any direction along the political spectrum and sperm are in danger, or endangering someone else.
A normal guy—say, a guy who is ambivalent about having children and certainly in no rush—could be forgiven for feeling misled. The sperm that he thought he had infinite supply of might not be enough, though a single mistimed one could still have dire consequences. Perhaps our guy never gave much thought to the quality of his gametes—ignorant, perhaps, that about half of all fertility problems are attributable to men. Reassured, maybe, by news of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro making babies with old-ass sperm, with no mention of “paternal age effects”—risks to partners and children that have been associated with older dads.
After all, this hypothetical guy needs only a decent crew from his daily 100 million—surely, he can come up with that, though what if he can’t? What do people who think about sperm all day think such guys need to know?
It wasn’t until my early 20s that I learned women don’t urinate out of their vaginas. If sperm are stupid, so are men. At the same time, while humanity’s future may feel difficult to imagine, some people are already living in it. And they’re designing technology that is next-level bonkers, both reassuring and frightening in terms of fatherhood, which may destroy traditional ideas of reproduction altogether.
Let’s start with sperm quality. Picture the male reproductive system as a factory, churning out widgets. Of all the factories in a body, the balls are the busiest. “Making sperm is the highest cell turnover in the body. And that is a process that can be subject to errors,” Sarah Kimmins, an expert in male fertility and epigenomics at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre, explained. As the factory ages and the machinery degrades, the widgets it makes turn out wobbly more often. Incidence of janky genetic information increases—whether it’s new errors in the code or physical breakages in the DNA. Plus, there’s inheritable information called the epigenome that controls how genes are used, and it, too, can become damaged with age.
It’s not just age that affects sperm quality. “The epigenome is dynamic, it’s influenced by the environment,” Kimmins said. “You can cause damage to the epigenome through being overweight, exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals…. If you disrupt that through an environmental exposure, then you make poor sperm.” Those chemical effects on sperm counts are one of the primary concerns in Count Down, a book by epidemiologist Shanna Swan. “I feel we are in a reproductive health crisis as a planet,” she said when we spoke. As Swan sees it, the midcentury twin advancements in the fossil fuel and chemical industries (including plastics, which are made from fossil fuel byproducts) led to a system that benefits many—soda bottles, cosmetics, pesticides—but at a poisonous cost, for us and plenty of other species. And when those costs manifest in a man’s sperm, multiple experts said, it’s often a biomarker for other problems going on.
After speaking with Swan, I decided to book a visit with my andrologist. Just kidding! There have been attempts, first in the 1890s, to develop the andrologist as a medical specialty equivalent to a gynecologist, but it never caught on. Though how much demand is there anyway? Before my 40s, I saw a doctor only for emergencies. I resisted medication, I avoided checkups; fundamentally, I was both dumb and fortunate enough to feel invincible.
For a reproductive checkup, I turned instead to Legacy, a sperm-testing and -banking start-up that analyzes its clients’ semen for sperm count and motility, among other factors, including DNA fragmentation. “Our fastest--growing segment is actually men who are healthy, who just want to be proactive about their sperm health,” founder and CEO Khaled Kteily said. Customers range from Navy SEALs about to enter boot camp to trans women who want to have a child with their own DNA someday. Sperm banking isn’t common practice for healthy young men at present, but Kteily is betting on that changing.
Kteily offered to send me a kit to test myself. A handsome box soon arrived in the mail, as though I’d been sent an expensive gift. I produced a sample, shipped it back, and began a nervous couple days’ wait.
Humanity’s best weapon against infertility—against species extinction, some might say—is IVF, in which sperm meets egg outside of the body. Under a doctor’s supervision, sperm are washed and sorted, then presented in a petri dish to the most viable eggs produced by an invasive retrieval process. After fertilization, embryos are transferred to a uterus and everyone knocks on wood.
In the US, in 2022, only 37.5 percent of all IVF cycles led to a live birth. Which is less than ideal. Swan, the epidemiologist, has previously speculated that if sperm counts keep dropping at the rate she and her colleagues have observed, 20 years from now, most couples trying to have a baby may need to use assistance.
Noor Siddiqui hopes people will adopt it sooner. She recently went through IVF with her husband, though they took a novel additional step: analyzing over 99 percent of their embryos’ genomes, employing technology utilized by her “fertility tech” start-up, Orchid. The idea is to allow potential parents to screen for, among other information, over 1,200 monogenic diseases, from cystic fibrosis to hereditary cancers, then select their preferred embryo. “I’m super excited about a future where we can hopefully eradicate genetic disease if parents want to,” Siddiqui said. “My hope is that this is the default way that everyone has kids.”
As Siddiqui has said elsewhere: “I think, basically, sex is for fun and embryo screening is for babies.”
Orchid screens embryos only for health information, but future companies may offer the chance to select for traits like height, eye color, even skin color. In fact, the first “designed” children are already among us, and they’re old enough to resent the process: A psychologist who has treated a number of them spoke to Wired recently about such patients struggling with their parents’ optimized expectations. “People don’t always realize they are creating a human being and not a piece of furniture,” the psychologist said.
It’s not difficult to imagine a world further divided by embryonic selection, where children with heritable problems are viewed as the products of irresponsible parents. There’s a term for such a vision, and it’s typically associated with Nazis.
“So, ‘the E-word’—I actually hate the E-word,” said Hank Greely. “It means so much that it means nothing.” Greely is a professor at Stanford Law School and the director of the university’s Center for Law and the Biosciences. He also happens to be one of Siddiqui’s former teachers. “Some people, when they say ‘eugenics,’ they mean the government says you can’t have babies.” There’s precedent for these associations. Between 1907 and 1937, 32 US states passed laws enabling the government to sterilize people against their will.
At the same time, Greely pointed out, people might also use “eugenics” to mean two parents deciding they don’t want their future child to suffer from something horrible or even fatal, like Tay-Sachs disease. Couldn’t embryonic selection actually mitigate inequality, by decreasing genetic diseases in poor communities, if it was universal and cheap? “For me, [embryonic selection] is mainly a matter of parental choice and when or if it should be limited, with the answer being almost never,” Greely said.
What strikes Greely as a little eugenicsy is the conversation about population declines.“My son is 36, and when he was born, there were 5 billion people on this planet,” he said. “There are now 8 billion people on this planet. Was humanity in a crisis 36 years ago because we only had 5 billion?” A bigger worry, he explained, is when some people complain about population declines they’re not saying there are too few babies being made—they’re saying there are too few good babies, too few white babies, too few rich people making kids.
Where things really get ethically intriguing, Greely pointed out, is what’s coming next: IVG, or in vitro gametogenesis. The technology exists—it’s been proven in mice—and scientists are working toward human application, where nonreproductive cells from a person’s body—say, from the skin—are reprogrammed into stem cells, and those stem cells are differentiated into eggs and sperm.
Say two gay men want to have a baby that shares their DNA. One man’s cells could be used to grow an egg, which is fertilized by his partner’s sperm, then the embryo is brought to term with a surrogate. Or a lesbian couple might manufacture sperm from one partner to fertilize the other’s egg. Then take it a step further into stranger lands: What if cells are swiped off Ben Affleck’s discarded Dunkin’ cup? How about a famous person who’s dead? What if a woman makes sperm from her own cells and, essentially using IVF, impregnates herself (what Greely calls a “unibaby”)? What if a polycule of a dozen people want to create a baby that shares all of their DNA, a scenario coined as multiplex parenting? What if we reach a point (and Greely thinks it is plausible trials could commence as soon as a decade from now), where scientists keep a donated uterus functional outside the body—also known as an artificial womb—and tuck a lab-grown embryo inside it? Have we achieved The Matrix, with humans being cultivated?
Breakthroughs in reproductive technology may come from work on our animal relatives. Colossal, a “de-extinction” company, was founded in 2021 to develop new technologies to rebuild extinct species, technologies that could be adapted to help humans too. It hopes to have its first woolly mammoth calves by the end of 2028. “If you look at the headlines, you just want to go hide under a rock, right?” Beth Shapiro, Colossal’s chief science officer, said. “We’re giving people something that says, There are people out there who are working to develop new tools that are going to help us end up in a place that’s better than we are today. And we need that, don’t we?”
Legacy, the sperm-testing company, wanted to know: Would I like them to freeze my sperm for future use? Frozen sperm, stored properly, is believed to be viable almost indefinitely, a fact that is sometimes comforting, sometimes unsettling. Stashing one’s sperm in a cryobank, one can hypothetically press pause on their own fertility or help another person create a family. But the rate of technological change means you can’t predict what world your genetic material will be born into.
When Todd Whitehurst was a graduate student at Stanford in the 1990s, he spotted an ad one day in the student newspaper for sperm donation. At the time, it seemed like an easy way to help people in need, also a not unpleasant way to make money; as an engineering student who lacked cash and didn’t date much, he was masturbating sufficiently without pay. Today, Whitehurst, 59, is an electrical engineer and computer scientist. He estimated he donated approximately three times a week for four years. “When I started, I think it was $40 a donation. It went up to $50 at some point. I remember getting a 1099 at the end of the year, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, you really need to get a life,’ ” he recalled, laughing.
Commercial cryobanks have existed in the United States since the 1970s, and they’re big business; the US is one of the world’s largest exporters of donor sperm. (A vial of sperm typically costs about $1,000 to $2,000.)
Plenty of families require somebody else’s sperm—lesbian couples, aspiring single mothers, straight couples experiencing infertility. And compared to an awkward conversation with a coworker, or connecting with a rando in a donor group on Facebook, cryobanks have a reputation for selling highly vetted sperm. That reputation’s not always earned, however, and the industry is largely unregulated in the US. There’s no global registry of sperm donors or donor--conceived children—such a thing could violate the anonymity often promised to men who donate—and LGBTQ groups in the US have raised alarms that future sperm-donor registries might pose a political threat to their families. Still, in the absence of widespread official tracking, grassroots efforts are piecing together the information on their own.
“The USDA mandates that for every calf born from artificial insemination there’s a record,” Wendy Kramer, the cofounder of the Donor Sibling Registry, told me. “But not for humans. That’s insane.”
Kramer and her ex-husband obtained sperm from California Cryobank, the United States’ largest such firm. (It even offers a “look-alike” service comparing donors to celebrities, if that’s desired.) Their son Ryan was born in 1990. “By the time [Ryan] was six, he was looking at me saying, ‘I want to know who my biological father is,’ ” Kramer said. “I’m thinking, Well, of course, you do.” Ten years later, she started a Yahoo! Group, which became a website that met a worldwide demand: By early 2025 they’d connected over 27,000 people with their half-siblings or biological parents in over 40 countries. “It’s really detrimental for any human to be kept from their ancestry,” Kramer said. If for no other reason, they would benefit from knowing their family medical history.
Anonymity is also utterly unrealistic in the age of at-home DNA testing. If all it takes is a sperm donor’s second cousin to do 23andMe to make him traceable, is jizz in a cup still jizz in a cup? What does a donor “owe” his offspring? How many children is it okay to sire?
The Netherlands cut Jonathan Meijer off from donating once he reached around 550. Meijer, subject of the docuseries The Man With 1,000 Kids, was ordered by a Dutch court to stop donating any more sperm to clinics. In a small country, his extensive sharing provoked concerns over the potential health risks of his progeny dating one another without knowing they share DNA. Other zealous donors, known as sperm bros, include New York City math professor Ari “The Sperminator” Nagel, who has said he’s fathered more than 160 children, and Los Angeles’s Kyle Gordy, who is reportedly nearing a hundred. There are also the men who’ve gone to heinous ends to breed, such as in the scores of cases of fertility doctors fathering children by surreptitiously using their own sperm to impregnate patients. In some cases, juries awarded victims millions of dollars in damages, but, for the most part, the victims have had few paths to justice.
Setting criminal cases aside, I kept wondering, What do superdonors want? Personally, I’ve never had any desire to reproduce. Do sperm bros dream of fatherhood divorced from responsibility? Yearn for legacy with no strings attached?
“Emotionally, look, for me, it’s just the purpose of giving someone a child to have a family,” Adam Hooper, a prominent Australian sperm donor, told me. “I just thought, you know, This is a person I could help."
Hooper doesn’t exactly qualify as a sperm bro, but he’s familiar with them. Hooper’s first donation was for a lesbian couple. He’s since helped over 20 families—he started a Facebook group called Sperm Donation Australia—and he regularly hosts meetups so the children can meet and play. “And you know, there’s 10 kids trying to hold your hand—it looks probably weird to the general public,” he said. “Wondering what’s going on here with all these different mums. It might look like I’m running a cult or something.”
Hooper hosts a podcast about the sperm donor realm in order to reduce stigmas. He said he knew of, and kept tabs on, various superdonors but wished they represented the private donor space better, or at least less salaciously.
I asked Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University and an expert on all things donation, about why the bros do it in the first place. “Oh Lord, I’ve thought a lot about this,” she said. Madeira suggested perhaps a sexual fantasy, or maybe the men saw themselves as good candidates for proliferation (but couldn’t attract a mate, I thought?). There were also nastier motivations. The Man With 1,000 Kids shows messages that appear to be from one bro saying he went to Kenya to donate sperm in order to “bleach” Africa. Seeing that, my mind went straight to Greely’s concerns—that there are some bros out there, white ones, who might not only be wishing for offspring that look like them but a world that looks like them too.
The most obvious impulse to me was the notion that putting children into the world takes an edge off mortality. Madeira said, “I’ve talked to guys about this in passing, and they’re like, But doesn’t everybody want this, the chance to spread their seed far and wide?”
Presumably, it’s a line that doesn’t work great on Hinge.
Thanks to Kramer, cofounder of the Donor Sibling Registry, I was able to convene a family reunion of sorts this past November, on the day before Thanksgiving. Six half-siblings Zoomed into my office. Their ages ranged from 28 to 31. They grew up in different households and lived in different parts of the country. The main thing they had in common was Donor 2053, a.k.a. Todd Whitehurst.
To blow up any ideas about nature versus nurture, I highly recommend hanging out with a bunch of donor-conceived half-siblings. Because they had a lot in common, in fact. They’re among 35 half-siblings, and those were just the ones they knew about. “My party trick is pulling the spreadsheet up on my phone,” one said. Of the group I spoke with, all but one worked or was studying in a STEM-related field, like Whitehurst. They had the same sense of humor, the same taste in music—in an hour-long conversation, I watched them repeat gestures, or phrase something in a similar fashion. Two of the women discovered, when they spoke for the first time, that they were attending the same university for graduate school, in similar science programs, and had even participated in a shared extracurricular group before knowing they were related.
Some of them also met up on occasion. Last year, five of them—plus Whitehurst—went to Texas for the solar eclipse. For one, it was his first time meeting his half--siblings, never mind his biological father—and when he and Donor 2053 ate together for the first time, the rest watched, slack-jawed. “All the movements were the same,” one of the women said. “The way they grabbed the fork and knife—it was like watching two people mime each other.”
Signing off, the call left me inspired. Here was a version of family I’d never seen before, people with a small but profound bond that connected them in meaningful ways. Perhaps any sperm bros desiring proliferation without participation were missing out.
Today, Whitehurst lives with his wife and two young children outside Tampa. We spoke a few days after the reunion. Whitehurst said the first time one of the kids emailed him, he thought it was one of his computer-scientist buddies playing a prank. When he realized the message was real, he was floored, then thrilled, and he quickly replied with his medical history, family photos, and questions about her life. “I don’t know how many donors have met their kids, but I definitely would encourage them,” Whitehurst said. “It’s just been uniformly positive.”
The more I learned about the “spermapocalypse,” the more I thought about men and their unawareness. We don’t know how our bodies work, how they age. We spend decades ignoring our health, then expect to deliver our partners perfect genetic material during their relatively smaller window of fertility. If there’s a true crisis here, it’s in our ignorance of our own bodies.
If men are worried about their sperm, there’s a lot they can do. “Look carefully at your life and the roots of exposure [to endocrine--disrupting chemicals] and try to eliminate as many as possible,” Kimmins, the male-fertility expert, said. E.g., eat organic. Lose some weight, exercise, and don’t smoke. For guys wanting kids soon, it’s best to avoid saunas and hot tubs, or a laptop on the groin—not for fear of radiation, but heat. (There’s a reason the balls are on the outside.) Also, for any guys smoking weed regularly, they may have up to about a third fewer sperm, according to one study. And to the bros shotgunning testosterone to improve sperm count: It has the opposite effect. Basically, for a man to protect himself and his partner, he should do the hippiest crap imaginable, minus the cannabis. I said to numerous experts, It sounds like aspiring parents should go live in a national park for a couple months, and they agreed.
Shipping ejaculate to be analyzed in a lab, as I did, is one way to learn about the body. Jason Wimberly offers a radically different approach, one that celebrates sperm—and the male orgasm—for itself. Wimberly is a personal trainer in Southern California who developed an alternative-health system he calls Nuworld, based on what he said are three essential pillars for male wellness: movement, meditation, and masturbation. Guys join him in the studio for “ball yoga,” or go on group retreats in the woods, and then commune by masturbating together. “An orgasm, for most men, is a very private thing,” Wimberly said. “To share that openly with another man that you’re not trying to have sex with, that you’re just sharing joy with, is really disarming, scary, alarming, a lot of things. But when they can get through it, it’s really affirming.”
Wimberly grew up in rural California. Jerking off in the woods with other teenagers was no big deal to him. With Nuworld, his inspiration was to eliminate shame as much as possible—such that he recently painted a series of dick pics he calls “The Cocks of My Life,” requesting inspiration from people close to him to celebrate their primal selves.
He brought up a different men’s health issue: “I really think when it comes to sperm, the shame of not being able to even talk about it is part of why men have more erection issues than ever,” Wimberly said. “Why are 20-year-olds taking Cialis? It’s because there’s so many mental barriers to just feeling our own pleasure.”
After spending a few weeks talking to scientists, it was striking to be reminded that sperm aren’t just any old cells. They’re a product of pleasure—hopefully during an encounter that is happy for the other person too. For many men—and the pro-natalists might not love this—maximizing the production of healthy sperm is a lot less important than avoiding unwanted fertilization.
Currently, there are no federally approved birth control drugs for males, despite repeated studies showing men’s interest. However, human safety trials are underway for several new products including a nonhormonal pill and a hydrogel injected into the vas deferens—the ducts that transport sperm to the urethra—intended to block sperm. One of the more promising interventions is a gel that a man rubs on his shoulder, a hormonal solution meant to suppress sperm production, that has completed a phase 2b trial. “We’re talking about an unprecedented technology here,” said Brian Nguyen, an associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California, who was involved in the study. “One of the big problems about gendered discussions of reproductive health care interventions is that we’re thinking about men on one side and women on another side. We’re not thinking about dyads. We’re not thinking about couples. Reproduction is about couples.”
“When the choice is between maximizing men’s pleasure or minimizing women’s pain, society will predictably choose men,” Gabrielle Blair writes in Ejaculate Responsibly, published in 2022. Her book argues a very simple point: Men cause all unwanted pregnancies—nearly half of pregnancies in the US are unintended—and if guys could just learn to come sensibly, the abortion issue might largely evaporate.
If the US legislated male bodies the way it does female bodies, Blair writes, there could be a scenario where, at the onset of puberty, all men would be required by law to bank their sperm and get a vasectomy. Later, if they found mates and wanted kids, they could use the frozen sperm, or, if necessary, reverse the vasectomy and then get it redone post-childbearing. Blair poses this as a provocative hypothetical, but one could also read it as an optimistic approach to the problem of sperm. It suggests a willingness to give up a little bit of power now, trusting that if a man wants to have kids in the future, the technology, medical services, and sperm he needs will still be there waiting for him.
A couple days after I sent my semen--analysis kit back to Legacy, I received my results. In a 4.8 milliliter sample, I had 298.28 million sperm. Of those, around 244 million were on the move. Exciting? Not really. Normally, men get their sperm tested from a fear of infertility. My analysis didn’t show any signs I’d have trouble producing a kid—and that’s what terrified me. Over the years, I’d thought about getting a vasectomy several times but never followed through, out of ignorance, for the most part, but also fear—trepidations that turned out to be totally unfounded.
“Vasectomies, I love them,” Paul Turek, a reproductive urologist and microsurgeon with practices in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, said. “In my hands, they’re spectacular.”
A vasectomy, in which a man’s vas deferens are cut and sealed, is among the most reliable forms of birth control. Afterward, sperm are still produced, but they’re reabsorbed. And except in extremely rare cases, the procedure doesn’t impair erectile function, or influence testosterone levels; studies find many guys experience improved sexual function through reduced anxiety. Turek said that if a patient wants it undone, he’s able to restore sperm to his ejaculate with high rates of success, particularly if the procedure is less than 15 years old.
Knowing all that, I found the decision easy to make. Turek and I did an initial consultation and scheduled a date for a week before Christmas. (Turek often sees an uptick during periods of highly watched sporting events—guys presumably looking forward to some downtime with The Masters, et cetera.) I took an Uber to Beverly Hills, feeling nervous but not uncertain. The lobby was decorated with photos of Muhammad Ali and Humphrey Bogart—“I’m trying to put guys at ease,” Turek said, smiling. From there, the procedure took less time, maybe five minutes, than the surgical prep—and with jazz playing in the background, two local anesthetics, and a mask of nitrous oxide, I may as well have gotten surgery outside a Phish show. There wasn’t any pain. I barely felt a thing. Before I left, Turek presented me with a “certificate of honor” for my bravery. He was joking/not joking.
I spent the afternoon in bed with a bag of frozen peas in my sweatpants, watching Netflix. I woke up the next morning with slight bruising and a mild ache that both dissipated in two days. Thinking, What the hell did I wait for?
Sperm may be stupid, but you are not. And though any billionaires and bros in your life may say such stuff is precious, they’re working from scarcity mindset, which is all about blinders—and that’s where we get men’s ignorance of their bodies, or racist fantasies about society, or guys simply clinging to old ideas of how families ought to look. Progress in your life doesn’t need to be tied to the GDP of your scrotum. It’s very likely that you have, and are, enough.
Rosecrans Baldwin is a GQ correspondent.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of GQ with the title “The Future of Sperm”
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