The Sociopsychological Profile and Motivations of Altruistic Sperm Donors

The article discusses the sociopsychological characteristics of sperm donors who participate in assisted reproductive technologies (ART) altruistically. The study is based on the survey of 86 respondents who were recruited on the site https://rebenku.biz and selected according to their willingness to donate sperm for ART without monetary compensation. The average age of the participants in the study was 37.4 (SD = 6.9 years). The participants (more than 50% of respondents) share a number of characteristics: they have a positive attitude to ART in general; they are graduates of higher education institutions; they adhere to a healthy lifestyle; they are not married and wish not to change their marital status in the future; they have their own children; they report average personal income (belong to the middle class) and assess their professional career as successful. At least 44% of the participants have previous experience of sperm donation, while 29% of the surveyed men have children conceived with the help of ART. In the classification of psychological needs, the author relied on Clayton Alderfer's model, in which three groups of needs are distinguished: existence; relatedness; growth and development. The survey helped identify most frequent motives for donation: altruistic motives ("the desire to help others", "to do something good in life"); reproductive motives ("to pass on your genes", "to have children, reproduction"); motives associated with personal experience or circumstances ("friends / family members are infertile"); the desire for self-affirmation and egoistic motivation. The content analysis and the author's classification of motives have shown that most respondents (71 out of 86) decided to donate due to only one type of need. The rest of the surveyed men were motivated by two types of needs simultaneously. The leading motive of the respondents was the need for existence (55%); then there follows the need for relatedness (41%) and the need for growth (14%). It should be noted that 26% of the respondents (i.e. 23 people) exhibited narcissistic and selfish traits, which is a significant percentage in our study, in particular because of the selection criteria.

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