In 2019, Dutch psychologist Tineeke Collemans published the results of a rare study: she followed a group of 70 sperm donors over ten years after donation. Half had by then received contact requests from biological children who had grown up and used donor identification laws. The picture that emerged was considerably more complex than the public discourse usually suggests.
Donors are not an anonymous category or a homogeneous group. They are people with different motivations, different expectations, and different long-term responses to what has happened.
Research on donor motivation — including the systematic review by Lui et al. (2021) across data from 12 countries — shows a consistent picture. Altruism is named as the primary motivation by approximately 60% of donors. Financial compensation: around 40%, though most of these combine it with altruistic considerations. Around 15% identify genetic 'continuation of self' as a significant factor — the desire to leave a biological trace.
Interestingly: studies find no significant difference in psychological profile between altruistically motivated donors and financially motivated ones. Long-term responses are determined not by motivation, but by what happens afterwards — especially after contact with biological children.
An important distinction: there is a fundamental difference between a donor providing biological material without further involvement, and a donor-co-parent — a person who biologically participates in creating a child and at the same time takes on parenting obligations. Blurring these roles is one of the most common sources of conflict in informal donation. Psychologists emphasise: the role must be defined before conception — clearly, in writing, with both parties' understanding. Not 'we'll see how it goes.' Because in this context, 'how it goes' means the child grows up in uncertainty about their own origins and the status of the adults in their life.
The psychology of sperm donors is a topic that has long remained in the shadow of the public conversation about reproductive technology. The data science has accumulated over the past twenty years paints a complex and human picture: different motivations, different long-term responses, real psychological load when things turn in unexpected directions. Acknowledging this complexity is not only the humane approach — it is the practically intelligent one.