https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/kultur/slut-med-dum-saed-dansk-saedbank-har-minimumskrav-til-donorers-iq
No more stupid sperm: Danish sperm bank has minimum requirements for donors' IQ
Associate Professor of Medical Ethics fears that more screening may give expectant parents a false assurance about what to expect from their child.
You must have an IQ of at least 85 to donate at the Danish sperm bank. (Photo: © Mads Rahbek Hougaard, DR)
When single people or couples browse through donor profiles in search of a sperm donor, you cannot only opt in and out based on things such as eye colour, medical history, height, blood type, known donor and baby picture.
Now it is also possible to see how high an IQ the potential donor has.
At least if you buy sperm from the Danish sperm bank Donor Network, which screens out all donors who have an IQ below 85 - and also everyone with a tainted criminal record.
The sperm bank has chosen to do this to give the sperm purchaser peace of mind, explains CEO Jakob Schöllhammer Knudsen.
- It is not an elite project, and we have not done it to position ourselves or exclude 20 percent of the donor corps. I just don't think it's ethically okay to sell something I can't vouch for.
The sperm bank sorts out approximately 18 percent of potential donors due to too low IQ. There is no upper limit to how high the IQ of the donors can be.
Hereditary intelligence
It has been important for Donor Network to weed out people with low IQs and convicted people, because the mother's and father's genes help determine what intelligence the child gets.
- You have a much higher risk of having a poorly gifted child if you have a child with a donor with a low IQ. If I, as a person with an average IQ, have a child with someone with an exceptionally high IQ, our child's IQ will probably be somewhere in between, says the director, who is a trained doctor and Ph.D. and has previously worked with drug development and personalized medicine.
