'Order a daddy' app lets you swipe for sperm donors, Tinder-style
Swiping might be synonymous with sex and dating thanks to Tinder and Bumble. But now, thanks to an innovative new app, there's a new reason to swipe.
The UK just got its first ever sperm donor app, which allows women to browse from their phone through the UK’s largest donor catalogue.
Nicknamed 'order a daddy', the app, launched by the London Sperm Bank, features donor profiles complete with physical characteristics, donor self-summaries, medical information, pen sketches and staff impressions of the donors.
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Unlike dating apps, however, the profiles are anonymous and do not contain any photographs of the donors. Users are not referred to by their names, but by a donor number.
Users can add profiles to a "wish list" of donors and order sperm just as they would any other online transaction. The ordered sperm is then delivered to a registered clinic of their choice. The app's wish list feature also means that users can submit their donor preferences and receive alerts when a donor meeting their criteria becomes available.
"Ordering sperm from an online catalogue or an app does not trivialise treatment, and every step meets the requirements of the HFEA (Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority)," reads a London Sperm Bank statement.
"You make all the transactions online, like you do anything else these days. This allows a woman who wants to get a sperm donor to gain control in the privacy of her own home and to choose and decide in her own time. We think this is the first-of-its-kind in the world," Dr Kamal Ahuja -- scientific director of the London Sperm Bank -- told The Sunday Times. However, campaigners have criticised the app for trivialising parenthood.
"How much further can we go in the trivialisation of parenthood?" Josephine Quintavalle -- director of campaign group Comment on Reproductive Ethics -- told the Times.
"This is reproduction via the mobile phone. It’s digital dads. Choose Daddy. This is the ultimate denigration of fatherhood," Quintavalle continued.
The London Sperm Bank app is free to download on Google Play and Apple's App Store.
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
