The parents ditching IVF and embracing the ‘turkey baster’

Emma Mansell always dreamed of a “cheaper by the dozen family”.

After growing up an only child, the wholesome, busy chaos of a large family held great appeal. But with out-of-pocket costs typically $5000 to $10,000 per IVF cycle in Australia, the double-digit dream remained unreachable.

“The reality was that if I wanted my big family, I had to find a different way,” Mansell said.

Instead, Mansell had three children in Sydney’s northern beaches through what’s colloquially known as the “turkey baster method” after an online search for a sperm donor.

Just as “test tube babies” (children born from IVF) are not actually created or grown in test tubes, a turkey baster – the giant bulb pipette-like kitchen tool, used for keeping roasting meat moist – is usually not the vehicle for semen during at-home artificial insemination.

Instruments vary. One Adelaide Hills mother told this masthead she used a menstrual disc. But the honour is mostly reserved for needle-free syringes, which is what Mansell used to start a family.

“We stayed in really fancy hotels,” Mansell said. “The donor just looked like a businessman who was coming in [for] a meeting.”

Mansell and wife Sarah Hopkins waited in the hall while the donor completed his end of the deal, before coming back into the room to finish the job.

“It’s totally awkward,” Mansell said. “No one’s comfortable with the process.”

“It never feels normal ... but it’s like brushing your teeth – you have to do it to have clean teeth. I had to do this to get pregnant.”

The number of Australians bypassing licensed sperm banks and IVF clinics in favour of private donor agreements and at-home insemination is unknown.

That’s a fundamental concern for researchers including Dr Neera Bhatia, an associate professor at Deakin Law School and director of its law, health and society research unit, who has observed, anecdotally, a marked rise in the practice of informal sperm donation.

Recent IVF bungles, price increases, sperm shortages, donation caps, long wait times, and a lack of desire to undergo hormonal IVF treatments are driving parents who need assistive reproductive technology to conceive – particularly queer couples or single mothers by choice – away from the regulated system and into the arms of the “Wild West”.

Without the mandatory checks and balances of the regulated system, including counselling, medical testing, and entrenched legal safeguards, Bhatia said parents are sourcing donors and sperm through a system of honesty and trust.

“As a recipient, you’re believing everything that you’ve been told by the donor, and vice versa,” Bhatia said.

“If you informally meet or communicate with an informal donor, and they tell you that they have only ever donated four times, a recipient believes their word. However, without any formal record keeping, the donor may have in fact donated several times over that amount.”

Fifteen women learned this the hard way, inadvertently giving birth to 27 half-siblings from the same Melbourne donor between 2020 and 2024. Many met the man through the popular Facebook group Sperm Donation Australia.

The group’s Perth-based founder Adam Hooper claimed the donor in question was banned from the group in 2021, which the donor disputes.

In the regulated system, clinics are responsible for tracking how many families have had children from the same donor, to comply with local statutory limits.

Victoria caps sperm donors at 10 families and New South Wales at five, partly to prevent accidental incest between half-siblings.

Hooper said births among his Facebook group had recently dropped – with 606 reported in 2025, down from 903 in 2023 – which he attributed to heightened cost-of-living pressures. This masthead cannot independently verify the number of births, which were self-reported by parents on Hooper’s website.

Sperm Donation Australia has about 23,000 members, but it’s not the only group of its kind. Private donors can also be found in smaller area- and year-specific Facebook groups, Reddit threads, international websites, Tinder-like apps and beyond.

After six years researching every possible pathway to single motherhood, Ellie Sedgwick has seen them all.

Born and raised on Sydney’s northern beaches, the 36-year-old photographer traverses the country in her Toyota Coaster. She didn’t want a partner putting a stop to that because they had welcomed a child together.

She also didn’t want to be stuck co-parenting with a former partner she “absolutely hates”.

“I honestly always liked the idea of doing it on my own,” Sedgwick told this masthead while on a women’s retreat in Lombok. “I’ve never doubted that I could do it.”

Her grandmother suggested a sperm donor. Sedgwick was open to the idea – she is bisexual, and knew she would have to go down that avenue anyway if she ended up with a woman – but IVF was too expensive.

The alternatives weren’t ideal either; one man she found on Facebook later bragged about “creating a cult” through sperm donations, and another she met overseas donated his sperm behind his girlfriend’s back for cash, to Sedgwick’s shock.

Sedgwick therefore decided she did not want a personal relationship with the donor, and that a contract would be essential.

Eventually, a mutual friend introduced Sedgwick to someone who had previously donated to a Victorian clinic, meaning he had already completed the required screening process.

Sedgwick sighted these checks, and the duo also underwent preconception blood tests to check for inherited conditions. She then paid $1500 for a lawyer to draw up an official agreement that satisfied all parties.

“What’s important to me was that he has absolutely no legal rights to come and take the baby,” she said. “For him, it was really important that I can never come after him financially.”

Her son is due in February.

Mansell and Hopkins, meanwhile, asked their donor to sign a contract they found online, and chose someone that – if it all went wrong – they would ultimately be comfortable sharing custody with.

They also asked their donor to provide a genetics and STD test.

“I figured a straight woman going out to a bar and having sex with a man was technically way more dangerous than what I did,” Mansell said.

“I just had to weigh it up and go: Is this risk worth it? Absolutely – now I have my kids.”

They have since had their contract checked by a lawyer, and have an agreement not to reveal their donor’s identity to their children until they turn 18.

In Australia, it’s illegal to charge money for sperm. Altruism might motivate many sperm donors, but reports of unscrupulous behaviour including sexual assault and coercion have also emerged as informal arrangements grow in popularity.

Legal practice director at Page Provan family and fertility lawyers in Brisbane, Stephen Page, said from a legal perspective, it’s impossible to eliminate risk. It can, however, be mitigated.

“It’s about having a solid process, about managing expectations,” Page said.

He warned against conceiving via sex or with a former partner – where legal rights become murkier – and recommended all parties, including partners of donors and recipients, attend fertility counselling.

“Always go with your gut,” he said. “If you’ve got concerns about the other party, then don’t proceed. Pick someone else.”

None of the numerous informal sperm donation agreements Page has drafted over the past 13 years have gone to court. He emphasised the importance of including a clause stipulating that after the child is born, the parties will notify the applicable central donor registry.

Queensland, NSW, Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia have central donor registries, which track half-sibling networks and allow donor-conceived children to legally access identifying and medical information about their donor once they reach 16 or 18.

Information sharing between jurisdictions, however, is not common practice. Only some jurisdictions allow private donation information to be added, and it’s not compulsory for those parents or donors to do so.

When Sedgwick’s son is born, for example, her donor will notify the clinic he has previously donated with in Victoria, but the clinic would have no idea if he didn’t.

Bhatia, who is part of an Australian Research Council-funded project, working with a team examining the ethical, social and regulatory implications of rising informal sperm donation, said there is an “urgent need” for a national registry that includes informal sperm donation arrangements.

That would allow donor-conceived children to know more about their genetic history, half-siblings, and, Bhatia argued, minimise, as best as possible, donors from making prolific donations, and accidental incest.

A national register, however, is only a partial solution for a complex issue that, if overregulated, risks driving the practice further underground, making it “even more unsafe than it currently is.”

“Just because something has risks and harms attached to it doesn’t necessarily mean that banning or legally prohibiting it is the solution,” Bhatia said. “It is important to take a holistic approach and consider a range of mechanisms”.

As Sedgwick documents her pregnancy on Instagram, she’s been fielding critical emails from a man in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who believes her son needs a father in his life.

“Meaningful male influences don’t only exist within the structure of a heterosexual marriage,” she said. “Everyone has a different idea of how they want to live their life, and you can do it your way.”

Mansell and Hopkins agreed. Mansell had five pregnancies – including two miscarriages – over a decade of hotel room meet-ups.

But for Hopkins, who tried the same method over the same time period, IVF was the only way she could carry a child, which meant they could not use the same donor.

“Acceptance … was part of the grieving process for me, that IVF had to be part of my journey,” said Hopkins.

“What you plan ... isn’t always what it’s going to be. But there’s no one way to conceive.

“There’s so many different ways to make a family.”

The Red Nose Grief and Loss Support Line is available 24/7 for anyone affected by the loss of a pregnancy, stillbirth or death of a baby or child on 1300 308 307.

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