Our current campaign is called “Be a hero when others hope”. The aim of the campaign is to encourage people to think about donating sperm, to reconsider their own attitudes and, of course, to motivate suitable people to become donors.

For the campaign, we have come up with three motifs: three typical heroes in appropriate poses with an empty donation cup in their hands.

In addition to the many positive reactions to the campaign, there has also been some criticism of the portrayal of sperm donors as heroes. From one side, we are being accused that the campaign stylizes sperm donors as super heroes and ignores the needs of children born from sperm donation.

We at the Erlanger Samenbank would like to strongly contradict this claim. Since the foundation of our sperm bank, we have been personally and professionally committed to ensuring that donors can exercise their right to know their origins. From the very beginning, we have informed all intended parents about the importance of an open approach to the subject and early information for their children. We founded the Erlangen Notary Model, a documentation model with which we have been able to ensure since our founding in 2003 that all children can receive lifelong information about their donors. The German government has now adopted our model and set up a corresponding register for the whole of Germany at the DIMDI (German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information) in Cologne (since 2023 BfArM, Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices, Bonn).

All sperm donors are informed about the importance of donating sperm, the responsibility it entails, and the possible needs of the children they will have. This is done through our website and in a personal meeting with our doctors. In addition, we offer free psychological counseling for sperm donors on these very topics.

And yes – we think that sperm donors are heroes! At least somewhat – are we not all heroes? We mean that there is something in every human being, which makes her or him particularly important for someone else – to a smaller or larger “hero” eben! Everyone knows such situations from his own life. A classmate or colleague who stands up for you and does not swim with the current. A teacher who has seen your potential, knows what you can do, and believes in you despite your current poor performance. A nurse or a doctor who checks up on you, even though he or she has been off the clock for an hour. Your dad or mom, who picked you up somewhere and simply held you in their arms – without a moral lecture.

Sperm donors can be heroes for others, parents can be heroes for their children, and children can be heroes for their parents. In our eyes, anyone who works for a good cause, in a group, in a club, in their spare time, or in their job, has something “heroic” about them. Heroes are people to whom we are grateful for something they have done for us without benefiting from it themselves.