TAMPA, Fla. — In 2019, a couple wanted a baby. Because they were both women, they asked a friend to provide the sperm.

The insemination happened at their Tampa home without the mediation of doctors, lawyers, clinics or cryo banks — just a plastic syringe from a drugstore kit. That’s essentially where the trouble started.

Ashley Brito gave birth to a boy in 2020. Jennifer Salas cut the umbilical cord. Because they’d married during the pregnancy, both their names automatically went on the birth certificate.

They seemed excited to be moms, at least in glimpses offered in court records. In an image from their pregnancy photo shoot, both women cradle Brito’s belly. And they seemed happy with Angel Giovanni Rivera, the casino restaurant worker who’d helped them get there.

He clearly played a role in their family, though the parties later disputed what exactly that role was supposed to be.

“Happpppyyy Mother’s Day. (He) has the most amazing mothers and I’m so grateful for you both,” Rivera texted the women in 2020. Salas thanked him.

“Like our son is so loved and I love it,” he replied.

In 2021, the women broke up. As the couple filed for divorce, Brito and Rivera quietly filed to make the man the boy’s legal parent.

Florida, like most states, only recognizes two parents. Add one, and someone has to go.

Their legal drama sheds rare light on the minefield of off-the-books family planning. Any day now, when the state’s highest court weighs in, the dynamics of innumerable Florida families could shift.

When Salas learned Rivera had replaced her on the birth certificate, she felt blindsided, her lawyer said. She’d been Mom from day one, she’d argue in court. She’d stayed home with the baby for a year while Brito worked, she said.

“I was (his) comfort, even more than his biological mother,” she captioned a photo submitted as evidence in which she kisses a toddler wearing a backward baseball cap.

Through an emergency filing, she got reinstated as the boy’s legal parent while the courts took a look.

Sperm donors in Florida, by law, forfeit their claim on a child. A judge in Hillsborough County leaned on that guidance in ruling that Rivera was disqualified from seeking parental rights. An appeals court agreed.

Across the state, meanwhile, a different court of appeal was looking at a similar case — and seeing things differently.

The donor involved in a do-it-yourself insemination near Daytona, judges said, did have standing to file for paternity.

They pointed to some lines in state law that, in essence, defined being a donor in relation to using a laboratory. People skirting that process — in this case, with a home kit — fell into a gray zone. And that meant the law ruling out donors as parents didn’t apply.

Now, the Florida Supreme Court must resolve the conflict. Attorneys from Tampa argued before the justices in September. Their ruling stands to affect anyone who has done an at-home insemination, or an off-the-books sperm donation — which, it turns out, is a lot of Florida families.

Insemination without a clinic

There are two things everyone in the DIY fertility world seems to agree on: More prospective parents are bypassing sperm banks and fertility clinics. No one knows just how many.

The creator of Mosie Baby, one of several insemination kits to hit the market in recent years, said her company has sold more than 100,000. The creator of the PherDal kit (pronounced “fertile”) says sales are growing 300% a month. CVS sells kits by Frida, the viral mom-and-baby products company, for $50.

People have done at-home inseminations for years by improvising. But there’s an undeniable mainstreaming that happens once a tailor-made product is shelved an aisle over from the toothbrushes.

Couples might use them due to sexual dysfunction or with donor sperm if the male partner is infertile. They might try a kit because attempting to hit ovulation cycles can take the romance out of things. Then there are same-sex couples and single mothers by choice.

For those struggling to conceive, in vitro fertilization remains the most effective path, if also invasive and costly. But first, clinics often recommend intracervical insemination, commonly called “artificial insemination.” Artificial insemination at home isn’t exactly the same as what’s done in a clinic, but it’s not far off.

The difference in cost, however, can be huge.

Artificial insemination can run around $500 to $1,000 per cycle at a clinic, and few get pregnant on their first try. That’s not including the donor sperm. A single vial from a sperm bank typically costs in the vicinity of $800 to $1,500.

“I went to a fertility clinic with hope, and I walked out with a loan application,” said PherDal founder Jennifer Hintzsche.

Sperm from the bank, then, is worth about five times its weight in pure gold. It’s no wonder people want a cheaper way, or that savvy donors have learned to meet the demand by cutting out the middleman.

Facebook’s gray market for sperm

With a stack of hundreds and fifties fanned out on his bed, Bailey Orion felt like he must be one of Florida’s top independent sperm donors.

“Not to brag,” he said by phone after sending a photo of the cash to a Tampa Bay Times reporter, “but I think maybe No. 1.”

He laughed, as he often does when talking about his side hustle. He can’t believe it either.

Orion is a freelance donor who skips the sperm bank to work directly with recipients. The banks typically pay about $150 per sample. Freelancers can get double that or more.

There are, he said, worse gigs.

“Doing this, I can sleep at night,” he said. “People should be able to have control of their own lives, and they should be able to have kids without going broke. I’m happy for them.

“I wish I could say it was only for those reasons, but I’m also saving to buy a new truck.”

Two other sperm donors who spoke to the Times said they didn’t charge anything. They simply like helping people.

Orion uses a pseudonymous “donor name,” like most who advertise this service on social media. He keeps the Quest app on his phone, loaded with his latest sexually transmitted infection screenings and his sperm analysis.

On the morning he met a Times reporter at a seafood restaurant near his home in Pasco County, he wore dark sunglasses and a Blue Jays cap pulled low. A shapely red beard covered the rest of his face. He is approaching 40, works in sales and sipped a Bloody Mary. Even clients don’t know his real name, he said, and he wants it to stay that way.

Mostly, that means protection from being pursued for child support. He has seen it happen, he said, and donating outside the system carries that risk. He doesn’t do written contracts aimed at avoiding legal entanglements because that would require his name, and he doesn’t believe they would hold up in court anyway.

“Florida needs to fix the law so that a donor is a donor is a donor, no matter where a donation takes place. Until then, I’m anonymous.”

Freelance donors also worry they could be charged with practicing health care without a license. It’s part of why the men refer to “reimbursement” for expenses, or “gifts” or “tips,” but never explicitly to payments.

Orion’s phone is loaded with messages from hopeful parents who saw his posts on any of the Facebook groups he frequents, including Sperm Donors of Florida, which has 5,500 members. That’s small, he says. The better groups have 50,000.

“Hi all! I’m peaking earlier than I thought,” wrote an ovulating woman in a recent post. “I’m in need of a successful donor within 1.5hr of Orlando/Kissimmee for tonight and/or tomorrow night!”

“DeLand Fl. Multiple successes. Mixed race. Paperwork ready,” went one of a dozen replies from donors.

Over the span of a week in November, Orion made arrangements with two out-of-town couples who’d booked hotels so that they could call on his services multiple days in a row, as well as with a local recipient. They parked outside his house, and he or his partner ran the sample outside in a sterile cup.

“We are 10 (minutes) out now,” one texted him while en route.

“Ok I’m gonna put it in the mailbox for you in just a few,” he wrote back — his discreet workaround during an unexpected mother-in-law visit.

It’s the cute photos of his own three sons that Orion shares, he said, that draw recipients to him. He knows of eight children born of his donations in the past couple of years, though he estimates he has provided hundreds of samples to dozens of clients by now.

Every Floridian involved in these dealings — the donors, the parents and the children — potentially has something at stake in the Supreme Court’s ruling.

There’s no great option

Bypassing the clinic or sperm bank may be cheaper for recipients and more lucrative for donors, but it comes with undeniable risks.

The traditional system protects both parties: A donor can’t drag a parent to court for a paternity claim, and a recipient can’t pursue a donor for support.

Freelance donation also allows for unchecked “mass donation.” If one guy’s sperm makes dozens of siblings, living in the same area but unknown to each other, it raises the risk of accidental incest. Sperm banks don’t always succeed in enforcing limits on donations, but at least they set some guidelines. They’re also required to screen for infectious diseases.

“The Facebook groups are a mess. They’re crawling with serial donors, and for a lot of the guys it’s not money that drives them, it’s pure ego, pure narcissism, a Genghis Khan complex or the belief that they must spread their superior genes,” said Laura High, an advocate for fertility industry reform who was conceived with sperm from an anonymous donor. Going through the regulated channels, she said, comes with its own mess of unfair rules, but there are some benefits to structure. For those who step into the gray area, she urged them to hire a fertility lawyer and do a legally recognized insemination, often overseen by a doctor.

It’s either follow those rules, High said, or risk losing custody of your child.

It’s not all about money. DIY fertility marks an alternative to anonymous donors that the banks have traditionally provided. Some parents want to talk to their donor, see their face and be able to reach out for health updates that affect their kid.

And they want to trust that, hopefully, their donor doesn’t already have 100 offspring.

High speaks from experience about the mental toll of taking a DNA test and suddenly realizing you’ve got dozens of siblings. Humans feel a natural pull toward having a relationship with their brothers and sisters.

“It’s traumatic. You can’t have a good, solid, healthy relationship with 100 people,” High said. “I mean, do you have 100 friends?”

People today are more often seeking a modern relationship with donors, not necessarily in a familial role, but at least a friendly open door.

To accommodate the trend, Danielle Winston founded Seed Scout, a concierge service connecting recipients to a vetted donor they can get to know.

“They’re a ‘donor,’ but it’s changing what people think of when they hear that word to more than just a vague anonymous profile from a booklet,” Winston said.

The service has created dozens of babies and dozens of such relationships, she said, while ensuring the men are compensated fairly and limited to three families. They also offer guidance on legalities, no matter how people want to do their insemination.

The service runs about $10,000. It’s not an option for everyone.

Tampa couple scared of losing full custody

Four years into their marriage, one Tampa couple knew they wanted to grow their family.

The Times verified the details of their story but agreed to withhold their names to protect their daughter’s privacy.

“Growing up, you could ask me, ‘What do you want to be?’ I wasn’t going to tell you a doctor or a police officer — I’m gonna tell you a mom,” one of the women said. “Sometimes I’d feel embarrassed because that’s all I could say, I want to be a mom. And growing up gay, at the same time, I had these thoughts of, ‘How am I going to have a baby?’”

“I was more of a tomboy, but I thought about it,” said her partner. “Kids just gravitate toward me. I wanted a family, but my fear was always to have a family and then have it ripped away.”

The couple, now in their early 30s, initially went the fertility clinic route. One worked as a guard at a prison. The other was a phone operator making $12 an hour.

They agreed to explore options once they realized the traditional clinic route would cost anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000.

They decided to try home insemination. Some friends and family members had gotten pregnant that way.

One of the women tried to get pregnant using donations from her wife’s uncle, but it didn’t work. The couple approached close friends, but that felt maybe a little too close.

They realized that what they’d prefer was a known donor in their social orbit, but at its far edge. Someone local, so they might be able to give their child a sibling with the same DNA.

It was slow going, but they let their friends and family know they were looking. They even browsed the social media groups.

At the time, one of the women had been frequenting a certain McDonald’s.

“There was this guy,” she said. “He worked there, and I recognized him a little bit from around town. Mind you, he’s part of the LGBTQ community, too. So whenever I’d come through the drive-thru, he’d say, ‘Hey, friend!’ I couldn’t have even told you his last name.”

One day, the women went through the drive-thru together. The guy was working. He was tall and seemed well put together.

“He goes, ‘Hi friend. You and your wife look beautiful together. If you ever are ready to have a baby, I’d be honored to donate to you.’ He just came out with that,” the woman recalled.

They had a girl about 10 months later. Because she was born into an intact marriage, both women are listed as legal parents.

The women say that from the start, they made it clear to their donor that he would not be a parent, a co-parent, or anything close to that, and that he’d assured them that was fine. He’d be known as a family friend.

He was welcome at birthdays and holidays, they said, but there were rules. He couldn’t call the girl his daughter. Gifts were OK, but he needed to ask first. The man asked if his parents could be involved, they said, and the women told him yes.

“The way we saw it,” said the mother who did not give birth, “the more people that love her, the better.”

As their daughter grew, though, they worried the boundaries were blurring. He posted photos of the toddler online and referred to himself as “Dad.”

A year later, the couple briefly separated, but both said there was never any question that they would share custody of their daughter.

Then the couple was served court papers filed by the donor to establish paternity.

“We just couldn’t believe it,” one of the women said. “He’d helped us out of kindness, or so we thought. Then suddenly it was like — now he wants to take our daughter.”

In a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for his court fight, the man told a different story. He said he was always supposed to be a father, that he’d been friends with the birth mother beforehand, and that they had changed their minds and cut him out. The women say he lied.

“We’ll never make her hate anybody, but what he’s doing, that’s not love,” one woman said.

They began paying a lawyer $800 a week. Lower courts ruled in their favor. But their case is effectively on pause while the Florida Supreme Court deliberates on the matter involving Brito, Salas and Rivera.

“If the court sides with the donor in that case,” said the other, “it could open the door for every donor to come back years later and say, ‘Hey, I want my rights now.’”

That uncertainty, they believe, would be devastating for families like theirs.

The women said they can’t plan their lives — not vacations, career changes or another baby — because they don’t know what their future looks like until the court decides. They live in fear, they said, of uprooting their daughter from the family she knows.

As they await outcomes in the courts, they’re raising their girl — a happy, bright 4-year-old who loves baseball. She calls them Mommy and Mama.

They’ve spent about $25,000 on legal fees and said if they’d known this would happen, they would have spent that at a fertility clinic.

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