When Diane Carr turned 37 with a compelling desire to have a baby and no true love to have one with, she began, gingerly, to explore the other option she had filed in the back of her mind.

Like other single women who have found themselves sifting through online profiles of anonymous sperm donors recently, Carr, a real estate broker in Atlanta, was quickly convinced that buying sperm was the easiest way to have a baby without a partner. She also concluded that it has quietly become a socially acceptable choice, if only because so many are making it.

Carr's hairdresser, it turned out, knew someone who had just conceived that way, as did one of her own clients. An Atlanta chapter of a national support group for "single mothers by choice" formed two years ago and had 26 members.

On the Internet, Carr discovered hundreds of pregnant single women trading notes. Some were arranging to send one another their leftover sperm.

"Five years ago you never heard about this," said Carr, who had the insemination procedure performed this fall. "Now you can talk about it, and it's OK."

In her effort to become a lone parent, Carr has plenty of company. The support group she joined is 25 years old, but it has grown from 12 to 24 chapters across the country in the last three years. About three-quarters of its 4,000 members used sperm donors. Sperm banks, which once catered largely to infertile and lesbian couples, are seeing a surge in business from single women, as are obstetricians who perform artificial inseminations.

The groundswell of single women deliberately having babies reflects their increased ability to support a family. It helps, too, that the Internet has done away with the need to leave the house to find a donor. A woman can now select the father of her child from her living room and have his sperm sent directly to her doctor. It is faster and cheaper than adoption, and it allows women to bear their own genetic offspring.

Single women have always found adoption rules more restrictive than they are even for gay couples. Many hesitate to simply have a sexual fling or use a "known donor" for fear that the father may someday stake a claim to the child. But thousands are gravitating to sperm bank Web sites, where donor profiles can be sorted by medical history, ethnic background and a wide range of physical characteristics. Like an online dating service where no one ever dates, the sites feature written answers to questions such as "What is the funniest thing that ever happened to you?" Some women screen for men with no cancer in their family. Some search for a man who might have been their soul mate. Others are more pragmatic.

"You're paying for it, so you kind of want the best of the best," said Anna Aiello, 38, of Moriches, N.Y., on Long Island, the mother of 1-year-old twins, who saw her ability to select a 6-foot-2-inch blond, blue-eyed, genetic-disease-free donor as some consolation for not getting to fall in love with someone who would most likely have been more flawed.

What it costs

Prices at sperm banks range from about $150 to $600 per vial, plus shipping. At some banks customers can pay extra for a donor's childhood photograph or a tape recording of his voice. Fairfax Cryobank, one of the largest, charges more for donors who have doctorates.

Veteran "choice moms" say more single women are trying to conceive in their mid-30s rather than waiting. Because they are starting before their fertility declines, they are having more success. Some are even having second children.

"It's not necessarily Plan B anymore, it's just the plan," said Melissa Singer, 46, a member of Single Mothers by Choice, a national support group, who had a donor-inseminated daughter 10 years ago. "It means there's a lot less desperation as a whole in the group."

Next page >