Who's Your Daddy?
By DAVID PLOTZ,
NYTimes on the Web, May 19, 2005
Washington -- TWENTY-FIVE
years ago, a peculiar little sperm bank called the Repository for Germinal
Choice began offering its product -- the seed of Nobel Prize winners and other
outstanding men -- to the public. The "Nobel Prize sperm bank" was jeered
for its elitism and self-importance. Some critics proposed that the
government ban it. But clients were undeterred. Women from across
the country inundated the sperm bank, in Southern California, with applications
for its special sperm.
These women weren't interested just in how smart the donors were, but in how
much the repository was saying about them. At the time, most banks
revealed little about their donors besides eye color and blood type. But
the repository published a whole catalog, detailing each man's personality
quirks, looks, accomplishments and -- most important -- health history.
It was a revelation. From then on, women shopped for sperm. They,
not their doctors, decided what kind of donor they wanted. They were no
longer patients. They became customers.
This history helps explain why the Food and Drug Administration's effort to ban
gay sperm donors is so misguided. New F.D.A. safety and screening
standards for sperm banks, which take effect next Wednesday, include strict
requirements for testing and retesting donors for H.I.V. But the F.D.A.
has also published an accompanying "guidance" document advising banks to bar as
donors men who have had sex with other men in the last five years, on the
grounds that these men are at high risk for H.I.V. Though the guidance
doesn't carry the force of regulation, many sperm banks have indicated that they
will follow it. Gay groups including the Lambda Legal Defense and
Education Fund and Human Rights Campaign have protested, but so far in vain.
This is a case of government trying to solve a problem that no longer exists --
because the free market already solved it.
As the Nobel sperm bank showed, consumer choice is an incredibly powerful force
for improving practices. Customers insist on safety and health, and banks
compete vigorously to satisfy them. Banks have replaced fresh sperm with
frozen, in order to have time to quarantine the sperm and retest the donor for
H.I.V. They screen not only for H.I.V., but also for gonorrhea, syphilis,
hepatitis and sexually transmitted diseases that most of us have never heard of.
Sperm banks force donors to pass a panel of genetic tests for cystic fibrosis,
Tay-Sachs disease, Fanconi anemia and other awful abnormalities. Banks
take exhaustive medical histories, perform elaborate personality tests and
require high standards of personal behavior. At California Cryobank,
America's leading sperm collector, less than 5 percent of donor applicants make
the cut. I would bet that the pool of American sperm donors -- which
includes gay donors who have passed all of these screens -- is smarter,
healthier, cleaner-living and freer of dread genetic defects than perhaps any
group of men on earth.
With its late and largely unnecessary obsession with sperm safety, the
government is missing the real issue in the sperm bank world: donor
anonymity. Thousands of Americans are born every year without the right to
know who their father is.
Our tradition of donor anonymity dates back more than a century and was
formalized in recent decades by court decisions and state law. Until a few
years ago, it was assumed that children conceived by donor insemination would
live with a father, and that father would -- following the advice of the time --
pretend he was the child's biological father. But today the psychological
advice has changed: many parents now tell children who are the result of
donor sperm where they came from. And a growing number of sperm bank
customers are single women and lesbian couples. In these families, there
is no paternal secret to protect. In an age of genetic determinism, many
of the children are haunted by the fact that they can't know half of their
genetic heritage, and thus half of themselves. Hardly a week goes by that
I am not contacted by an adult child of donor insemination seeking to find his
donor father. Because the law is arrayed against them, these quests for
identity are usually hopeless, and heartbreaking.
Several European countries, including Britain and the Netherlands, recently
banned anonymous sperm donations and established donor registries. When
donor-insemination children born today in those countries reach age 18, they
will be able to look up their fathers in the national registry and seek them
out.
The move to end donor anonymity is still small in the United States -- it lags
far behind the similar effort to open adoption records -- but it will grow as
the huge current generation of donor-insemination children reaches adulthood.
So far, the federal government has shown not even the vaguest interest in the
issue, which is a shame, because government is the only force that can really
help. It will take federal government action to establish a national
registry and to reduce the barriers such children face when seeking their
fathers. I don't know whether they all should have the right to know their
donor fathers -- it's a terribly complicated issue -- but I do know it's a
public policy question that lawmakers should be considering. And it
certainly deserves more thought than a pointless ban on gay donors.
David Plotz, the deputy editor of Slate, is the author of the
forthcoming "Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank."
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