The following comes from an opinion piece in the Nov. 30 New York Times.
The new movie Delivery Man stars Vince Vaughn as a former sperm donor who finds out that he has more than 500 children. Is this a Hollywood exaggeration or a possible outcome? Truth is, no one knows. In the United States, we do not track how many sperm donors there are, how often they donate, or how many children are born from the donations.
Unlike a Hollywood happy ending, however, this lack of regulation has real consequences for sperm donors and the children they help produce. The Journal of the American Medical Association published one case study of a healthy 23-year-old donor who transmitted a genetic heart condition that affected at least eight of 22 offspring from his donated sperm, including a toddler who died from heart failure. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends genetic screening of sperm donors, and many banks do it, but the government does not require it. The risks become magnified the greater the number of children conceived from each donor….
AIDS changed everything. As doctors in the 1980s learned how the disease was transmitted, it was no longer advisable to transfer fresh samples directly from donor to recipient. Physicians began to use frozen sperm from commercial banks because it could be quarantined for six months, after which the donor could be retested for H.I.V.
Under these conditions, mass manufacturing began to make sense. A sperm program required personnel to keep track of donors, lab technicians to test samples, facilities to store the frozen vials, and distribution departments to ship the product around the world. Doctors could not handle these complexities on their own, so the procurement of sperm was outsourced to for-profit banks.
Today, the supply of sperm in the United States is concentrated in a few large companies that maintain multiple offices around the country, generally near college campuses. Recruiters write cheeky advertisements (“Get paid for what you’re already doing!”). They comb through hundreds of applicants to find the “few good men” who will pass rigorous medical screening and have sperm counts high enough to survive cryogenic freezing. Because of the large investment in finding donors, sperm banks require men to make regular deposits for months on end, resulting in large caches of genetic material that can produce tens and perhaps even hundreds of offspring.
Regulation has not kept up with the fundamental shift in how the fertility industry sources sperm. No federal agency or professional organization monitors the number of men donating, vials sold, or children conceived. The Food and Drug Administration requires that sperm banks test donors for particular diseases, but does not collect data about how many times men donate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conduct an annual survey of fertility clinics, but don’t ask about sperm donation. Sperm banks say they cap the number of offspring per donor, but have no way of compelling customers to report when they get pregnant or give birth.
Similar information gaps about the number of donors, and the number of children born, plague egg donation. But until now, the market for eggs has resembled the old-fashioned version of sperm donation: women produce a small number of fresh eggs for a particular customer. Now that scientists have figured out how to successfully freeze eggs, egg banks are being established, and the scale of production may eventually lead to the same challenges sperm banks face.
We owe it to sperm donors and the children born from their donations to gather basic data. Sperm banks should be required to report the number of vials sold per donor to the F.D.A. The C.D.C. should expand its survey to include sperm donation. These reasonable first steps would allow for an evidence-based discussion about whether there should be regulations to limit the number of offspring per donor. At the least, we would get a handle on whether the typical number is in the dozens or hundreds.
To read the entire op-ed piece, click here.
The inevitable result of making human life no more than a commodity. Things begin with the best intentions but are soon corrupted when money becomes a motivating factor.
When man tries to play God, God will always show them his displeasure!
May God have mercy on an amoral Amerika!
Viva Cristo Rey!
God bless, yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher, Founding Director
Concerned Roman Catholics of America, Inc.
What, with youth unemployment being the biggest issue facing the world, solving economics problems is important. Businesses need customers.
Diabolical, ungodly, wicked, depraved, corrupt, unconscionable. A few words to start on this subject.
Amen! Laurette. Why would any decent woman have herself deliberately impregnated by a man she neither knows nor loves.
When man tries to play God, there can be disastrous results. One possible scenario is that a fertility doctor in one large city, uses the same healthy, attractive, intelligent sperm donors several times. Several women in that same city receive the sperm and successfully produce children. Years later, those same offspring may unwittingly marry a half-brother or half-sister and produce children. If each one of the parents carries a recessive gene for an unwanted condition or disease, the trait could easily be passed on to their offspring, with unfortunate results. Don’t mess with mother nature.
Having hundreds of children will poison human quality. These children of unknown sperm donors may one day interbreed. We all carry dozens of recessive mutations in our genome. It will be marrying your own sister.
Never thought about that aspect, Gratias, but you have a point. Especially if say, the market (disgusting), were swayed by those traits deemed highly desirable: Sports ability, super model body, capacity for quantum physics.
God help us.
If we are taught that it is sinful to circumvent the will of God by means of murder in the form of abortion and mercy killing, how is it that circumventing the will of God by going to ungodly means to create children born of masturbators getting paid for the donation of sperm containing the heritage of their ancestors? Why does the desperate recipient of this purchased material pay thousands for it, simply to circumvent the will of God, knowing that these procedures not only often do not work, but also result in fatherless children? Men who raise these children often confess to therapists that they went along with this plan to get along with their wives, who believe their lives are incomplete if they do not have children and pretend they belong to the man present, whereas they are forcing this man to go along with the idea of caring for another man’s child to the point of being declared legally responsible for them. These situations eventually often are confessed to the children when they are older, leaving the child with more questions than answers. One of the questions that is answered, however, is why they were never fully comfortable with their pretend fathers. This whole thing is cruel, except to the man who is paid to masturbate to pornography, wink, wink.
Oh, wait. It is cruel even to the man, that is, assuming he is human enough to have a few questions himself about who these other humans being are whom he may have thereby helped create!
This is simply technological promiscuity.
Parents are responsible for and in the light of eternity – will be accountable for raising their own children.
CCC: ” 2223 Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children.
They bear witness to this responsibility first by creating a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule. The home is well suited for education in the virtues. This requires an apprenticeship in self-denial, sound judgment, and self-mastery – the preconditions of all true freedom. Parents should teach their children to subordinate the “material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones.”
Parents have a grave responsibility to give good example to their children. By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them:
He who loves his son will not spare the rod. . . . He who disciplines his son will profit by him.
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. ”
CCC: ” 2252 Parents have the first responsibility for the education of their children in the faith, prayer, and all the virtues. They have the duty to provide as far as possible for the physical and spiritual needs of their children.”
CCC: ” 2376 Techniques that entail the dissociation of husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral.
These techniques (heterologous artificial insemination and fertilization) infringe the child’s right to be born of a father and mother known to him and bound to each other by marriage .
They betray the spouses’ “right to become a father and a mother only through each other.”
CCC: ” 2377 Techniques involving only the married couple (homologous artificial insemination and fertilization) are perhaps less reprehensible, yet remain morally unacceptable. They dissociate the sexual act from the procreative act. The act which brings the child into existence is no longer an act by which two persons give themselves to one another, but one that entrusts the life and identity of the embryo into the power of doctors and biologists and establishes the domination of technology over the origin and destiny of the human person. Such a relationship of domination is in itself contrary to the dignity and equality that must be common to parents and children.
Under the moral aspect procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not willed as the fruit of the conjugal act, that is to say, of the specific act of the spouses’ union . . . . Only respect for the link between the meanings of the conjugal act and respect for the unity of the human being make possible procreation in conformity with the dignity of the person. “
Very instructive notes, Pete! Reminds me of an acquaintance of ours who chose artificial insemination to become pregnant. She was also a “master catechist” in her parish, teaching the faith to Catholic school children. Evidently her pastor never informed her that she was about to engage in a gravely immoral act. Perhaps the good padre didn’t know himself.
What Anton just wrote reminds me why the late Saintly Fr. Dan Johnson of St. Mary’s By the Sea never allowed any RCIA in the Parish as long as he was in charge. God bless His soul!
May God have mercy on an amoral Amerika!
Viva Cristo Rey!
God bless, yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher, Founding Director
Concerned Roman Catholics of America, Inc.
Well said, Pete.
What kind of people would want to mess around with sperm? Yuck!