Sperm
banks: Who's your daddy?
David Plotz The New York Times
FRIDAY, MAY 20, 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 U.S. Food and Drug
Administration's effort to ban gay sperm donors is so misguided. New
FDA safety and screening standards for sperm banks, which take effect
Wednesday, include strict requirements for testing and retesting donors
for HIV.
But the FDA 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 HIV. 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 HIV.
They screen not only for HIV, 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 the online magazine Slate, is the
author of the forthcoming ''Genius Factory: The Curious History of the
Nobel Prize Sperm Bank.'' )
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