I’m becoming more comfortable with tempering my pro-choice voice and admitting to myself that the right to avoid unwanted motherhood may be more sacred than the right to be a mother.

Does anyone know what the actual risks of 150-per-donor situations are? I’m assuming there’s genetic screening involved, and it’s not like the small percentage of pregnancies initiated by sperm donation is enough to threaten human biological diversity. I suppose it seems kind of squicky, but only by the same lights that sperm donation is squicky in the first place.

I guess I’m a bit ignorant of the economics here—women don’t like, pay more money to the sperm banks if they get pregnant, right? So there’s clearly more profit for the clinic in a woman who keeps coming back after failed attempts than one who is recommended a donor with proven results who has a baby and then is done? I don’t understand how profit motive plays into this at all.

I imagine for a lot of the people it’s mostly an “eww” reaction to the idea of a guy with 150 biological children.  It kinda stirs thoughts of Mormon-style polygamists with harems of wives they force to bear numerous children (admittedly, this was my initial reaction, so I may be projecting a bit too much :/ ).  But your arguments make sense, it’s rather cruel to women who want children to force them to go through dozens of artificial insemination procedures because of excessively strict limits on the numbers of children a donor can father (that doesn’t seem like the right word but I can’t think of a better phrase).

I think my pro-choice view makes me wonder why we can’t force the clinics to tell the women how many children the donor has conceived and educate them on the problems or issues with that number. Then, we trust each woman to make the best decision for her given the information on hand.

It’s possible the strategy is simply customer satisfaction. If you sell too many ineffective products to too many customers, it makes your business look bad.

progrocker, I would use the verb sire rather than father.

So, why is having 150 half-siblings squicky? Does one somehow become less unique and therefore less human? I mean, I get the “ew” sensation as well, but where’s it coming from, and do we have to respond to it? (fwiw, I have 5 half siblings, and they in turn have another 5 half-siblings themselves, so we are legion. And individuals.)

You nicely list some downsides to limiting the number of donations.  Honestly though, I really don’t see what’s so bad about the unlimited donations.  Even the “incest” angle doesn’t really squick me.  Half-siblings have 25% shared genes.  That’s worth worrying about, but it’s not that bad for society if this crops up once in a blue moon.  Compare it to first cousins sharing 12.5%, and remember that there is greater kinship relatedness in societies that practice cousin marriage.

Rare genetic diseases?  Then stop using that donor.  There’s no need to stop using all high-impact donors.

On a related note, I know two adoptred children, who when they tracked down their birth parents found they were half siblings.  They are a boy and a girl who were somewhat attracted to each other.  Now they fortunately have a siblingish friendship in high school.  What if they hadn’t found out?  Same goes for children of donated sperm.  I am not passing judgement in any way on any of this.  It is all just worth considering.

So, why is having 150 half-siblings squicky?

If you’re living in a small and insular enough community, you might accidentally have sex with one of your half-siblings if your respective mothers don’t know or don’t tell you you share a father.

I guess the question I have about your theory (which is a good one) is that in the article, many of the sperm banks claim to have very incomplete information about pregnancy and birth rates. Which would imply they don’t have a really good idea of whose boys can swim and whose can’t.

The biggest public health interest I see in regulating this is that there already has been at least one case in which more than a dozen children were found to have an extremely rare genetic disorder traced to one donor.

Count me in with those that don’t understand what the big deal is other than an “ick” factor that I don’t really understand.

Hell, 150 offspring doesn’t even make it into the big leagues in terms of fathering offspring in our species’ history.

“No one likes the idea of one guy making 200 kids with his sperm donations” What does it matter one way or another? Who is being exploited in this situation? The man? The women? The children? You point out, Amanda, that the sperm banks make less money by deliberately using donors known to be fertile. The main interviewee in the article wants to end anonymous donation and restrict the number children born to particular donors, both policies that would restrict the donor pool and make it that much harder for women to get pregnant. It just reeks of “I’ve got mine” since she herself used a sperm donor.

tl;dr: I see no problem here, could someone explain it to me?

No one likes the idea of one guy making 200 kids with his sperm donations

I’m actually not particularly bothered by this.  200 kids in a city of millions, or even in a specific subgroup of tens of thousands, means that half-siblings won’t all be pairing up constantly, especially when you consider that the vast majority of other people in the group weren’t conceived by donors at all.  The odds of ending up with another person who is the result of a donor is small, and the odds that it will be the same donor is smaller still.  Statistically it will happen a few times, of course.  But there are plenty of scenarios where kids will end up worse off than half-sibling incest.  Even full-sibling incest isn’t a guarantee of getting genetic mutants.

Of course children should always have the right to their donor’s information, at minimum a certain ID number that is universal across different sperm banks.  But the occasional accidental half-sibling incest won’t even make a blip in the incidence of any diseases.

@ progrocker “It kinda stirs thoughts of Mormon-style polygamists with harems of wives they force to bear numerous children” I guess I can see that, except the exact opposite power dynamic is in play here. The women are deliberately seeking (often at great physical, emotional and financial expense!) to have a child and the man is a non-entity but for some genetic goo.

Rare genetic diseases?  Then stop using that donor.  There’s no need to stop using all high-impact donors.

Since I brought this up, part of the problem is that first they have to know that that donor is a carrier of that genetic disorder. In the old-fashioned kind of reproduction, if there is a rare disorder, a family has a kid and that kid gets sick. The disorder is diagnosed either before the family has any more kids or when a younger sibling is quite young. Then they can make an educated decision about whether to have more kids. A donor can help create a lot of kids in that same time, and the sperm bank might not even know.

In terms of regulation, I’d probably favor disclosure over a ban or strict limit, but again, the sperm bank would need good reporting from their customers. And do we want to require women to report back? Or their doctors? I would think whether the father is a sperm donor is not in and of itself medically relevant to the OB or midwife. So if you want to regulate it, the question becomes what, exactly, do you regulate?

What if they hadn’t found out?

What if they hadn’t? If nobody knew they were half-siblings, the incest taboo is inoperative and meaningless.

I would say that if it bothers the women who would have chosen a different donor if they’d known or if it bothers the donors who wouldn’t have donated if they’d known, then there is at least somewhat of an issue.

I wonder if there is a genetic advantage to children spawned by someone with hardier and more effective sperm.  Could this cause a measurable change in the rate of evolution? Is this an ethical or moral issue?

Count me among those who aren’t worried about incestuous half-siblings, but Jeebus, sperm banks urgently need to be regulated, even though customers will end up paying more.  There’s just nuthin’ now in the U.S.  A giant uncontrolled experiment that puts women disproportionately in danger. 

Make ‘em keep track of conceptions-to-term and disclose the number, as shakahi@5 said, for starters.  That way a customer could make an informed choice among “Looks good but untested,” “Looks really good but doesn’t cause pregnancy too easily,” and “Really works, maybe more than you want.”  And keep track of genetic diseases.

Also, I’m running out of patience with the NYT bias in favor of well-heeled consumers keen to Buy the Best.  How about interviewing sperm donors and would-be donors?  A story about working for a sperm bank or giving advice to customers?  The different insemination experiences of single women vs. lesbian couples vs. hetero couples?

Men’s privacy should be respected as much as the woman’s. I’m a firm believer in that: women who give their kids up for adoption should be allowed “full blackout” on their information so that their life isn’t ruined later on.

I see the “ick” factor as a simple matter of Oedipus, Stupid. Oedipus had two very simple rules to not be miserable: 1) don’t kill a dude who is old enough to be your father and 2) don’t fuck a woman who’s old enough to be your mother. For children who know that they were conceived by sperm bank, if they are really “holy shit I don’t want to accidentally sleep with my sibling,” they simply need to not fuck other people who were conceived by sperm donor. I would put that in a Dealbreakers category, in fact.

(And for matter of half-sibling incest, there are a lot of cultures, and the greater degree of western history involved cousin-marriage and the like in order to preserve family inheritance. So if a handful of half-siblings start sprogging off, it’s hardly the end of the Human Line. I think that the taboo against fucking people you’re related to has far expanded beyond the boundaries of what is genetically safe.)

I would say that if it bothers the women who would have chosen a different donor if they’d known or if it bothers the donors who wouldn’t have donated if they’d known, then there is at least somewhat of an issue.

How about an option for donors to request a limit on how many times their juice can be put out? It’s probably legally a no-go but women already have to option of choosing a less successful (or not yet successful) donation when they’re offered the prize studs.

@Ponygirl: Oedipus’ was ignorant of the mother fucking, father killer prophecy. The rule he broke was the one Tiresias gave him not to seek the killer of Laius the former king. Which just shows that if your folks are trying that hard to cover up the means of your creation, the reason is probably something you are not going to like.

No, he wasn’t. In the Sophocles tragedy, Oedipus is only told of killing his father and the mother-fucking is left out. But the original legend is quite clear:

“One day, taunted by a Corinthian youth with not in the least resembling his supposed parents, Oedipus went to ask the Delphic Oracle what future lay in store for him. ‘Away, wretch!” the Pythoness cried in disgust. ‘You will kill your father and marry your mother!’”

-Robert Graves Greek Myths

Apparently there’s a thing called genetic sexual attraction, where genetically related people who did not grow up together meet, and are sexually attracted to each other. Common enough that people who are meeting bio-family members for the first time are warned about it by reunification counselors. They “recognize” parts of themselves in the other person, and this feels a lot like love. Finding and meeting dozens of half-siblings could potentially up the odds of this happening, with all the attendant incest taboo ramifications.
GSA:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_sexual_attraction
2 things I wonder about: is this an actual, provable phenomenon, (beyond a wikipedia entry) and does it come into play if the two people have not been told they’re genetically related?

So there’s one other thing at work here. Why are we, as a society, producing people who absolutely HAVE to know who their genetic father was? Is it natural human curiosity? Or is it some sort of weird societal fetish we have towards explaining things through genetics that probably can’t be explained through genetics?

@Jeff #27

Good question. Is it possible that, assuming that romantic relationships between unknowing half-siblings aren’t an issue, the compulsion of “must know who the father is” is an outgrowth of Sperm Magic?

A thing I never hear *anyone* talk about is that male sperm count has been plummeting over the last several generations. I think it’s the sexist belief that only women care about fertility, and that infertility is a woman’s issue; also, men with a low sperm count *can* still get a woman pregnant if they have enough sex and she’s fertile.

But there probably is wide variation in the “quality” of the sperm, at least in terms of how many shots it takes for a woman to get pregnant, because some factor has been making men, in general, less and less fertile, and the men who are less exposed to this factor or more resistant to it will have higher sperm counts. (And I’m pretty sure the sperm banks *could* know who had a high sperm count, if they checked.)

As for genetic sexual attraction… I have kind of a fetish for albinism. I had no albinos in my family and didn’t know any when I grew up; I just had a thing for white hair on people who are not old, and extremely pale skin. I ended up marrying the first albino I ever met (to be fair, he met a whole lot of my other criteria for “sexy guy”, too, like being a brilliant, arrogant asshole)... and my first child with him is also an albino. Turns out I was a carrier, and never knew it. The frequency of genes for albinism in the population is about 1 in 70, so the likelihood of my being a carrier was pretty damn low. Am I, perhaps, also carrying a gene with a predisposition to find albinos attractive? If I have a gene for albinism, I may very well be the descendant of someone *else* who found albinos attractive enough to have a child with one.

So my anecdotal evidence suggests that genetic sexual attraction is quite plausible. If you’re attracted to a person who’s related to you, and they look like one of your ancestors, then you’re probably related to someone who found that ancestor hot. (Unless you come from aristocracy, or a nation where all marriages were arranged… but in Europe, peasants tended to marry for love, inasmuch as they could get “married” at all, because their families owned no property and had no reason to make marital alliances.) A gene that is paired with another gene that promotes attraction to the trait the first gene codes for is going to be much more successful in a small interbreeding pool (which, throughout history, most of us have lived in) than a gene that’s paired with a gene that promotes lack of attraction to the trait the first gene codes for.

@Jeff

I’ve wondered about the fetish about genetics too. I think it exists because most people don’t even have a basic school textbook understanding of it, or have forgotten, and that media has turned genes into something that a scientist merely has to read from both parents to know everything about how their child will turn out. Like a more science-y astrology, but just as bogus.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. Ten years ago I was a donor. It was somewhat easy cash(the screening was rather involved, though I lied about not being gay, because I was afraid they wouldn’t choose me); $200 a shot, tax free, six specimens. I was never informed if any of my specimens were used. I never asked, I don’t even remember what the policy on that was. I would really prefer not to know.

The problem of unknown half-siblings potentially fucking seems really far down on the ladder of social problems, far below the problem of infertility.

Even if a guy has 150 offspring, chances that doesn’t translate to 150 kids who are half-siblings to each other. A lot of people who get pregnant with a donor for their first kid understandably want to use the same donor for the rest of their kids, so that all their children will be full sibs.

To the extent that high-volume impregnators are a problem at all, they’re a problem when one donor serves a relatively small community. Sperm banks could solve the problem by exchanging sperm from their best donors so that no one donor inseminates more than X number women in any large metropolitan area.

So there’s one other thing at work here. Why are we, as a society, producing people who absolutely HAVE to know who their genetic father was? Is it natural human curiosity? Or is it some sort of weird societal fetish we have towards explaining things through genetics that probably can’t be explained through genetics?

Honestly, health reasons are extremely important. Especially if you are ever thinking of reproducing yourself.

For example deafness runs in my family. Not an issue that would keep me from having kids but I know what I have to look out for if I do. The earlier it is treated, the better the results. It something that is often overlooked until the child has noticeable development delays.

No, this information cannot give you a perfect guide book on what your child will be like but prospective parents and possible children deserve to know whether cystic fibrosis, or colon cancer, or even something as simple as colour blindness runs in the family. Right or wrong, these issues often have a profound effect on one’s decision whether to have children or not.

As some have alluded to, the donor market tends to be a free for all. Some regulations really are needed.

You know, I’m not really liking the idea of wanting to meet one’s birth father as a “fetish” based on ignorance or “magic sperm”. Meeting one’s biological parent or sibling is a big deal for many people, and I don’t thank you for reducing it to some sort of current pop psych whim.

Between the sperm donor number system and the medical pedigree that sperm donors have to disclose, it seems like the problem of rare genetic disease is already solved.

Armed with that information, someone conceived through sperm donation is probably already in a better position to decide whom to have kids with than someone who was conceived the old fashioned way.

Sure, a certain percentage of kids who are sired by sperm donors won’t be told, so they won’t be able to look up their number and history. But then the question becomes: What are the odds of any given child-of-donor-x (status known or unknown) reproducing with another child-of-donor-x (status unknown)? It’s actually pretty remote. The kids who don’t know are probably a minority of the total number of kids conceived. To be generous, suppose that out of 150 kids, only 100 will know their status. (I bet the actual percentage of kids who know their status is a lot higher.) Some among the 50 who haven’t been told won’t be at risk for unwitting incest with each other because they’re actually full sibs raised together. (A lot of women/couples who get pregnant with one donor will want the same donor for the rest of their family.)

I just don’t see this as a major problem, especially if fertility clinics started trading sperm to make sure that no one donor dominates any given region.

No, he wasn’t. In the Sophocles tragedy, Oedipus is only told of killing his father and the mother-fucking is left out. But the original legend is quite clear:

“One day, taunted by a Corinthian youth with not in the least resembling his supposed parents, Oedipus went to ask the Delphic Oracle what future lay in store for him. ‘Away, wretch!” the Pythoness cried in disgust. ‘You will kill your father and marry your mother!’”

-Robert Graves Greek Myths

Your source for original myths is Graves? I love I, Claudius as much as the next guy but I would bet my accuracy on him. Digging through my old myth texts indicates that some versions have Oedipus hearing the prophecy and leaving Corinth to avoid it because he still thought Polybus and Merope were his actual parents. I’d argue that still makes him ignorant because he was out of the loop on his adoption which setup the whole mess.

I certainly think requirements for genetic testing of donors and an independent registrar for donors.  As it stands now, there’s no way to know if clinics are trading the same, or even safe, wares.

I worked at a fertility clinic right out of college and I would be really surprised if anyone knew which donors had the highest rates of conception.  Certain characteristics were frequently requested, like height and hair color, generally the taller and blonder the better.  You can see how the few six foot four blonde donors could wind up fathering a lot of children.  Outside of testing for HIV and hepatitis I don’t think their was any other screening of the donors. 

People seem to assume that medical services are professional but after working at a fertility clinic and then a organ donation service i have a feeling some people might be really disappointed.

You can tell the incest thing is more a product of overactive imaginations than anything else, because daughters were the only ones told to watch themselves.  Why not sons?  Is it better if a son commits incest?  Of course not.  But we’re in the world of fears and fantasies, where only female sexuality is a concern.

I mean, is sex between people who are conceived through donors *that* common?  Again, I have to wonder, why is it strictly a female responsibility to monitor it?

The “health issues” cover for why knowing who your bio parents is transparent rationalization.  People raised by their bio parents probably only know their bio family’s full health history, what, 10% of the time?  15%?  Probably less.  You know what affects you directly, I suppose, but this notion that Americans generally have a fully disclosure moment where they make a long list for their kids is a pure myth.  It’s definitely an irrational urge, based in no small part by how much patriarchy impacts our sense of self.  I fail to see why we have to pretend that’s not true.  Self-flattery, I guess, but what value is there in that?  I really don’t understand this constant need to pretend your average person is a flawless person who rises above social training and cultural values.

Between the sperm donor number system and the medical pedigree that sperm donors have to disclose, it seems like the problem of rare genetic disease is already solved.

It’s actually not. See Benny’s comment, but beyond that, there are so many rare genetic disorders that they can’t screen for every single thing that one person in a million is a carrier for. You can be a carrier for something that has never shown up in your family before. Tracking through the numbers appears to be entirely voluntary. If I have time to hunt down the article, I’ll post the link, but there was a case a few years back where exactly what I described happened - dozens of children in a mid-sized city all ending up with something that most pediatricians could go their entire career without seeing, all traced to one donor, and it was detective work on the part of the pediatrician and the parents that figured it out. The sperm bank (and the donor, obviously) had no idea and were still giving his stuff to women.

We can say the problems affect such a small number of people or the consequences of additional regulation are so undesirable that we’re going to let this slide. I don’t think we can say that there’s nothing wrong at all with the current system.

And I said this already, but just to be clear: Obviously, rare genetic disorders get passed on all the time when people have kids the old-fashioned way. The question is whether we want to do more to limit the disproportionate impact and needless suffering when one of them pops up in donor sperm.

I’ve read things about this issue that lead me to believe that a lot of women will only use donors who agree to an open donation. So, say this guy is one of the men who agreed to having his bio-children meet him one day. Even if only half of the 150 kids he sired want to meet him, he could be in for a surprise. I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of 150 kids traced to one donor, but only if he consents to having his sperm used this many times. I bet that even men who donate a lot don’t really expect that their sperm would be picked this often and that the rate of success would be so high. If a man is comfortable with the possibility, okay. But I feel the donor has the right to be informed and to set a limit on the number of times his sperm could be used. Especially since men who donate are often young or are driven by financial difficulties. Maybe he’s thinking “sure, I dont want kids in my life, but I need this money and what’s the harm in allowing one kid to find me one day.” But then 50, 100 show up? It seems a bit…not coercive, but something in that ballpark, not to inform donors of the possible consequences. So, in this case, I would actually support the donor’s right to limit the use of his genetic material over the desire of women to conceive.

Your source for original myths is Graves? I love I, Claudius as much as the next guy but I would bet my accuracy on him. Digging through my old myth texts indicates that some versions have Oedipus hearing the prophecy and leaving Corinth to avoid it because he still thought Polybus and Merope were his actual parents. I’d argue that still makes him ignorant because he was out of the loop on his adoption which setup the whole mess.

LOL—talk about grasping at straws rather than admit that you lost the argument.

Amanda @ 41 - you are talking like the young,relatively health person you are. 
People who’s families have heart deases(spouse), sugar regulation issues (his family and mine), various possibly genetic predispositions to cancers/cycts (my family), etc do have a long list and due make certain our kids know the signs and possible outcomes.  My daughter’s dealbreakers include family health issues too close to ours.

I don’t get the push back on people wanting to know their biological/genetic history, even if it’s not for medical purposes. I love hearing stories about my family. Families have personalities, and I consider the threads that led to my parents as part of my identity too. I don’t get why that’s a bad thing or something I should pretend is not the case? Is the argument that if patriarchy didn’t exist families would not impact sense of self?

The anti-choicers are already outspoken in their opposition to fertility treatments precisely because clinics are more than happy to work with lesbians, so we do need to proceed with caution regarding regulations of donors.

That said, the 150 children thing could end up in some sort of Greek tragedy. But I have to say that those kids, with their different moms and different upbringings, do not scare me as much as the fact that the Duggars (of 19 kids and counting), if their kids have 19 kids too, will be about 2 million people in 200 years. That many religious fanatics is more scary than one guy with 150 kids.

And clinics do do everything they can to get people pregnant. Unsatisfied customers are really bad for business. I have been to a fertility clinic and the doctors did ask my husband (high sperm count, high motility rate) if he would be a donor. He said no, but I completely understood their motives and did not blame them for asking.

I agree with Elena @44 that the donor’s consent is at issue here; one of the most disturbing thing in the Times article was the extent to which it seemed like sperm banks were promising to limit the number of potential children a potential donor would produce and then failing to do so.  Leaving all health issues aside, as an ethical matter I think sperm donors should have the right to expect that any conditions they place upon their donation will be honored.

As far as health issues go, though, several commenters have pointed out that genetic diseases are not as much a non-issue as they might seem.  There are lots of genetic disorders that don’t show up immediately, so that even if reporting systems were standardized and worked perfectly, under unregulated conditions a donor might have passed on a recessive gene for a disease to hundreds of children before anyone could have any idea that something was wrong.  If none of their mothers was also a carrier of that gene, then an actual problem might not crop up until those children had children of their own, at which point the problem gene would have spread far beyond its likely incidence under old-fashioned mating conditions.  Over time, this could become a real problem; it cancels out one of the evolutionary advantages of sexual reproduction, which is that it maximizes genetic diversity.

It’s obviously good to be wary of cross-species comparisons, but I’ve been reading When Species Meet by Donna “Cyborg Manifesto” Haraway lately, which is about various kinds of human-animal interactions.  She talks about the problem of “popular sire” syndrome in animal breeding circles, which happens when a few males of any given breed are used to the exclusion of all others; apparently it’s been a big problem in some breeds and led to lots of unexpected and sometimes dire consequences.  Again, a purebred dog breed population is obviously a much more circumscribed genetic pool than even the most insular small human town, so the effects of a similar use of “popular sires” in human society would probably be very diluted in comparison.  But there’s no reason to assume that it would be nil.

Another thing that the “popular sire” syndrome brings up, and to me this is a much “squickier” issue in the human sphere than incest, is the idea that a few individuals are chosen over and over again as genetic exemplars.  It may not be Gattaca or anything, but we can all imagine what the human “popular sires” look like: they’re white, they’re tall, they’re Ivy-educated.  Of course, women should be free to choose sperm donors based on whatever information is available to them, but the whole issue makes me worry about the extent to which, when all you have is a resume to base that choice on, certain traits get emphasized over others that matter in real life (the ability to make decent conversation, shared taste in music and movies, being nice).  I don’t necessarily think that’s a reason to limit the number of offspring from a certain donor (though I think I’m persuaded that there are valid ethical and public health reasons to do that), but it’s an occasion to think about how choosing sperm donors might lead us to fetishize certain personal qualities, some of which have a lot more to do with privilege than with genetics, and to undervalue the complexity and the randomness that (happily) influence real-life decisions about mating.  Women who need artificial insemination should certainly not be allotted random sperm by lottery or anything, but I do wish that the discourse of artificial insemination could include more appreciation of the extent to which outcomes in child-bearing (however you do it) are a lot more unpredictable than the sperm banks want to concede.

As someone with a one year old daughter from donor insemination, this article just sounds like some kind of fantasy. The banks we looked at restrict the number of children to a specific donor and also limit the number of children in a region. They test for most of the major genetically transmitted issues. You also get a detailed history of major illnesses in the family.

As to donor anonymity, our child has an “identity release” contract, which means our daughter gets one contact with him after she turns 18. They all offer this. It’s a very good option and solves most of the issues people here are bringing up.

The real problem is that Nice Guy sperm is being edged out by asshole alpha-male sperm, and this is a disaster that needs immediate rectifying.

when my ex and I were looking into sperm donors she found a guy who was blacked out (though they had a lovely term that I can’t remember) on the east coast. when we asked what that was about, they said he’d had too many conceptions, so he wasn’t available in that area anymore. beyond the mind-boggling implications of how many kids this guy had, we started joking that one day they’d all face east and say in unison “yes, father, I hear you”

and as I recall Oedipus was exposed due to the prophecy, raised by adoption, found out about the prophecy and fled so he wouldn’t fulfill it. thereby meeting Laius on the road and fulfilling the prophecy. Tiresias tells him that to lift the plague that’s beset Thebes, he has to punish the killer of the former king. and hilarity ensues!

junk science @ 51 wins the thread!

shade—precisely. But let’s be honest—if you’re told that you’re fated to kill your father and marry your mother, there are two very simple rules you follow.

Don’t kill dudes old enough to be your father.
Don’t fuck women old enough to be your mother.

You don’t run away and figure “hey, that’s taken care of.”

Apparently easier said than done.

@professordarkheart

...but the whole issue makes me worry about the extent to which, when all you have is a resume to base that choice on, certain traits get emphasized over others that matter in real life (the ability to make decent conversation, shared taste in music and movies, being nice)

How are those qualities nature rather than nurture?

Women who need artificial insemination should certainly not be allotted random sperm by lottery or anything, but I do wish that the discourse of artificial insemination could include more appreciation of the extent to which outcomes in child-bearing (however you do it) are a lot more unpredictable than the sperm banks want to concede.

Women aren’t stupid.  I read through hundreds of profiles before choosing our donor.  Certainly, some women/prospective parents will fail to do their due diligence or trust where it isn’t warranted, but people occasionaly do that in more traditional reproduction, too.  Personally, I put a lot of thought into choosing my life partner, and I put the same sort of thought into choosing the donor for my baby while still understanding that this is not a guarantee in either case.  In the end, you get what you get - if you’re incredibly fortunate, a baby.  I think the majority of us understand that they are their own little people and that the only thing you can guarantee or control is how much you love and care for them.

Even if there are 200 children sired by he gets everyone pregnant, only about half of them will be able to breed with randomly selected child sired by HGEP, because the other half are the wrong sex to combine gametes with.  At least, currently.

Parents don’t necessarily give their kids the whole list of who has what disease, but by virtue of living with your family you learn what diseases they get.  I couldn’t fail to notice my father’s heart attacks, and he would have had to work hard to hide his diabetes from me.

@Mighty Ponygirl: and that’s why you aren’t an ancient Greek.  Because that shit doesn’t make sense to you.

But there’s no reason to assume that it would be nil.

Actually, the reasons you list are exactly the reasons to assume that it would be nil.

felixBC: Last I read, the studies that allegedly supported Genetic sexual attraction have been heavily criticized by other researchers for various methodological flaws. If it exists, its effect is small enough that it could be explained simply by the lack of the Westermarck effect ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)#Westermarck_effect ), combined with the existing emotional investment that anyone who cared enough to seek out their long-lost siblings would already have. Disclaimer: IANAS.

@ martian

I put a lot of thought into choosing my life partner, and I put the same sort of thought into choosing the donor for my baby while still understanding that this is not a guarantee in either case.

Of course, and so should we all.  And I do trust women to make their own choices on both counts (with the understanding that some of them will be stupid by my lights)...I was trying to figure out how not to sound patronizing, and maybe didn’t make it all the way there.  My point was only that sperm banks themselves tend to sell what they have to offer as a near-guarantee of certain outcomes, and I wish they wouldn’t.  One near me that I’ve looked at, for instance, is currently featuring a group of donors currently pursuing graduate degrees with the tag line “These guys have way more to offer than just great minds!”  Since this isn’t a dating site and the only thing they’re “offering” you is sperm, there’s a clear suggestion that a “great mind” is on “offer” for any of their biological children.  Of course you and I know this isn’t true, just as you and I knew before Fast Food Nation that McDonald’s didn’t make healthy food using ingredients grown in an environmentally sound manner.  But as long as McDonald’s controlled the discourse, it was easy for a lot of people to avoid knowledge of exactly how false their advertising was, and I’m worried that the same applies to the fertility industry.  Genetics isn’t exactly simple, and I just think it’s unfair for sperm banks to promise, explicitly or implicitly, that the offspring of a certain donor will turn out to share their desirable traits, especially in the case of traits that are not terribly heritable.

And I didn’t mean to suggest that the personal traits that only surface in real-life interaction are more heritable, or “nature rather than nurture.”  If anything it’s the opposite.  But that’s sort of the point: when two people get together, they’re generally a lot more attentive to the kinds of qualities in their partner that are likely to contribute to a nurturing family, rather than to their genetics, as I’m sure was the case with you and your life partner.  Since you can’t really know those things about a sperm donor (and since they’re probably not genetic anyway and therefore irrelevant), I feel like sperm banks try to make up for a certain measure of uncertainty by offering a false sense of genetic certainty to prospective parents.  For what it’s worth, among my acquaintance this isn’t something I’ve ever seen be a problem for same-sex couples.  They realized when they got together that childbearing was going to require some outside assistance and have thought about what that means realistically.  But for heterosexual couples who have been made to feel like they “should” have been able to conceive on their own, it can be tempting to buy into the idea that the sperm bank is offering you the baby you “should” have had to begin with.  I’m worried not so much about disappointed parents here but about kids who, when they begin to disappoint their parents just like every kid everywhere does, find themselves in a family where their individuality is read as their own failure to be the kid they were “supposed” to be.

I’m pro-regulation, mostly because I think that clinics should follow rigorous pre-donation disclosure procedures, screen for genetic abnormalities, and conduct follow-up investigations to track possible genetic problems, as well as limit the number of times a given donor is used, but as far as I know, there are no enforceable standards that clinics have to follow.  They may do it voluntarily, but they might not, and there really ought to be a set of rules that they have to follow, so that everyone knows what they’re getting into.

and conduct follow-up investigations to track possible genetic problems

Whoa.  Because I get inseminated artificially, I’m required to disclose my child’s personal medical information to a bunch of nosy sperm bank employees for years and years afterwards?  I don’t think so.  Private medical information is private.

Well, if you think that sperm bank employees are nosy and not likely to abide by HIPAA and other privacy laws, why are you trusting them to help you get pregnant in the first place?  I think it makes sense that the sperm banks should track whether children conceived using donated sperm have genetic problems that could be traced to the donor, so they can stop or limit the use of that donor.

You think it’s going to be doctors and nurses conducting follow-up checks?  I doubt it.  But even if it were, their need to know private medical information in order to treat me in the present does not give them the right to know my or my child’s future medical information for their own ends.  The doctors to whom I take my child to be treated are ones who need to know his or her condition.

Lots of things make sense that shouldn’t be mandated by law.  I’m happy for the sperm bank to request that I let them know if any genetic anomalies crop up in the future.  But I’m sure as hell not OK with being legally required to do so.

The NYT piece cites estimates that there are at least 30,000-60,000 kids born each year with donor fathers. What the story doesn’t mention is that this is a drop in the bucket, as it were, compared to the nearly 4 million babies born in the U.S. each year.

200 offspring over a donor’s career sounds like a lot, but if those pregnancies are spread out over space and time, it’s really not that many—at least in terms of the risk of unwitting incest. I’m not against regulating sperm banks, I just don’t think that a lifetime limit of under 200 is a very smart regulation.

The article went out of its way to sound like these poor men don’t have any way of knowing how many kids their seed has sired. That may be true for guys who only donate a few times. But don’t all donors at least have some upper bound based on how many times they’ve donated? If you’ve donated >200 times (nobody bats .1000, even if they’re very fertile), chances are you’re comfortable with the idea that you might have gotten a whole lot of women pregnant.

Maybe it’s different with in vitro fertilization vs. insemination. In theory, one sperm sample contains enough sperm to fertilize a lot of eggs in vitro. And many women who undergo IVF opt to implant multiple embryos at once. But how common is it for one ejaculation to be parceled out among several IVF clients?

Two of my three children, my twins, were conceived using donor insemination. And this whole thing makes me just think, meh.

The particular bank I used had a time limit that a donor could participate. It was one year with no more “donations” than three times a week. I also know that they split up a donation into twos or threes sometimes, but that depends on the sperm count. I used the same donor three times, but only got pregnant on the third (albeit with twins.) Donors go through an exceptionally rigorous medical history screening, so they are probably some of the healthiest people out there. Which still doesn’t mean that they can’t pass on genetic defects. However, it may be that they are actually increasing the gene pool because most donors/sperm travel a long way into many diverse geographical regions. My particular donor was from Belarus. I have never met a person, much less dated a person from Belarus in my life. So it is more likely that I would have naturally conceived from someone with closer genetic ties than I did if I conceived with someone from my own hometown. My twins legal father-my co-parenting partner-is from Kansas, and I am from Nebraska.

Through donor registries, we have met 4 donor siblings of my kids (children whose parents used the same donor and are genetically my children’s half siblings). They come from two different families as one has three siblings in the same family. We live on three different corners of North America. I know that there are undoubtedly more donor siblings whose families chose not to use the donor registry, but it is getting to be more the norm, not the exception to register, so that you might have a ppol of people to share medical emergency resources with (i.e. bone marrow transplants, etc.) and because there is getting to be less and less of a stigma and it is not so secretive anymore. Also, donor siblings sometimes like to meet, and that is getting more common as well.

I doubt that donors often have many more children than some of the more sexually active men who don’t use birth control out there (you know who I mean…the “I don’t have any kids…that I KNOW OF” har, har, har” types.”) I mean, you have people like, was it Wilt Chamberlain??? who brag that they had sex with 2000 different partners. I know that all those partners didn’t lead to a baby, but still. Somehow that is not a big deal, but this planned and deliberate and monitored choice is?

I think the hysteria around this goes back to reproductive choice. I agree with the first poster above, that choosing not to get pregnant is paramount to choosing to get pregnant as far as rights go, but in the end, women should have choice and consenting men should also be able to choose this path. I think the squick factor comes more from “oh, my god! women can just choose to have children on their own without being the property of a MAN!” than from any real concern about the fact that donors may have a lot of offspring.

Lindsay, Wikipedia says “One sample will be divided into 1-20 vials or straws depending on the quantity of the ejaculate and whether the sample is ‘washed’ or ‘unwashed’.” So a less-frequent donor with a large volume of ejaculate and a high sperm count could produce more pregnancies than you (or he) would think.

Given that the biggest sperm banks sell their wares all across the country, the risk of their most prolific donors siring kids who later hook up is probably smaller than the alarmists fear. A small local clinic that over-relies on a few regular donors and sells sperm to mostly local clients would be more problematic. (No idea how many such places there might be.)

In regards to monitoring genetic abnormalities resulting from use of sperm donors…you know, you are getting pretty close to eugenics there. I do appreciate that my donor got a physical and history and basic HIV/Hep testing done. Because that could put ME in jeopardy as well as my child and that is smart to do with any partner you conceive with. But at some point, the genetic lottery is the genetic lottery. You take a chance with sperm donors as you take a chance with any human you choose to conceive a child with.

I decided to go the donor route because my partner had infertility issues. Others may do it because they do not have the option of having a male partner or do not choose to do so. Donation is a way to get around those challenges. I don’t see why its participants should be put to any standards that are significantly higher than your everyday people who want to conceive. As I said above, no one is regulating a man who just goes around and has a lot of unprotected sex with consenting women. That is much more dangerous than sperm donation.

@professordarkheart, #60

I’m worried not so much about disappointed parents here but about kids who, when they begin to disappoint their parents just like every kid everywhere does, find themselves in a family where their individuality is read as their own failure to be the kid they were “supposed” to be.

I’m going to be be Captain Obvious here, but some people, without ever intending to be, of course, are just crappy parents.  Sometimes the people you would least suspect.  I don’t think any kind of reasonable regulation can shield kids from unreasonable expectations if that’s the sort of nonsense their parents are prone to - they’d do it to a conventionally conceived child, too.  Which is not to argue against regulating better, more standard disclosure - I’m on board for that.  I just think that, our government being what it is, there’s a high risk of regulations becoming intrusive and paternalistic once things get rolling.

I will confess to having told a lot of bad jokes, though, about the awful things I might say to my kids if they “fell short”.  Sky’s really the limit when it comes to potential parenting fails.

Genetics isn’t exactly simple, and I just think it’s unfair for sperm banks to promise, explicitly or implicitly, that the offspring of a certain donor will turn out to share their desirable traits, especially in the case of traits that are not terribly heritable.

In my opinion, it could be difficult to pin down how to regulate some of the questionable marketing, so long as explicit claims aren’t being made, and I question how effective restrictions would even be.  The entire process is aspirational.  I don’t know that anybody’s baby dreams are entirely grounded in reality.  Even if the bank you work with doesn’t try to take advantage (ours was very concerned with the ethics), you bring all sorts of fluffy fantasies to the process all on your own.  Considering the complexity of heredity, I’m not even entirely certain whether the intangibles and characteristics I was looking for are or aren’t heritable.  There’s a lot of gut instinct involved, much as there is in choosing a mate.  Having been through the process, it wasn’t the sperm bank selling us on certain things so much as we sold ourselves on the possibilities.  Is intellectual curiosity heritable?  Don’t know for certain - but I don’t think anybody could have talked me out of desiring that as a defining characteristic in a donor.  Apparent capacity for joy?  Intrinsic happiness?  Possibly heritable to a degree according to recent research - on my list regardless.  In any case, the science on what’s heritable seems to be expanding.  Trying to definitively regulate market claims strikes me as a bit of moving target.

I’m going to go ahead and hippie-punch some of the people who are saying that having 150 offspring of a single donor represents a trivial public health concern.  Saying that sperm banks genetic testing is sufficient is highly hubristic, as only a small subset of genetic diseases/alleles can currently be screened for with any reliability.  And as far as the incest angle; the first generation offspring may not be a huge concern, but the second generation offspring (which are essentially cousins) accumulate to a larger degree and may have implications for prevalence of certain genetic diseases in the 3rd generation.  Additionally, some of these concerns may develop later in life, and if banks allow large numbers of offspring from a single donor, it may be too late for them all once problems are encountered.

That being said, I don’t think any of those things are CURRENTLY a concern.  I feel that donor insemination is going to become increasingly popular as more single women/female couples attempt to conceive, and now is a good point to start enacting reasonable guidelines to prevent any genetic monoculture public health concerns. 

I also think that, as far as artificial insemination/frequent impregnators goes, part of this is a problem in adequately conveying the limits of artificial insemination.  Evidence is accumulating that anti-partner immunity is probably an important factor in the success/failure of many couple pregnancies; it’s also consistent with the relatively low fertility rate that can sometimes be observed in unprotected sex among couples (not uncommon to attempt for 6mo-1year before a successful pregnancy).  In this context, it’s actually surprising that there are donors with super high successful pregnancy rates, but also possible that it’s recipient-specific.

@martian, 69

Trying to definitively regulate market claims strikes me as a bit of moving target.

Sure.  As I said initially, this concern isn’t one I would propose a regulatory solution to; it’‘s definitely more of a cultural problem than a policy problem.  Having found myself unexpectedly in the high-median-income suburbs for the last few years, I’m perhaps more aware than I used to be of the unrealistic expectations that some parents have with regard to their ability to control every aspect of their childrens’ destiny, and of their sometimes manic investment in doing so.  This definitely applies to biological children as well as all of the other kinds.  But insofar as (some) sperm banks are part of the problem and not part of the solution in terms of encouraging parents’ unrealistic expectations about control/predictability, it seemed worth bringing up here.  The solution to what seem to me to be unhealthily genetically-determined ideas about what a family is and should be isn’t regulation; it’s conversation.  Like this one.

This may be off-topic, except that it raises yet other ethical and legal issues, but any discussion of infertility treatment brings to my mind the possibilities of heterospermic insemination.

It’s widely used in livestock breeding: if sperm from more than one sire is present in the vagina, the spermatozoa tend to compete with one another, increasing the chances of fertilization.

Maybe sperm banks should offer women who have difficulty getting pregnant the option of a “cocktail” of semen from different men to improve their chances.  Instead of choosing one potential donor, she can choose several she finds acceptable.  A DNA test after the child is born can definitively identify the sire.

It’s at least possible that the presence of sperm from an unusually successful donor might actually stimulate other men’s sperm into action.  That would be an experiment worth trying (on nonhumans to start with, of course).

A couple of commenters have brought up Quiverfull families and their desire to destroy liberal civilization by outbreeding them.  Don’t worry, folks: if the experience of the Amish is anythign to judge by, the upshot of the Duggars’ eagerly raising 19 children to be good little breeders for the Lord is going to be a whole lot of disappointment for parents who find that four out of five (or more) of their children don’t want to live that way—especially the girls.

@ professordarkheart, #71

Sure.  As I said initially, this concern isn’t one I would propose a regulatory solution to; it’‘s definitely more of a cultural problem than a policy problem. -snip-

But insofar as (some) sperm banks are part of the problem and not part of the solution in terms of encouraging parents’ unrealistic expectations about control/predictability, it seemed worth bringing up here.  The solution to what seem to me to be unhealthily genetically-determined ideas about what a family is and should be isn’t regulation; it’s conversation.  Like this one.

Oh, my misunderstanding, sorry.

I’m open to that conversation, definitely.  Especially, though probably a tangent to Amanda’s post, the part of the conversation about attempting to control every aspect of your child’s destiny even to the point of attempting to manage their dna.  It caught me off guard, the intensity with which I want the best for my kids - the anxiety over it.  I’ve been wondering, though, after reading your comment if, in some part, this is less irrational than it seems in an economy where the gulf between the have and have nots is ever increasing and class mobility is decreasing.  Maybe people are just instinctively grabbing at every possible advantage, social, material, evolutionary, to give their children a foothold. 

EG01:

If you don’t track the medical histories of kids conceived by donor, then you have no way of finding out whether some really horrible anomaly is being spread around. And why the $%#%#$ would you wish that on someone else’s kid? And, as lots of other people have pointed out, sure many or even most sperm banks do screening for the most obvious stuff, but that’s not an argument against regulation, it’s an argument for it. Because the good people will have higher costs than the people who just let things slide.

There’s already been at least one horror story on the egg-donor side (which you would think would be much better screened, given the much higher costs). Tay-Sachs, iirc.

Yes, I understand the point of tracking.  I understand the potential good it can do.  I am still opposed to using the power of the state to coerce access to individuals’ private medical information.  If we want regulations that mandate that sperm banks explain to customers the need for and importance of letting them know should any unusual genetic anomaly crop up and request that they do so, I’m fine with that.  But I am not fine with mandating that individuals be required to do so.

Amanda @ 41 - you are talking like the young,relatively health person you are.

Also admittedly, someone who doesn’t want kids. So I’m guessing it probably isn’t a topic that has received a lot of deep conversation in the Marcotte household.

Some have said screening was really specific and of high quality and others say that it was really lousy. That’s the problem, there doesn’t seem to be much consistency.

And as Pablo stated way up there. He lied about being gay due to worry about being accepted. So how many times are you being told that your paid for genetic material is healthy; and their version of a genetic health screen was a questionnaire? I just think the consumer (I have no word to make that sound right) should be more informed.

Lexie:

In regards to monitoring genetic abnormalities resulting from use of sperm donors…you know, you are getting pretty close to eugenics there.

How do you get away from the eugenics spectre when you go through a sperm donation route? Unless you get randomly selected sperm you are choosing a donor for their specific genetic qualities.

Personally, someone requesting genes with a low incidence of cancer creeps me out less than someone requesting blue eyes.

Theoretically I don’t see a problem with sibling incest from a genetic standpoint. Even if it does occur, it will happen at a low enough incidence that it alone won’t cause issues unless a clinic start using one specific donor for thousands of offspring.

The bigger issue to me, in that case, would be the emotional health of people who might possibly find out after the fact, that they were engaged in a relationship with a sibling. But again, extremely small chance of that ever occurring.

In regards to monitoring genetic abnormalities resulting from use of sperm donors…you know, you are getting pretty close to eugenics there. ... You take a chance with sperm donors as you take a chance with any human you choose to conceive a child with.

Sure, but there are people who choose to do genetic counseling before they have kids with a partner, particularly people who know they have something in their family history or belong to groups at higher risk for certain disorders. It’s not like it’s not an issue at all when people have kids via sex and only an issue with donor gametes.

And really, since we’re all pro-choice here, we support the right of women to abort fetuses for any reason, including abnormalities. It’s okay to have an abortion for DS but not to screen for Tay-Sachs? Really?

I did not say that couples shouldn’t do genetics counseling or donors shouldn’t be screened. My oint was that children of donors should not be required to provide health updates because they came from donors as children concieved more traditionally are not. (no problem with voluntary disclosure, though.) Also, you don’t think that couples who choose to concieve with each other don’t do their own, albeit less formal, gene selection on some level? All I am saying is that people get in a tizzy over these issues when it comes to donor insemination and don’t think about them in more traditional conception. I believe the different standard comes from hand-wringing concern troll judgement often, and not legitimate risk (above the risk everyone takes when conceiving a child.)

Also, you don’t think that couples who choose to concieve with each other don’t do their own, albeit less formal, gene selection on some level?

Yep. That’s pretty much my whole point. This concern isn’t exclusive to donor gametes, which makes it less concern trolling.

And yes, there’s some concern trolling, no doubt. As far as I can tell, few things make people lose their shit like ART. And in my first comment on this issue, I acknowledged that the question of who do we want to make do what is a problem for regulation. The problem with donor sperm is that when there is an issue, 1) it has the potential to be exponentially magnified in a way that it would not be in traditional reproduction, and 2) there is a barrier to getting accurate information that would not exist in traditional reproduction. If a man and a woman have a child, and that child has a serious genetic disorder, they KNOW and they can decide if they want to have any more kids. Might be nice for men donating sperm and women using donor sperm to be able to make similar decisions.

“In regards to monitoring genetic abnormalities resulting from use of sperm donors…you know, you are getting pretty close to eugenics there. I do appreciate that my donor got a physical and history and basic HIV/Hep testing done. Because that could put ME in jeopardy as well as my child and that is smart to do with any partner you conceive with. But at some point, the genetic lottery is the genetic lottery. You take a chance with sperm donors as you take a chance with any human you choose to conceive a child with.”

Yeah, but two people who know each other can figure out if they might both be carriers for Tay-Sachs or some other recessive-gene condition.  And often that means they don’t choose to conceive a child together.  If a donor is a recessive-gene carrier, I think it’s pretty important to know that, so that his sperm doesn’t get selected for women who might also be carriers.  People definitely think about these things in traditional conception—they consider their family histories, certainly, and some people choose to do more extensive genetic testing and screening.  And if they have a child with a genetic disorder, they certainly consider that when deciding whether to have additional children. 

I agree with chinona @80—I’m really not concern trolling.  Precisely because I think it’s an issue that responsible couples consider when they are considering traditional conception, it ought to be something that responsible women/couples can consider in cases of donor sperm.  And I’m not sure that relying on voluntary disclosure is enough.

It seems like transparency to the donors about the number of kids they’d potentially sire and to the mothers about what number their kid would be for that particular sire might be okay standards to set.

As for regulations, it might be worth putting some very basic regulations and licensing requirements in place just because the very requirement of jumping through a few government-required hoops seems like something anyone who wants to perform a medical procedure that’s this sensitive should have to go through. Minimum government regs will weed out the outrageously fly-by-night operators. I think a licensing regime should start with just making sure that the basics the clinics tell donors and mothers are being done really are.

I tend to be a bit of a Yglesias-style licensing skeptic about things like barbering and taxis, though I know the crushing burden of bureaucratic regulation is frequently overstated by conservatives who are fronting for the ability of corporations to run wild. My folks ran their own small-business (a veterinary clinic) and had to deal with the mofoin’ DEA because of the drug they used in euthanasia. They seemed to bear up very well under the strain of leviathan crushing them. But sperm bank seems like the kind of thing you’d want to put a bit of regulation on.

it ought to be something that responsible women/couples can consider in cases of donor sperm.  And I’m not sure that relying on voluntary disclosure is enough.

But the disclosure in traditional couples is purely voluntary.  There’s no legal mandate forcing anybody to tell a partner if there is Tay-Sachs in the family.  There’s no legal mandate forcing a man to tell his wife that the girl he knocked up when he was 16 had a baby with Tay-Sachs.  Nobody mobilizes the power of the state to do such things, no matter how much suffering might be saved, because it’s an unacceptable intrusion into somebody’s private life, even if we think a guy who does this is pretty much an asshole, because being an asshole is not a legal offense.

How would this be enforced for women who conceive through sperm donation?  Are doctors going to share medical records without patients’ permission?  Are you comfortable with that?  Are there going to mandatory visits from social workers checking up on the health of the mother and/or kid for years afterward?  I don’t find this acceptable when applied to mothers on welfare, and I don’t find it acceptable when applied to mothers who conceived via sperm donation.  Are mothers and children going to have to leave forwarding information with a sperm bank every single time they move?  That seems to me like a) an unacceptable constraint to place on women and b) yet another thing that will make women vulnerable to abusive partners they’re trying to get away from.  And what it they don’t provide that information?  Are they going to be arrested?  Fined? 

If disclosure isn’t voluntary, it’s mandatory.  And I can’t see any way of making it mandatory that is not a significant violation of the woman’s and/or child’s rights.

Amanda, y’know, it’s one thing to argue that family medical history is irrelevant, and quite another to argue that anyone who disagrees with you is lying and self-delusional. Or are we just back to “Amanda doesn’t give a shit so no right-thinking person should give a shit either”?

The idea that sperm banks are the one type of for-profit business that can totally be trusted to act out of kindness and without regulation is laughable. Without regulation, how are we supposed to determine whether they’re doing any checking on donor health history, whether they’re disclosing everything they should, whether they’re accurately tracking information like number of donations or pregnancies that reached completion.

Seriously, it’s like Pandagon went Libertarian. “No regulation! Trust businesses to do the right thing because it’s in their self-interest to do so! And, uh, let’s just assume they’ll make sure the customers have informed consent.”

EG01 - the tracking could easily be done via the CDC or other agency and via a number sytem rather than by name (s).

How could a number system be mandatory?  Unless the numbers are pretty clearly linked to names and other identifying information, there would be no way to enforce disclosure from any given mother or child.  As I said, I have no problem with voluntary reporting, anonymous or otherwise.

Nor do I have a problem with the CDC tracking incidents of significant illness.  But if the idea is that the sperm bank would be able to limit or stop use of sperm that carries significant risk of genetic illness, then the information would have be reported to the sperm bank. Given that the sperm bank will have files on which women conceived with which sperm, I’m not sure how that could be done without violating privacy and confidentiality.