Sperm donors may win biological sweepstakes
For all of humankind’s history, men have been rivals for the favors of women, and a huge part of that competition (at least in the biological sense) has been to foster the birth and survival of their own offspring. If you believe in natural selection—and I do—that struggle for progeny has favored the growth of certain characteristics in men, ones that are more likely to lead to what we might euphemistically and archaically call the spreading of their seed.
Now a relatively new phenomenon, artificial insemination by sperm donor, may end up skewing the situation at least a little bit (more if current trends continue). At the very least, it has led to some potential problems for the offspring involved. The strange fact is that there are no legal limits in the US on the number of women who can be impregnated by one donor, and some donors have racked up some rather high numbers.
This article mentions one donor who is known to have been the biological father of 150 living children. That’s a sobering thought, especially when you consider that the donor does not know who his children are and has nothing whatsoever to do with them. And for the children themselves it poses some conundrums, not the least of which is that they face a possibility of meeting their own half-siblings and falling in love with and even marrying and having children with them, without knowing they are so closely related to their own spouses.
One way to reduce this problem is to legally limit the number of children a sperm donor can father. But this would only affect the future; it’s of no assistance to the children who are already alive. Some of them have already been helped by the establishment of donor registries to connect donor families. This has had the added benefit of sharing information about inherited diseases and the like. It also has a strange but understandable side-effect:
Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together ”” they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.
Ah brave new world, that has such people in it!
duh
and yet most dont pay attention to the demographics behind socialism…
lets see.. free abortion for the underlcass
and lets see… visit economic stagnation, loss of hope, destruction of family, and so on so that they walk in and do it to themselves.
dont forget the redistribution of wealth from smart and unconnected to dumb with protection.
ie… morlocks and eloi
and we are breeding people
shall we also add women suddenly not giving a crap who they have babies with?
sociopathic user, but cute… ok to have a kid with, a rotten relationship, break up, get tax money.. but now there are more sociopaths
cant use family as a measure… does he come from a good family? awe mom? who cares? what do i care if my kids come out with some mental condition and need tax money and maybe even go on killijng sprees. isnt his smile cute?
a population with an average iq lowered from 100 to what used to be 80 yesterday.. cant defend itself, make better inventions, and so on.
with the oppressor white men, which includes jewish men, being gone… and too old to have kids… suddenly, your going to notive a huge shift
and THEN their siding with minorities who are growing at 500 percent the rate of whites, will make sense…
who wants to be the leader of a dying race – who refused to acknowledge its dying and do anything, compared to the up and comers? who believe they are a minority, but who have more people
One way to reduce this problem is to legally limit the number of children a sperm donor can father.
why is it a problem?
why is it that a man with a 175 IQ selected for that and his proven success froma book… is to be limited
while the dip stick who can cruise around the US, impregnate women, and make 20 babies on the public dole and cheats them and tricks them… is ok?
kind of feminist inverted logic, eh?
i mean… if we cared about bastardy, then this would not be a problem.
notice how your solution is not to limit the women, but to limit the mens fertility…
yes.. we have to stop the smart men who women select too much.. (as it helps negate our lowering of the general populations intelligence…)
too bad its all by progressive design…
“The most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it.” — Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race, (Eugenics Publ. Co., 1920, 1923)
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“Birth control: to create a race of thoroughbreds.” — Margaret Sanger, Birth Control Review, November 1921, (vol. V, no. 11); p.2.
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“More children from the fit, less from the unfit–that is the chief aim of birth control.” — Margaret Sanger, Birth Control Review, May 1919 (vol. III, no. 5); p.12.
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“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” — Margaret Sanger, letter to Clarence Gamble, Dec. 10,1939. – Sanger manuscripts, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. (Dec. 10 is the correct date of the letter. There is a different date circulated, e.g. Oct. 19, 1939; but Dec. 10 is the correct date of Ms Sanger’s letter to Mr. Gamble.)
“In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them” — Dr. Mary Jo Bane, feminist and assistant professor of education at Welleslry College and associate director of the school’s Center for Research on Woman
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“No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” — Interview with Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975, p.18
if you dont have this sperm bank as a source, then how do you survive the above? or below?
[edited for length by n-n]
The problem it is solving is not the one I talked about at the beginning of the post (which may or may not be a problem), but the problem of anonymous sperm donors combined with huge numbers of offspring, and therefore unintended incest.
And it is not my solution. It’s a solution discussed in the article, and I am mentioning it.
Ms Kramer, who conceived a child using donor sperm says:
“We need to publicly ask the questions ‘What is in the best interests of the child to be born?’ and ‘Is it fair to bring a child into the world who will have no access to knowing about one half of their genetics, medical history and ancestry?’”
Uh, she’s the one who chose to be impregnated with donor sperm. Did she not consider this before doing so? Why is this suddenly “our” problem?
Man, Sam said, is not evolving, devolving, or even solving. He is merely revolving. This is what is meant by ‘all learning is remembering,’ and ‘there is nothing new under the sun.’
Here, look into this glass. What do you see? Your reflection, until I smash the glass. What is the glass in which we properly see ourselves? We don’t know, but we do know the glass only appears before a systemic destruction. The closer we get to destruction, the closer is someone to seeing who we really are. This has happened many, many times before, and no one seems to know how to change it.
It does appear that our destruction is no curse, but a gift, and it also appears that the destruction always comes when we have learned how to transgress nature’s way of reproducing ourselves. –Deep Planet Six
The ‘Dodger has made a point that I’ve made in the past. Mama’s baby-daddies may not even be known to her in some cases. When these little kiddies live in the same neighborhoods, there’s bound to be some inbreeding. (BTW, this has nothing to do with color.) Somehow, the authorities and the “social engineers” never get around to publicly denouncing this behavior. Rather, it is deemed a cultural thingie.
Yet these same authorities will spare no offense to vilify and prosecute, if appropriate, the Mormon father who has multiple wives and a gaggle of children by him. At least he supports them, loves them and keeps track of the parentage of the offspring.
Neo, I share your sense, expressed in your comment, that there may not be a significant problem. I leave it to younger, smarter commenters to do the counting required to support or invalidate my intuition.
Therefore I am dubious about the need for a law as alluded to in your post. A law, a bureaucracy, regulations, jobs & power for lawyers and “bioethicists”, more reduction in individual privacy (for the children, of course). Yippee!
Also, subject to correction by biologically knowledgeable commenters, I anticipate that economical genetic testing will become available unless government impedes it on behalf of special interests.
So we have Ms Daily a “social worker” and her partner, and Ms Kramer and her son, and about 150 others for whom the biological “father” is a male who in reproductive morality terms differs not at all from those young men who have been quoted as responding to questions regarding any responsibility they might feel for their offspring, with a shrugging reply that ” It all be on her”.
Which is ultimately to say, upon the taxpayers, of course.
Now were Ms Daily a coal miner or a steel puddler, or a combustion turbine engineer, or even a party store owner, it might be more difficult to discern any potential parallel between her situation and that of the more obvious kind of welfare recipient.
And, I certainly do not have the stats ready to hand to demonstrate that Ms Daily in the particulars of her economic life is necessarily representative of her reproductive class.
Nor that one case like her’s demonstrates what might be called a trend among those who are socially enabled to view themselves as “facilitators”, i.e., persons whose rice bowls are rightly filled from the public trough in return for their invaluable stewardship; the guiding hand without which civilization would collapse.
But nonetheless, it reminds one that maybe, just maybe it’s time to stop spouting the “secular faith” doctrine that we all in the same boat of shared interests and liabilities.
Because it’s quite obvious that we are definitely not.
A modest proposal (and simple solution): outlaw all unnatural conception. Sperm donors, in vitro fertilization, administration of fertility drugs, the lot. Nature’s way, or the highway.
Beside addressing the (minor) threat of unintentional incest, doing so would have a positive impact on society by undercutting some of the feminist rubbish (fish/bicycle and all that), precluding the “Octomom effect,” and discouraging the self-absorption that seems to characterize our society (women who want a career until 40, then suddenly realize that they’re short a fashion accessory, and move the earth to undo the previous couple decades), and last but not least, put paid to lesbian couples conceiving (at least with the assistance of a physician).
So far, I’m not seeing a downside.
OC – A few years ago your suggestion would have seemed extreme to me. However, I’ve since witnessed my husband meeting his birth mother for the first time in his 30’s – and the subsequent discovery of how much of who he is can be traced to her. And my sister, who needed in-vitro fertilization after years of trying to conceive (while she was still young and healthy), now faces the dilemma of what to do with the unused fertilized eggs. Should she have them destroyed – thus destroying potential beings? Should she donate them, knowing that they would be no different than my husband – condemned to grow up never knowing someone who looks and acts like themselves, never having the opportunity to meet their biological parents and siblings? Science has outpaced our capacity to deal with such dilemmas.
Science has outpaced our capacity to deal with such dilemmas.
Exactly.
Per the Rolling Stones, you can’t always get what you want. It’s called “life.” The aspects of life that aren’t a tragedy are a farce.
“For all of humankind’s history, men have been rivals for the favors of women…”
LMAO–so it’s all about the females?
Wow, and we thought we were evolving….
ah, Geran, that’s “humankind.” “Mankind” is totally different.
Any medical risks can be alleviated by deciding the interests of the child outweigh the parents’ interest in privacy. Being raised apart, they wouldn’t have the naturally acquired incest avoidance, but the knowledge alone would do the trick.
If you know who your father is, you know who your siblings are. Frighteningly unfashionable to think it, so I guess we should expect to see limits on sperm donations.
The probabilities are so low that this is a puff piece.
We have too much white space for our media buffoons to fill.
So the quality collapses.
We, as a society, have rejected the notion that genetically-related families are any better than any old amalgam of people. The formerly risible, but now irrefutable, move to approve of “marriages” as being between any two consenting adults, regardless of sex, is part of that rejection.
It is what it is.
I foresee problems, but hey, I’m not in a position to influence society’s headlong rush.
You might want to research Ghengis Khan and a certain inherited marker in a muy large number of people today……others can comment on the reliability of what has been proposed concerning the percentage of Earth’s population that may be descended from him….
My solution to future genetic and social problems:
1. No more “in vitro” fertilizations. Encourage responsible people to adopt orphans and give them a good home.
2. No more homosexual marriages. Encourage gay people to live together in some kind of contractual way not called marriage and tell them that they can’t have children, in vitro or adopted.
I know I’ll get a lot of flack for these opinions, but I think that in vitro fertilization and gay marriages open huge cans of worms–kind of like forcing banks to lend to people who can’t put down enough money for mortgages.
Sometimes we just have to acknowledge that all personal problems can’t be solved. Sometimes people just have to act like responsible adults.
I think Occam at 7:40 expressed this same idea.
I always wanted a pony, and I never got one. Boo-hoo.
jon baker
Good point. One presumes that any number of kings, dukes, earls, or little hedge knights may have had the same, ahem, “opportunities”, and results.
I believe I heard someplace that eighty percent of the people on earth are descended from twenty percent of the men who ever lived. Not sure about that, nor how you figure who started the process to be in the original twenty percent and who was merely descending.
Occam, your modest proposal reminded of the movie Gattica.
Libby, re: “Science has outpaced our capacity to deal with such dilemmas,” indeed it has. To quote another movie, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could they didn’t stop to think if they should.” That certainly seems to be the way of it regarding reproductive medicine.
Personally, I can’t imagine donating eggs or sperm in the first place as though it were the equivalent of cutting off my hair to make a wig for someone else. But that’s just me, viewing babies as human beings, not inanimate commodities.
Occam, I’ve never disagreed with anything you’ve ever posted – until today. The suggestion that the government should be able to dictate that a long-married couple, who can afford IVF and can afford to raise the child, cannot have the procedure goes against what we talk about here every day – limited federal government.
And for the poster who suggested adopting orphans, find me a healthy orphan up for adoption where it won’t cost me $50,000. Adoption is no longer a viable alternative.
Unintended consequences. Due to supply and demand.
Lisa, fair enough.
I generally favor limited government, but not in all cases, and set the bar high for when I think government should be involved. This is one case where I think public policy comes down on the government intervention side.
Cases always exist where a general rule works a hardship, and you’ve cited one such in anecdotal form. On the other side I’d set Octomom, and others like her, who place enormous burdens on others (especially in the healthcare realm) in the course of indulging their fondest hopes. Not all hopes, however fervently desired, warrant fulfillment.
Note also that the scenario posited works just as well as an argument for abortion. Merely change “long-married” to “un-married,” and “can afford to raise a child” to “cannot afford to raise a child,” and you’re there.
Last, with respect, the paragraph citing a couple who can afford IVF conflicts with the subsequent one citing the costs of adoption. A couple who has the money for one has the money for the other.
Occam’s Beard-
Amazing how, once again, the Catholic Church’s standard teaching is the simplest solution that doesn’t involve sacrificing anyone, isn’t it? The blog Mary Meets Dolly hits that theme a lot. (I have no idea if you are Catholic, familiar with natural philosophy in the Church, etc– but you might enjoy the site.)
As I recall, children brought about with reproductive technologies also tend to have a higher rate of birth defects.
I favor limiting government power because it hurts people, or at the very least is not better than non-gov’t control; that doesn’t mean that I’d favor removing all laws, or that I don’t favor laws protecting all human life– from one cell to one old age or injury makes them a “useless eater.”
Occam, IVF is not like abortion. Abortion kills the baby. For the record, I also don’t think the federal government should have a say in abortion either way. It’s a state issue.
When I researched both 10 years ago, IVF cost $12,000, while adoption was running at about $35,000 with additional fees for travel.
Promethea, Having the government prohibit IVF is akin to them saying you can’t have surgery at age 70. You might want to live longer, but we can’t have everything we want. BooHoo.