Ruth Institute Blog

Wow. Powerful title.

by Michael Cook

Is it high-tech child abuse to rob children of their biological heritage?

A 51-year-old Michigan man may have fathered as many as 400 children by donating sperm to an IVF clinic between 1980 and 1994. At the time Kirk Maxey saw this as a way to pay his way through medical school and to help infertile women. “You would get a personal phone call from a nurse saying, ‘The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?’,” he told Newsweek last year.

Today Mr Maxey deeply regrets his experience, but little has changed since then. More and more babies are being born through sperm donation. In the US, it could be as many as 30,000 and 60,000 children each year. No one really knows. Neither the IVF clinics nor US government departments are required to report these vital statistics.

The United States alone has a fertility industry that brings in US$3.3 billion annually. “Fertility tourism” has taken off as a booming global trade. Some nations, like Cyprus, the Ukraine or India, bill themselves as destinations for couples who wish to circumvent stricter laws and greater expense in their own countries in order to become pregnant with reproductive technologies. The largest sperm bank in the world, Cryos, is in Denmark and ships three-quarters of its sperm overseas.

This disconnect between procreation and fatherhood is unprecedented in human history. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have entered the world as genetic orphans. How do they feel about it?

Incredibly, there is almost no reliable evidence, anywhere, about this. Last year an academic study in the British journal Human Reproduction lamented that “Despite the prevalence of donor conception across the world, relatively little is known about the offspring who result from this method of assisted conception.”

That’s why My Daddy’s Name is Donor, a report released this week by the Commission on Parenthood’s Future should be welcomed. It is one of the first efforts to learn about the identity, kinship, well-being, and social justice experiences of young adults who were conceived through sperm donation. About 500 American adults between 18 and 45 years old who said their mother used a sperm donor to conceive them were interviewed for the project, along with a similar number of young adults who were adopted and who were raised by their biological parents. It’s difficult to get information like this – partly because so many people are unaware of their origins. The British researchers only interviewed 165 donor-conceived people and did not compare them to other groups.

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