Anonymous Sperm and Egg Donation is Over
On December 31st Diane Rehm (on NPR) rebroadcast a show about DNA Sequencing & Personal Genomics. (Yes, and I’m just now getting around to blogging about it…)
When they started taking comments and questions from listeners, the first caller hit on something that made me wonder how this rapidly developing technology is going to affect the future of Assisted Reproductive Technology for everyone.
From the transcript:
SUE
Good morning. I want to say that nobody has touched on reducing risk for future generations yet. I think this has broad ramifications for adoption law and closed records. Would you respond to that, please?
In his response, one of the show’s in-studio guests reminded me of an issue I first came across while reading an excellent book about ART titled Everything Conceivable: How the Science of Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Our World:
REHM
Art Caplan, what about adoption?CAPLAN
Yeah, well, this caller is on a very important point. When you do genetic testing these days, one of the things that jumps out at you very clearly is when you have the same genes lined up for long stretches of chromosomes, and that means incest. It means some kind of interbreeding, either that the person may be aware of in their past because of rape or assault or maybe that they didn’t know because they wound up being the product of a marriage between people who were, let’s say, children from the same sperm donor.
If you think about it, when people ‘shop’ for sperm donors, they’ll be somewhat more likely to choose certain outstanding donors – the ones who have the best looking profiles – over the other poor ordinary schleps. (It’s the same 80/20 rule that shopkeepers have always known about: 80% of your sales will usually be generated by 20% of you merchandise.)
So a relatively small number of the donors at any particular sperm bank end up ‘fathering’ a disproportionate number of the children conceived at that facility. And since sperm banks often tend to draw their customers from the same local geographical area, it’s not so unusual for the kids of the same donor ‘dad’ to meet (maybe even grow up around each other) without realizing they’re related, then fall in love, and…
But, in addition to that, Dr. Caplan also sees medical reasons why anonymous sperm and egg donation will soon be a thing of the past:
CAPLAN
I think adoption and infertility treatment is going to be pushed by new genetic knowledge to end closed adoption and to end the secrecy of sperm and egg donors. People are going to expect that if they want access to their genetic information and they’re going to use it down the road to guide their health, they’re going to have to know who their parents are ’cause that’s a key part of doing genetic analysis. And so, I think, the caller is basically saying, the world we used to live in where if you got adopted, you didn’t know much about your birth parents, or if you were a child of an infertility process — sperm donation — I think we shouldn’t be telling people who are sperm and egg donors they’re going to have their privacy. I don’t believe that’s true. It will collapse.
On top of all that, there are also emotional factors motivating donor-children children and their mothers to find the other parent:
REHM
Misha?ANGRIST
I think that day is already here. A few years ago, a 15-year-old donor-conceived boy, very precocious, used a combination of genetic testing and very clever online genealogical searching and found his biological father.REHM
Wow.ANGRIST
And this is already going on, and I think people forget sometimes that these are, in many cases — if not most cases — single women who are interested in knowing as much as they can about their donors.
So what do you folks think? How will sperm and donations be affected when the potential donors know that they could be hunted down by a deluge of kids who are dying to understand who their other parent is and how it is that they apparently just don’t even care about their own progeny? Do you think there are many donors starting to worry that some 15-year-old kid (or kids) could use “ a combination of genetic testing and very clever online genealogical searching” to find them?
How is that brave-new-world anything-goes regulatory environment that has benefited the ART industry in America up to this point working out now?
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How could it not be affected?
Assuming that the just 20% of the population used ART, within five generations, the reality of marrying and reproducing with a sibling would become pervasive. They would HAVE to use ART in order to prevent inbreeding problems.
This is eugenics in its purest form. Within the ART population, you can effectively weed out the undesirable genetic material from the gene pool under the guise of reproductive choice.
The fertility industry in the US is fueled by greed, with little concern for the rights of children.
I think anonymous donation will come to an end, despite resistance from the industry. Donor kids are agitating for their rights and they have the moral high ground.
Some sperm donors may have upwards of 50, 100 or more kids. So the possibility of interbreeding is real concern. Google: Genetic Sexual Attraction.
@Daniel Cox
Or even a parent! Suppose that a daughter goes to the same sperm bank that her mother went to….
good points Daniel and Anna.
The industry looks at the problem of inbreeding as a reason to do more ART: Your wife turns out to be your half-sister? Well, no problem, we’ll provide some different sperm and you’ll be all set. Not only that, but the public will probably respond to the problem by making a law that couples have to undergo genetic screening to make sure they aren’t related, even if they are married. We’ll probably let them marry anyway, since legally they are unrelated, but we won’t let them procreate offspring together. This is part of the problem of separating marriage and procreation rights, it opens us up to having to accept forced contraception and donor gametes.
And I think Caplan kind of misses the point of personal genomics, it kind of obviates the need to identify the sperm donor, since you don’t need to ask him about his family history to learn about your own genetic risk factors, you can get them from your own genes. Heck, the donor probably doesn’t even know his own history, he’s probably a DC person himself. And despite what that fifteen year old kid did, it’s hard to identify someone just from knowing half of their DNA, so it’s not like access to personal genomics is going to result in everyone finding their true progenitor. It might provide some more information to narrow the search, and it can confirm that someone is or isn’t related if they also give a sample, but you need to find them to get a sample first. We can’t just go around sampling everyone and identifying everyone’s progeny and progenitors, I think that sort of searchable government DNA database would be expensive and intrusive and unsustainable and very disruptive of family and culture.
I think we need to prohibit gamete donation and force sperm banks to open their records and identify all of their clients and donors and identify (with DNA testing) all of the children created. And those children should have their birth certificates corrected to contain their true parentage, so that if they meet a half-sister, they will know and not be eligible to marry or procreate with that person. There will still be people with incorrect fathers listed, of course, because sometimes women don’t know or sometimes they hide the truth, but that is as it always was and we should try to reduce that by respecting marriage and adultery laws, not by compensating for it with mandatory testing. (But we should do mandatory testing on all the people born to clients of sperm banks, paid for by the clinics, just this one time to correct for the mistake of allowing this practice for the last few decades.)
@Anna
I Googled that.
The brave new world becomes a nightmare.
It’s always been a problem with adoption so this is nothing new.
@John Howard
Thanks
Your point that birth certificates should be corrected to contain true parentage is important.
The government should not collaborate in a lie. It is an injustice to those children.
@Ruth
Yep. The conceit of Humankind.
@Mark
Adoption was a bad idea, made by the same sort of clueless people who thought up eugenics, and we should review the practice and revise it. It has become a baby selling business. It shouldn’t lie about parentage either, the birth certificate should show the truth. (I know i said maybe it should lie in cases of incest, for the child’s psychological benefit, but that’s a special case that hopefully would be very rare (because it would be both illegal and immoral) and thus its unlikely that it would be a problem like thousands of people having a hundred half-siblings is. But maybe I’m wrong about that and it would be better to tell products of incest the truth also.)
@John Howard
“Adoption was a bad idea, made by the same sort of clueless people who thought up eugenics, and we should review the practice and revise it.”
So it would have been better to group all those kids into orphanages?
@Mark
Yes, or relatives homes, or street gangs.
@John Howard
“Yes, or relatives homes, or street gangs.”
At least you are clear in your ridiculousness.
This world is really really sad! People today are greedy and don’t stop to think about these innocent children growing up. Why do children have their identity hidden? This is a sin. If a woman cannot have a child with her husband naturally then she needs to look into adoption or forget it! I believe it is a selfish act and we are in a Loguns Run world now. I have spoken to many people and they believe that donation is perfectly fine and don’t bother about what the poor children will think when they growup. It makes me mad. My cousin now has two girls through donated eggs. She couldn’t accept that God did not want her to have biological children and went and did this procedure because also her husband wanted it. It is quite sad. At the announcement that she was pregnant she cried and at the shower she cried. They were not tears of joy but tears of guilt and hurt. I don’t voice my opinion to her what I really think because I don’t want to hurt her. But I feel what she did with her husband was wrong. I will be going to her christening soon and enjoy the festivites. She will have to deal with this in the future. There will be a price to pay when the children find out that she is not the real mother. They will most likely have resentment. That is why today’s world is not good anymore. The world was never 100 percent but now it is sad that these things are happening.
You’re right Pat, thanks for sharing your opinion here. It is indeed impossible to voice it out loud to people we know in real life, because there’s too great a chance someone will say “hey! my sister did that! Are you saying she’s a bad person?” So that’s why it’s important to speak up on these forums. Writing your legislators would be very useful also.
And you are also right that it is donation that needs to be stopped, not anonymous donation. It is indeed a Logan’s Run world we are building now. I think we still have a chance to prohibit it with some simple federal laws, and keep humans natural and equal.
It occurs to me that if the possibility of marrying a sibling becomes serious that it would be a good idea to encourage young people to marry outside their ethnic grouping.
It is one of those things that makes the whole anonymous thing a bad idea–even outside of ART being a bad idea.