November 25th, 2011
Betsy
by Damian Adams
Not knowing your biological father is hardly a fit topic for Hollywood slapstick.
Starbuck is a new French-Canadian comedy about what happens when a sperm donor who has fathered 533 children is tracked down by over 100 of them. There is all manner of hilarious slapstick when he anonymously steps into their lives after watching them from afar. According to the Ottawa Citizen, it’s “a sparkling crowd-pleaser”. Read more…
Wonderful! The world is coming to its senses!
FROM THE IONA INSTITUTE BLOG:
In the last year to 18 months the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, pictured) had handed down several excellent decisions. The most famous is the Lautsi judgement in which it ruled that Italy could place crucifixes on the walls of state classrooms.
In another, it ruled that a prohibition on same-sex marriage did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights, and this week it ruled that a ban on the use of donor sperm or eggs does not violate the Convention. Read more…
Posted by ceridwen
“One of my least favorite things is sperm donor jokes, which are also inexplicably common. The only thing I hate more than sperm donor jokes is when someone calls their absent dad/child’s father a sperm donor… I literally have to walk away in order to not to get incredibly angry at whoever is saying it. ” Read more…
by Elizabeth Marquardt
” … I don’t want to be on his family’s Christmas cards or to take up an inordinate amount of his time. I just want to know who he is.”
“I feel like half a person.”
“I wish he simply knew I exist.”
If you are a man who gets a woman pregnant after meeting her in a bar, you cannot legally hide your identity from your child, nor walk away from at least minimal responsibility as a father. Yet if you wish anonymously to sell your sperm to a sperm bank, you can remain hidden from your child forever. Read more…
by Elizabeth Marquardt
A scruffy man, tanned and good-looking, dressed in an old leather jacket and snug jeans, is on a motorcycle zipping through a neighborhood near you. He’s a restaurateur into “local” everything, a man whose produce vendor is one among many sexy women who want to hook up with him. He was also, years ago, a sperm donor who, unbeknownst to him, achieved reproductive success. Read more…
By W. BRADFORD WILCOX
In “The Switch,” coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie offers a largely celebratory treatment of donor insemination, as do two other movies out this year, “The Back-up Plan” and next month’s “The Kids Are All Right.” Indeed, one of the bottom-line conclusions these movies are pushing is that the children turn out “all right” with donor dads. Read more…
Is Father’s Day going to become obsolete? I guess those for whom it is actually celebrated are a dying breed.
By Van Helsing
Father’s Day is coming up a week from Sunday. MSNBC has begun to honor it already — by proclaiming that fathers are needed only for their sperm: Read more…
by Elizabeth Marquardt
A revealing new study shows that, for donor offspring at least, being wanted isn’t everything.
Experts estimate that there could be around one million young people alive in the world today as a result of sperm donation. How are they doing? Elizabeth Marquardt of the Institute for American Values and colleagues have done a unique study based on a large, representative US survey and, in a report published today, tell us that the kids, many of them, are not okay. In this interview with MercatorNet during a recent conference hosted by the Social Trends Institute in Barcelona, she talks about some of her findings. Read more…
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. Read more…
By ROSS DOUTHAT, New York Times
If you want to adopt a child in the United States, you’ll face an array of bureaucratic roadblocks and invasive interrogations. Adoption agencies will assess your finances, your relationships, and your fitness as a potential guardian. The interests of the child, not the desires of the would-be parent, will be treated as paramount throughout. Read more…
February 19th, 2010
Betsy
Great article by a Ruth Institute Academic Advisory Board Member.
By Jennifer Lahl, CBC National Director
Newsweek recently reported a story about a 51-year-old man, who between 1980 and 1994 donated his sperm twice a week in order to make cash for medical school and to nurture his altruistic desires to help infertile women. Kirk Maxey states, “I loved having kids, and to have these women doomed to wandering around with no family didn’t seem right, and it’s easy to come up with a semen donation.”
Don’t get me started. Read more…
Thirty-two invitro fertilized children gather at the Swedish Medical Center in 2003 in Denver. The Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Center gathered the children from each of its 16 years of work in the field. Guests included Payton Kline, 4 1/2 months, the 5,000th invitro fertilized baby born at the center. – Kevin Moloney/Getty Images 
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