January 30, 2006--$60 Dollars A Shot

When I went to college, if you wanted to get your hands on what we used to call “dirty” books or magazines, the best you could come up with was a well-thumbed paperback copy The Amboy Dukes, which contained one titillating-for-the era sex scene; an issue of National Geographic that was devoted to some tribe in New Guinea where the “natives” didn’t wear any clothes; a copy of Swank Magazine where unfortunately there were black rectangles superimposed on the “private parts.”

Or one could become a sperm donor, where the magazines that was placed in your cubicle to put you in the mood was of very high quality. And so I found my way to IDANT, Inc. where not only did they have excellent reading material but they also paid you $20 per “donation.” As you might imagine, I would have been willing to pay them for the privilege.

So when the NY Times recently published a piece about sperm donation, I was inexorable drawn to it (see it linked below). No surprise, unlike your misbehaving Blogger, the Times took a different tack in their reporting, emphasizing some of the complex ethical issues surrounding this practice, which is now a major industry.

For example, up to this point donors have remained anonymous and children conceived by sperm donors as their biological fathers have not been able to locate them, in contrast to adopted children who now rather routinely, if they wish, can find their biological parents.

Further, since sperm banks may collect many donations from a single male (me for example) and they may divide each donation into multiple doses of sperm, it is conceivable that any given donor may have dozens of “children.” There was a case in the 1990s in Virginia where it was discovered that a fertility doctor himself had fathered at least 75 children.

Also, the cloak of anonymity may present other problems—fertility clinics frequently advertise that they have sperm available (for sale) from men who have PhDs (for the IQ points I suppose) who never smoked cigarettes (for health reasons) when it turns out that the donor was actually a chain-smoking high school drop out! Since these clinics are for-profit businesses there is an incentive for them to either cheat in this way or, if they in fact have a supply of sperm with PhDs, they might be tempted to divide it up and use it as widely as possible. Hence the problem of many, many offspring from the same father.

Needless to say, since all of this goes on in secret, it wouldn’t take much of a fiction writer to begin to imagine a whole lot of unintended and unknown “incest” occurring in that part of Virginia where . . . . I should probably stop right there.

And then I am wondering if somehow I might have a dozen or so now college-age sons and daughters on the Upper West Side of Manhattan who might be looking for me to pay their tuition.

So I called IDANT, they are still around, to see what I might learn. They said they had no record of my “contributions”; and that even if they did, they would tell me nothing. That was reassuring. But they did say that, if I wanted to, I could come by and get back into the business.

They now pay $60. Inflation.