by Louie Tacker

One night I was watching a show here in America called ‘60 minutes’ - a news show that has been on the air for more than 30 years now. It is a much acclaimed award winning show, which is aired on C.B.S. network, and I believe, is broadcast world wide. I usually don’t watch it as I always feel it has become, over the years, more of sensationalism journalism, rather than investigative reporting.

Well, on this night, I happened to be waiting for another show, and I caught the end of the show, in which their last story was about how there are ‘NEW FAMILY TREES’ developing, due to sperm donations.

With these sperm donations, a man gets paid $50.00 to donate his sperm anonimously. It is then frozen, to be used, or rather to be sold to a couple where the partner’s sperm is not up to the task of impregnating the woman or to a woman who is either into a lesbian relationship, or who chooses to conceive without a having sexual contact with a man and raise a child by herself.

Sperm donation is a legal business here in America. We may all have conflicting views on this, based on our political, moral or whatever principles and beliefs, but what first strikes my mind is - the RISK OF INBREEDING AND INCEST BETWEEN AND AMONG HALF BROTHERS AND SISTERS OUT IN THE WORLD who may have been conceived out of common donors.

It turns out that the sperm donor is only identified by a number or code, with brief descriptions of height, weight, eye, skin and hair colors and so on - for the potential mom or parents to pick according to their liking. Sounds like they are just buying cars !

So, let’s forget about bearing and parenting children out of love and marriage - no, wny bother? I hate to say this, but it is true - once again the ‘ME GENERATION’ gets what they want, how they want it and when they want it - for as long as they can pay for it, they feel it’s okay. Well, I am not here to judge their or anyone’s moral beliefs on this, but I just want to bring to light the OBVIOUS DANGER OF HAVING HALF BROTHERS AND SISTERS eventually growing up and possibly meeting and having children not knowing it is incest, which is not only illegal but dangerous to the unborn child.

Going back to this ‘60 minutes’ show, to my amazement, as I kept an eye on it during the almost 15 minutes spot, not even once did the reporter mention this obvious risk. The whole segment revolved only on how a lesbian couple three years ago had a baby with a donor sperm, and at a party met a single woman who also chose to impregnate herself with donor sperm. As they were talking about their respective children, they discovered they had the same donor number. So the show focused on this ‘wonderful event’ that they found out the two children were really half brother and sister, and ‘how nice that they discovered this’.

Well, being the critic I am by nature, I thought - what if they never met and lived close to each other, went to school, grew up, met each other, even fell in love without knowing they had the same fathers? Now, that is trouble incest, inbreeding of blood lines… yes, once again, man has toyed with nature and no one seems to realize its great harm.

My fear now is this: it will likely happen that use of donor sperm in conceiving may yet one day become a fad. When indeed this occurs, even healthy married couples or anyone else for that matter, who want to have children of particular physical or character traits like hair, skin and eye color, build and even intelligence - may avail of these sperm donors just to fulfill their wishes.

(Side note: This reminds me that in the 1940s, a man by the name of Adolf Hitler tried ‘controlled breeding’ because he wanted to raise a generation of a perfect race of blond, blue eyed Caucasians by ”ridding the Aryan race of undesirable elements and eliminating other races that he considered  inferior and dangerous to the Germans. This he attempted by the passage of a law requiring the compulsory sterilization of men and women deemed likely to have defective children, primarily those with physical or mental handicaps, so that by 1945, some 400,000 Germans had been sterilized. He also approved only marriages to the ‘right kind’ of Germans - those whose ancestors and appearances measured up to the Nazi’s standard of Aryan purity.” - Microsoft Encarta Premium Suite Encyclodia, 2005.))

Now, there is also a side bar to this bizarre story on this C.B.S. show - where one man who chose to go public for this story told how he - to put himself through college - donated over 250 times over four years to the sperm bank… Wow! imagine that one man with possible 250 babies some places out there - not knowing where they came from? Scary? Yes, I think so…

Final Note: Sperm banks have been around for some time. They were first put up to help married couples where the men’s sperm was insufficient for fertilization. Through these banks, a couple could pick a donor to hopefully conceive a child with another man’s sperm. But now, it is open to even lesbian couples or single women who wish to have children though remain unmarried.

As of today, there is a very strong contention that there have already been incidents of inbreeding among individuals who are ‘products’ of sperm banks. Here in the U.S., for the last 10 years or so, many children have been diagnosed with newly labeled disorders such as bi polarism, attention deficit disorder and other learning and physical disabilities. We are now medicating children as young as 6-7 years old for these disabilities.

Putting two and two together, this could be an indication of half brothers and sisters marrying and thus bearing children with defects.  

It think there should be regulations for this, such as - the children must be told at a predetermined age that they are conceived from a sperm bank, and let them know their donors’ code number so at least they can check before they marry. (But again, granting that these children know they have different donor numbers - who could say the sperm was labeled correctly?)