By Geoff Clegg.
An interesting little article recently popped up on City Journal entitled “The Incredible Shrinking Father” by Kay Hymowitz about the paternity issues of sperm donors.
In Kansas, a raging debate over the issue of contracts and paternal rights has turned up in court.
The case, involving a father who donoted sperm to another couple, invites the question of who is responsible for the welfare and the general rights afforded to the donor. The lower courts of the State of Kansas affirmed that the mother is the sole individual heir to the children (they were twins) produced via artificial insemination.
Hymowitz points out that while artificial insemination is not rampant, it has become increasingly popular among childless and/or gay and lesbian couples. She writes:
Now they’re more likely to go to the sperm store like everyone else, especially since a 2006 American Society for Reproductive Medicine Ethics Committee report calling for equal access to fertility treatment for gays, lesbians, and singles. These days, anyone can buy sperm: married couples, gay couples, and single women; women on the AARP mailing list, women barely out of college, 40-year-old women who have tried desperately to find husbands and have no other hope of becoming mothers, and 20-something women who—well—just want to, that’s all; rich and famous women like Annie Leibovitz, Wendy Wasserstein, and Mary Cheney; and divorced third-grade teachers who live in modest two-bedroom condos and are fed up with men. Whoever. The California Cryobank, the country’s largest, estimates that about 40 percent of its customers are unmarried women. The Sperm Bank of California says that two-thirds of its clientele are lesbian couples. Most professionals believe that about 1 million American children are the progeny of sperm donors—the large majority of them anonymous—with 30,000 more boosting the ranks each year.
But this all begs the further question of who exactly is the predominant party and legal custodian in the case of children born from sperm donors.
Hymowitz continues:
…aided by a lucrative sperm-bank service industry, an increasingly unmarried consumer base, a legal profession and judiciary geared toward seeing relationships through a contractual lens, and a growing cultural preference for individual choice without limits, AI is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family. There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men promotes the very male carelessness that leads a lot of women to become single mothers in the first place. And fatherless families are a delicate proposition, as AI families are discovering, since all the scientists’ technology and all the lawyerly contracts can’t take human nature out of human reproduction.
What we can take from this passage is that artificial insemination has grown to be a cottage industry amongst the legal profession. But her mention of the irony of single mothers only further demonstrates the general ignorance of her position. At no point should we limit to choices of women to participate in legal insemination.
It is a perfectly natural right of one party to seek help in the arena of procreation without the involvement of another party, particularly if one party wishes to have no input from a male. Amongst gay/lesbian couples, this tends to be the best resort for their civil rights and only furthers their ability to seek acceptance in a dual gender society.
What we are seeing is a “conservative” backlash against fatherless mothers. It is undeniable that many youths without paternal influences are less structured in their early years, but we must also understand that this is not a case of single mothers who get pregnant without a “delegated” father. Despite Ms. Hymowitz’s criticisms of an under-regulated industry, it is important not to lose sight of the many benefits of artificial insemination, which, every year, allows tens of thousands of couples the opportunity to rear a child of their own.
When artificial insemination takes place, the role of the father is contractually substituted by another person, whether it be another female or male. Artificial insemination allows for childless couples and/or gay/lesbian couples to be able to reproduce; ergo, they are more welcome into the body politic of society. Roles are reversed (or transfixed) so that they become less static and more reliable.
What Hymowitz is talking about is the reversal of roles and the negative effect artificial insemination has on sperm donors. One needs to be consider whether surrogate fathers have a right to the children spawned from their donation. One needs to further consider whether such acts are beyond the realm of fatherly production and more in the realm of aid to another person. At no point should a donor consider themselves to be a party to the growth and maturation of their donation.
As it stands, the act of donation precludes the potential donor from having a role in their progeny’s life. Why? It comes down to the act itself. Once someone has officially donated their sperm, they have little (if any) rights after the procedure.
Donors are doing this without any sense of love or commitment to another party and are hence disowned from the process. If potential donors want to seek inclusion with those who receive their sperm, they should sign into an agreement whereby their product is shared with both parties. This would eliminate many of the concerns rightfully espoused by Ms. Hymowitz.
When people speak of the debate concerning sperm donors and their reproductive rights, it is important to frame the context. If the donor wishes to donate to a party he knows and trusts, then he should seek legal representation that allows him access to his child with the second party. But, if the donor is anonymous and the donation is inseminated into a second party who is unknown to the first party, he is left at the whim of the second party. His rights are suspended at that moment, as the person who accepts the party has a legal right to preclude him from the development of the child.
Indeed, this is a complicated issue, but it demonstrates how actions are not taken into context and oftentimes ignored in the long run. As the article points out, many of the donors are college-aged males who donate because of the financial incentive. They are hardly paying attention to the overall consequences of their actions and only care about the monetary gain they recieve from their donation.
Kay Hymowitz concludes her piece by asking that it would be “a good idea for Americans likewise to abolish anonymous sperm donation.” A main problem with this advocation is that it infringes on the rights of men and women to choose an alternative means for reproduction. This view, I believe, harms society by restricting the rights of childless couples and gay/lesbian couples.
Anonymous donation should be allowed, because it enables certain segments of the population to have children (in a way that does not create a myriad of legal issues).
Without anonymous donation many couples would have to enter into tricky contracts that limits their rights while asserting the rights of absent fathers who most likely would not have been involved in the pregnancy or the process anyway.
CenLamar 