Artificial Insemination and the Commercialization of Our Children

The Cincinnati Post - DNA dad must be available

I am willing to guess that Mary and Heather chose a sperm bank as their matchmaker since these banks offer their customers - and I do mean customers - a screened set of genes from a diverse portfolio of men. The sperm donors range in height and ethnicity, athletic prowess and SAT scores. Some donors even provide an essay, sort of like a college admissions application.



It's fair to say that the sperm banks overtly promote the importance of the male gene in the creation of a child. And covertly promote the unimportance of the male presence in the raising of a child.



In the beginning, artificial insemination was a treatment for married couples with an infertile husband. Sperm donors, or sperm vendors as bioethicist George Annas calls the men who sell their genetic material, were often medical students who treated this as casually as a blood donation. The world and the child were expected to regard the husband as the biological father.



Today about 30,000 babies a year are born from sperm donors. The customers are now likely to be single women who have given up looking for Mr. Right in favor of Donor Right, and lesbians. But the donors are pretty much the same.



"Most of them are young guys trying to make some money and not thinking about the consequences," says David Plotz, author of "The Genius Factory," a book about a famous sperm bank. "They make a donation, it's kept in quarantine, released to someone they don't know and then a child is created with whom they have no connection."



This makes a perfect market solution: female customers who want children and male manufacturers ready to sell their genetic material without strings or custody suits attached. But sooner or later, the "consequences" grow up and may have a very different opinion. Some children of sperm donors are beginning to search for their biological parents the way adopted children do.

I was amazed when I read the commentary quoted above from Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman. The language Ms. Goodman uses to describe the practice of artificial insemination could have come from the pen of a Catholic commentator. It is a great example of the brutal honesty that I admire in Ms. Goodman. She calls the women who use artificial insemination "customers." She describes how these "customers" choose their products from the most genetically desirable donor profiles. She explains how artificial insemination basically allows women to have children without a real man in the picture at all. She correctly identifies the potentially horrible effects such a market-based approach to reproduction may have on children - "But sooner or later, the 'consequences' grow up and may have a very different opinion.'" She even seems to take the correct moral stance, stating later in the article (not quoted above), ". . . who said that families were markets?"



But then, true to the modernist philosophy that drives her, she proclaims, "We can't ban sperm donation any more than we ban the fertile one-night stand." What is her solution to the marketing of children and families? Give the children the right to know their biological father.



As a father of an adopted child, I know that the conversation will one day begin (and be ongoing) wherein my wife and I will have to reveal to our daughter where she came from. We have chosen to try very hard to keep an open line with her birth mother so that they can meet some day if they choose to. However, I do not look forward to the pain my daughter will experience when she finds out that she was created through an act of selfish sexual pleasure, and that her biological father doesn't even know that she exists. The pain will not come from not knowing her biological father. The pain will come from realizing that she was an "accident," the product of a careless act of pleasure. You see, human beings are meant for love. We are meant to be created by an act of love, and we are destined to live in love for all eternity with God, Love Himself. It is devastating for a child to know that she was not created in love. We hope that the love that we have given her as her adoptive parents will heal those wounds.



Now, can you imagine the devastation that occurs when a child finds out that she was created in a marketplace transaction between a customer and a "manufacturer" of genetic material? Not only was she not created out of an act of love, she was a product to be tailor-made, manufactured, and purchased. Will meeting her biological father make up for such an insult to her dignity? Just as in the case of adoption, one hopes that the love given by the family who raises her will help to heal those wounds. However, that love has already begun with certain conditions, since the baby 's genetic material was chosen for certain desirable qualities. What if the baby never exhibits the qualities that the mother paid for? Can this relationship ever become pure, unconditional love? Perhaps it can - the human capacity to love can be surprising at time - but it is certainly going to be a difficult journey when it has such a faulty start.



Why can't we put a stop to the callous marketing of human life? Ms. Goodman seems to have a strange definition of freedom, and an even stranger idea of the purpose of law and authority. It would probably not be prudent for a government to outlaw extra-marital sexual relationships - not because government should not take moral stands, but because to legislate morality too much is to remove the opportunity for citizens to embrace morality for themselves. However, government has the responsibility to create laws that protect the innocent from being taken advantage of by those who choose evil. Government has to impose laws and restrictions on society because there are those in society who do choose evil. Laws against rape, murder and theft are obvious examples. However, there were also times in history when government needed to step in on behalf of the weak to impose restrictions on the powerful. This would be a perfect case for such law. We need to protect the dignity of our children against those who would make our children victims of market forces. If some women seek out sperm donors on their own, and use a turkey baster to get the job done, then at least our culture has not condoned such a heinous act, and has not made it easy for a woman to treat her child as a commodity.



The practice of commercialized artificial insemination would have struck horror into the hearts of most Americans in the 1950s. However, when Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae, warning that the callous use of technology for reproduction (for avoiding and achieving pregnancy) would lead to the commercialization of sexuality and of the family, he was scoffed at. Now we see how right he was. The question is, do we have the courage to stand against the tide?

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