Tomorrowland (31 page)

In the washing-away category are projects like those started by Dr. Kirk Maxey, a former sperm donor and founder of the Donor Semen Archive, the Donor X Project and the Donor Y Project, a series of endeavors that use genetic markers to track both donors and the resulting children, with hopes of forcing the industry’s hand.

“I think that gamete [egg and sperm] banking is by its very nature a nonprofit activity,” says Maxey. “It is only a misguided perversion that has allowed it to become an industry, and that industry is the only strong advocate for donor anonymity. The malfeasance perpetrated under the guise of donor anonymity is what we are slowly but steadily bringing to light through genetic testing.”

In an interview with ABC News, Maxey said he began donating his own sperm in the 1980s, and guesstimates that over the course of sixteen years he may have produced more than 200
children. While Maxey uses these figures to paint a disturbing picture of the industry he now opposes, there is no way to verify his claims.

Dr. Rothman defends the industry, saying, “We’ve been trying to create an industrywide donor tracking system, but it’s expensive and we’re trying to get other sperm banks to buy in as well. Either way, we’re hoping to have something in place within a year or two.”

But there’s an important caveat in Rothman’s avowed support for a donor tracking system, which would put an end to the destruction of former donors’ records: Their names would remain anonymous to parents. Donor tracking would be used only internally to allow gamete banks to keep track of how often and where donors sell their sperm and eggs, and, as they age, to monitor donor health issues that aren’t currently tracked.

As such, this form of donor tracking would be the middle ground between current practices and an outright ban on anonymity. Many industry watchdogs feel this tracking system doesn’t go far enough, while others feel Rothman’s sentiments — despite the fact that he publicly applauded Wendy Kramer’s efforts and initiated talks to partner with her enterprise (as of yet inconclusive) — are mere lip service. Whatever the case, when it comes to donor tracking, California Cryobank may be sailing alone.

Recently, William Jaeger, vice president of Genetics and IVF Institute in Virginia, another of the nation’s biggest banks, told the
New York Times
that mandatory donor-identity disclosure “would devastate the industry.” Kramer has found similar attitudes elsewhere. “I’ve spoken to the directors of all the major sperm banks and they don’t all think like Cappy,” she says. “Even though my site is based on mutual consent, Northwest Andrology [one of the other major players] is very much against what I do.”

Kramer contends that Northwest Andrology — whose website features a photo of a fat wad of $100 bills and touts the news that
donors earn up to $16,000 — is so opposed to unveiling the donor names that “they’ve threatened donors on my site, making them take down their information. They’re hell-bent on preserving anonymity.”

5.

While anonymity is a major issue, industry watchdogs maintain that hidden beneath it is a far more insidious problem: incest. There is a growing concern that sooner or later two donor siblings are going to meet and mate without realizing that they share the same father or, in the case of egg donations, mother. “No one on the sperm-bank side wants to talk about it,” says Kramer, “but there are over one million donor children in the world, and I know of several cases where unknowing siblings have ended up going to college together and having the same groups of friends. The industry says accidental incest is a statistical impossibility, but from what I’ve seen, it’s only a matter of time.”

This is no small issue. Simply put, incest is bad for the gene pool. Sleep with your brothers and sisters and mutations arise. If this pattern of intimate relations with intimate relations continues for more than a few generations, pregnancy becomes impossible. The line dies out. For this reason, in 1910, anthropologist James Frazer demonstrated that the incest taboo was universal, an idea extended by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who felt that the incest taboo drove us to procreate with people outside of our own family and tribe — meaning this fear is actually the fundamental building block of society.

To protect this building block, some countries have laws limiting the number of women who can receive sperm from a single donor. Britain sets their legal limit at ten, Denmark at twenty-five. In the US, there are guidelines. The American Association of Reproductive Medicine suggests that a single donor sire no
more than twenty-five children within an urban area with a population of 800,000, but — as there’s nothing stopping a man from donating sperm at LA’s California Cryobank and then traveling a few miles down the freeway and making another donation at Pasadena’s Pacific Reproductive Services — these guidelines are hard to enforce.

Instead, the banks police their own limits internally. California Cryogenics, for example, draws its line at twenty kids per donor, but only 40 percent of the women who buy frozen sperm report back to the Cryobank with news of a live birth — yet they don’t cap sperm sales until those live births are reported. And, because certain — think blond-haired, blue-eyed — donors are extremely popular and not all pregnancies take, banks often sell the same sperm to more than the recommended number of buyers. Furthermore, because most families order sperm for their immediate needs and then pay a storage fee to hold more in reserve for future use, there’s no way to enforce the limits.

“No sperm bank knows how many children are born to specific donors,” says Kramer. “They don’t know who these kids are or where they are. There’s no accurate record keeping.”

More alarming is the charge that sperm banks have been intentionally underplaying how many kids have been sired by particular donors. The most egregious example of this is Dr. Cecil Jacobson, who ran a reproductive genetics center in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Instead of using donor sperm, Jacobson substituted his own. When he was caught, investigators found seven children sired by the doctor and — because mothers refused to submit their kids for DNA testing — seventy-five other possibilities.

Talking about this problem, San Francisco’s Chloe Ohme, both a midwife and the first person in history to impregnate herself using Internet-found, mail-order sperm, says, “I’ve been at gatherings of single mothers and people suddenly realize their kids look a little too alike and begin comparing donor numbers and, sure enough, they match.” And that’s nothing compared to
what Kramer noticed after she opened her donor-sibling registry for business. “Very quickly,” says Kramer, “we found donors on the website with thirty and forty and fifty kids.”

Unfortunately, no one really knows the scope of the problem. One of the only times the issue of sibling incest and sperm banking has been studied was in 1984, by the Law Reform Commission of New South Wales, Australia. The Commission found no danger of incest among donor offspring in the US, but based this determination on annual, nationwide, assisted-reproduction birthrates of 10,000. These days, some 30,000 women a year use California Cryobank’s services — and that’s only one bank out of thousands.

Not surprisingly, it’s religious organizations who are most vocal about this issue. The Catholic Church feels that any form of assisted reproduction threatens the sacred covenant between man and woman, often citing the dangers of incest among its reasons. The Southern Baptist Church has also begun looking into the dangers of accidental incest. Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention and head of the organization’s public policy arm, says, “We don’t share the Catholic prohibition against AIH (artificial insemination by husband), but forget the religious implications. There are good medical reasons why all states have laws against incest. It produces very real medical dangers. In the past twenty years, we’ve learned enough about the tyranny of biology to know that, for the most part, the nature-versus-nurture argument is dead. Nature always wins. Which means incest is a real concern, and the more children who are the product of sperm banks, the more this concern becomes a problem for everyone.”

Rothman disagrees. “Incest isn’t an issue. Not only is it statistically improbable, but go back 300 years and just about all of us lived in tiny villages. There was no public transit. Everyone was related to everyone else because there was no one else around to marry. We’re all descendants of incest. Secondly, from a medical
perspective, you’re talking about the danger of one generation of incest — even if that happens, the chances of something going wrong are minute.”

Still, even if incest isn’t an issue, it remains a fundamental taboo — so the problem doesn’t seem likely to go away.

6.

The King of Sperm has a corner office, exotically decorated. Perched by the window is a small statue of a man with, as is appropriate, enormous testicles. His balls, literally, hang to the floor. Above the statue, hanging from the ceiling, is a sizable replica of the solar system — a
Starship Enterprise
model positioned dead center. This is also appropriate.

“I’m interested in the frontiers of technology and humanity,” Rothman says. “And I know there are dangers in sperm banking. I reread
Brave New World
once every three years. But I also know that infertility is the kind of problem that ruins lives. I only wish the government would recognize this fact as well.”

What Rothman means is that unless the industry finds a quick way to address donor anonymity and its downstream concerns (incest among them), it’s only a matter of time before the federal government gets further involved, and that’s exactly what the industry most fears. “The Food and Drug Administration has become the most onerous obstacle involved in reproduction right now,” says Rothman. “They’re unaware of the field and — especially in the Bush years — are taking orders from an administration — which has time and again proved themselves irresponsible with science.”

Take the 2001 FDA ruling that banned the importation of European sperm on the grounds that it might be contaminated with mad cow disease. “The problem,” says Rothman, “is that mad cow disease is a prion disease — it’s not sexually transmittable. The only way someone could get it is to eat the frozen sperm.”

Nor is this an isolated incident. In 2005, because of the dangers of HIV transmission via blood transfusions, the FDA created Donor Eligibility and Determination Labeling — a set of rules pertaining to the transference of biological material from one person to the next. Sperm banking and in vitro fertilization labs must adhere to these rules, yet there has never been a case of anyone getting HIV from the transfer of reproductive material. Concurrently, they also banned sperm banks from using the sperm of any man who has had “gay sex” in the past five years — even though, again, there is no instance of AIDS being passed via purchased sperm.

As Dr. Barry Behr, Stanford University associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology, and director of Stanford’s in vitro fertilization lab, says: “The government has put unreasonable and nonsensical demands on reproductive clinics.”

Among those nonsensical demands, Behr points to a California law stating that all couples considering assisted childbirth must be screened for diseases like HIV, HDLV, syphilis, hepatitis, and rubella. Save HIV and HDLV, all of these results can be ignored or waived — meaning one partner can sign a form saying they understand the dangers and want to go ahead anyway — so infected material is occasionally stored at cryobanks. “The FDA demands that this material be held in a completely separate ‘biohazard’ location in the cryotank,” says Behr. “This means we need more cryotanks, a separate labeling system, and a ton more paperwork. All of it is unnecessary. What they don’t get is that every sample in the tank is still sharing the same liquid nitrogen. It’s like making people with a cough live on the same street, but using only one school bus to pick up the entire neighborhood.”

“Every time the government passes another law,” says Rothman, “all they’re doing is restricting women’s reproductive freedom. I don’t think the government belongs in our bedrooms. I understand that if the industry doesn’t establish a donor registry, this is what’s coming. But I think the American public should rise up against it. By letting the FDA tell you whose sperm you can’t
use, they’re in essence telling you whose sperm you have to use. And I don’t think we want the federal government deciding what kinds of kids the American public should be allowed to have.”

Unfortunately, since few in the industry share Rothman’s position on donor tracking and almost no one on the banking side wants to see donor anonymity revoked, without some sort of intervention, the dangers of accidental incest and hidden genetic disease will continue to grow. The truth of the matter is, as the famed physicist Freeman Dyson once pointed out, “If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”

Acknowledgments

This book would never have been possible without a great number of people. In helping me decode the science and develop the ideas, I owe a debt of gratitude to Peter Diamandis, Dezso Molnar, Andrew Hessel, Mark Gordon, James Olds, Marc Goodman, and Rick Doblin. My dear friend Michael Wharton served as an indispensible first reader/editor. My amazing wife, Joy Nicholson, kept me sane and laughing throughout.

As none of these stories would have gotten written without the magazine editors who assigned the original pieces, a great thanks to Joe Donnelly at the
LA Weekly
, AJ Baime at
Playboy
, Adam Fisher at
Wired
, Ilena Silverman at the
New York Times Magazine
, Don Peck at the
Atlantic
, Rick Theis at
Ecohearth
, Gary Kamiya at
Salon
, Torie Bosch at
Slate
, Mark Frauenfelder at
Make
, and Pamela Weintraub at
Discover
.