sperm donors

While channel surfing the other day I happened to stumble upon Oprah …her topic - Sperm Donors.

I don’t stumble upon Oprah too much (just so you know) but I did watch parts of the show. Why? Well, let’s just say the thought of being a sperm donor did cross my mind no so long ago, but more importantly, I wanted to see just who these donors were. One guy had made three trips a week to the sperm bank (at $40 a pop!) for four years …while another did it for more altruistic reasons. Whatever the compelling force though, the result is a bunch of kids running around the world that happen to look like the donor. Well - they don’t know that for sure …but the odds are there - it is a possibility. It was like the ultimate gene reproduction experiment, and any male parent who is impressed by their measly 2, 3 or 4 kid ‘output’ would have to be floored at the possibility of potentially fathering dozens if not hundreds of kids. Wow …gene pool success!

But then I realized how warped that actually is. How warped is the idea that a guy can have that many offspring …and more importantly, why would you want to! Why would a woman want to conceive a child with another man’s sperm knowing he could possibly be the genetic donor to hundreds of other children? So much for individuality.

There was a meeting on the show between a boy and girl who had the same donor …and they almost looked as twins! Now imagine, if there were 30 other kids who also looked similar - you’d have a huge family of people that not only looked alike, but shared many of the same genetic traits. Isn’t that freaky? Isn’t knowing that there are dozens of other people who look just like you - maybe sharing some of your mannerisms, really strange? *shudder*

Take it a little further now and consider if a celebrity decided to donate his/her sperm/egg in the same manner, and you had thousands of little ‘half Brad Pitt’ or ‘half Halle Berrys’ running around. Sure, it’s a great idea if there’s only one or two …maybe a few I suppose - but to have THOUSANDS of little Pitt/Berrys’ in this world would be - well…

Boring.

Mundane. Over-used. Cliche.  It’s like having the newest gadget, and then after everybody got one …it suddenly becomes a passing fad. Isn’t that what selecting off-spring would be like …eventually. Isn’t the personal selection of your sperm/egg tantamount to selecting your favorite color of car? Your favorite mp3 player? Sure, if the donor remained anonymous then you’d bypass the selection process, BUT - by allowing a sperm donor to donate thousands of times (creating the possibility of fathering hundreds or thousands of children) doesn’t that amount to the same thing? Aren’t you in effect creating an over-abundance of similar people? Isn’t this bad? At some point wouldn’t his be bad?  Wouldn’t that play havoc on a child’s self worth? Imagine a 20 year old girl searching for her ‘father’, finding she has a sister, and then finding she has 50 other genetically similar siblings!?  It’s more than weird.

Individuality and self-esteem, I think, would suffer. Of course the parenting mothers would offer other genetic information, and combined with genetic transfer by other means, you’d end up with a bunch of kids who of course wouldn’t be entirely the same …but they’d be pretty darn close. Too close, as far as I’m concerned.

But maybe I’m out of the loop in a way though. Maybe being adopted and not knowing who my biological parents are makes me look at things differently. Maybe I have a different perception of what an individual is. Maybe not being similar to others (as far as I know that is) affords me a different concept of uniqueness. A different idea of individuality. Maybe I’m wrong though …maybe people would be happy being like a bunch of other people. Maybe they’d think it’s great that they’d have hundreds of half-brothers and sisters scattered around the continent.

Maybe.
But I doubt it.

Images from the Internet Movie Database