Keeping in touch
Some sperm banks are trying to assist the children they helped create. “As the patients and the offspring are growing and we’re finding out what possible issues there may be, we want to respond to that,” said Michelle Ottey, the director of operations at Fairfax Cryobank and Cryogenic Laboratories in Fairfax. To that end, Fairfax Cryobank has created a program by which donors commit to being identified if their offspring want to find them when they turn 18. About 25 percent of donors are participating.
Fairfax Cryobank also asks new donors to update their medical and personal information annually and has begun contacting old donors with the same request. So far, about 50 percent participate. Mothers of donor-conceived children can access this information on the sperm bank’s Web site, though without learning a donor’s name.
“This is allowing us to keep in touch with our donors even after they’ve stopped donating to let us know how their health is progressing,” said Ottey. “It’s all well and good to have their medical history as an 18-year-old when they’re donating, but we feel it’s just as important that we update that because things will develop over time.”
Greater access to donor records may come at a price. In the United Kingdom and in parts of Australia where sperm-donor anonymity has been banned in recent years, there have been shortages of donated sperm, though this may have been partially a consequence of restrictions on payment for sperm and limits on how many families can be formed using the same donor.
One donor, a 32-year-old from New York, said he donated sperm in 2002 to help pay for graduate school but would not have done so had he been required to update his medical records or reveal identifying information. He looks at sperm donation as a purely financial decision and says he isn’t curious about the children who may have been born using his sperm. “I guess it’s whether you believe in nature or nurture, and I’m much more of a nurture person,” he said.
Kathleen LaBounty, however, may never have the option to know more about her donor. The only information she has about him is that he was a medical student at Baylor College of Medicine, where LaBounty was conceived, sometime between 1979 and 1984. With the help of college yearbooks, she has written to nearly 600 possible donors in the hopes of finding her biological father, but has not been able to find him yet.
She believes that the only way sperm donation should be practiced is if the donors agree to be identified. “I think it’s the only way that is fair for the children,” she said. “Donor-conceived people need to have options available so that they can do whatever feels right for them. There needs to be less emphasis on the parents and the donors and their rights, because the children are the ones who have no say in this entire process — they’re just born into this situation.”
Shenk is an editor and freelance writer in Washington.
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