-
- OTTAWA (CP) -- Sperm donor No. 1131 is pleasant, kind and generous.
There is no history of baldness in his family. He wears glasses. His ancestry
is Scottish and English and he has freckles on his shoulders.
-
- Anyone interested in having a child using
this man's sperm can learn these and other details about him by consulting
the ReproMed Ltd. sperm donor catalogue on the Internet.
-
- Prospective clients who don't warm to
No. 1131 can consider scores of other candidates who are profiled in equal
detail by the Toronto-base sperm bank .
-
- It's called Data Assisted Donor Selection
(D.A.D.S.) and it represents the leading edge in donor-assisted conception.
-
- Prospective clients -- mainly women
with impotent husbands, lesbians or heterosexual single women who want
children -- can view photos of a donor's facial features: an eye, an ear,
a profile of the nose. But there is nothing that would make him recognizable
by sight -- his actual identity remains a closely guarded secret.
-
- As recently as a decade ago, women undergoing
donor insemination could get virtually no information about the men whose
sperm they were using. "People were told absolutely nothing,"
Toronto sociologist Rona Achilles said in an interview. "Now, you
know, we're counting the hair on the guy's head or whatever. "It's
like the pendulum swung the other way completely."
-
- Achilles says it is a good thing for
children produced through donor insemination to know as much as possible
by their biological fathers. But she is nevertheless troubled by the computerized
catalogue.
-
- "It borders on eugenics. If the
information is for the use of the child I don't have a problem with it.
But if it's used as a basis for selection it makes me uncomfortable. I
don't see why it has to be that detailed."
-
- No one knows how many Canadian children
owe their birth to donor insemination -- there is no national registry
-- but the number is certainly in the thousands. The practice remains
unregulated but the federal government is preparing legislation for introduction
later this year.
-
- Cathy Ruberto, a spokeswoman for ReproMed,
takes pride in the company's thorough approach. She says it's in the interest
of both parent and child to have a good "mix." Ruberto says
the company is extremely rigorous in its selection of donors, and only
a fraction of those who would like to participate are accepted.
-
- Margaret Somerville, director of the
McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, said women who choose a sperm
donor from a catalogue are employing similar principles to those who choose
a mate. "At one level, when you're choosing a husband you're choosing
a father." But she also has concerns.
-
- "I think we've got to have the utmost
respect for the passing on of human life and we mustn't do anything that
demeans that."
-
- So is there something demeaning about
an electronic sperm catalogue? "I think we've got to be careful because
most things don't go down the drain by one big chop. It's the thousand
little pinpricks that mean that it survives or not.
-
- "Everything that we do that's got
to do with the passage of human life, we should examine it not just from
our own individual wants and desires and what's convenient, but also we've
got to look at it in a much larger picture."
|
