Sperm donation

"I find my blood pressure rising when Clinton's cultural shock troops participate in homosexual-rights fund-raisers but boycott gun-rights fund-raisers... and then claim it's time to place homosexual men in tents with Boy Scouts, and suggest that sperm donor babies born into lesbian relationships are somehow better served and more loved."

"The London Sperm Bank recently came under public scrutiny for rejecting a prospective sperm donor because he’s dyslexic. Aside from dyslexia, this repository also screens out men seeking to donate sperm if they have ADHD, dyspraxia, Asperger’s and other neurological conditions, many of which have a demonstrated genetic link. On the company’s website, these traits were listed as “neurological diseases,” along with Cerebral Palsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Epilepsy, Tourette Syndrome and Multiple Sclerosis."

"Screening policies in the human gamete industry reflect larger cultural assumptions that pathologize difference. In my research on both sperm donation in the 1990s up to my current work on egg donation, I have discovered there are a number of reasons a prospective sperm or egg provider may be rejected: too short, too tall, overweight, “socially inappropriate,” not having the “right motivations,” not attractive enough, a variety of “health reasons,” possibly even religion or ethnicity, and so on. The reasons for rejecting a potential donor are often unspoken."

"Are there genetic predispositions to coffee drinking? Highly unlikely. I referred to this kind of donor selection process as grass roots eugenics—where people select donors based upon fuzzy interpretations of genetics, imagining a prototype perfect donor whose desired traits will be passed down to their child. People choose donors with whom they feel they have a connection. If they plan to tell the child how they were conceived, they also want to be able to say good things about the donor who helped create them."