Until a few weeks ago, I was an innocent virgin as far as the brave new world of fertility clinics was concerned. Now I am thinking about quitting my day job and becoming a professional sperm donor. Granted, I don’t have the brains of Albert Einstein or the athleticism of Roger Federer. But the first is dead and the second is presently too busy playing tennis to spend his days filling test tubes with genetic material. That leaves me to fulfill the wishes of infertile couples all over the world. In former times only sultans could father 170 children; now anyone who is deemed a genetically superior human being by a fertility clinic can become the biological father of hundreds of children. But after reading the facinating story about fertility clinics in a recent issue of the NY Times (see below), I am a bit worried about 200 children knocking one day on my door, asking me to babysit my uncountable number of grandchildren

Are You My Sperm Donor? Few Clinics Will Say

By AMY HARMON, NYT, January 20, 2006

As soon as she gave birth to healthy triplets, Raquel Villalba knew she wanted them to meet the woman whose donated eggs had made it possible. The donor, Marilyn Drake, was just as eager to meet the babies.

But the fertility clinic did not think it was a good idea. Ms. Drake had grown “overly maternal,” the counselor warned Ms. Villalba. Ms. Drake, in turn, was told that Ms. Villalba would blame her if anything went wrong with the triplets, so it was best to stay away.

Largely unregulated, fertility clinics have long operated under the assumption that preserving anonymity is best for all parties. But as the stigma of infertility fades, the secrecy of the process is coming under attack, both from parents like Ms. Villalba and from the growing number of adults who owe their lives to donors.

“I don’t understand why these clinics are being so difficult,” said Ms. Villalba, who finally prevailed on the clinic to let her contact Ms. Drake.

Critics say the industry’s preference for anonymity allows it to escape accountability. How would anyone know if a sperm donor advertised as a Ph.D. who does not smoke is really a chain smoker with a high-school diploma, for instance? Or how many offspring a donor might have? With neither party in a position to verify the number, there may be little incentive for sperm banks to impose limits on their best sellers - whose offspring might number more than 100 - leaving children at risk of unwitting incest.

Many also complain that they are at the mercy of the fertility industry for important information - for instance, that a donor developed diabetes in later life - that might signal health risks. And some critics are pondering the larger question of whether anybody, having already decided that one’s children will never know where they came from, has the right to bring them into the world. Many children born from donors are haunted by questions of identity, for which they blame companies that require anonymity as a condition of buying their sperm and eggs.

With ever more exotic reproductive technologies looming, like cloning and the engineering of traits like eye color and intelligence, some advocates for more regulation say there is a growing urgency to protect these children from what they call “genetic bewilderment.” Guaranteeing children access to their genetic heritage, they say, could be the cornerstone of an industry ethics code.

“We need to get it right for donor conception,” said Rebecca Hamilton, a law student at Harvard who created a documentary about searching for her donor father in New Zealand, “and use it as the basis for the million weird and wacky decisions coming our way.”

The documentary helped rally support for a law there prohibiting anonymous donation. Several European countries have already begun to ban anonymous donation of genetic material. Britain, for instance, began requiring fertility clinics last April to register donor information, including names, in a database that offspring can view when they reach 18.

But those regulations have resulted in a steep decline in donors, which has made sperm banks and fertility clinics here more determined to oppose mandatory identity disclosure.

“If that was required, it would devastate the industry,” said William W. Jaeger, vice president of the Fairfax Genetics & I.V.F. Institute in Virginia, one of the nation’s largest fertility clinics, which routinely turns down offspring who ask if their donor might be open to contact. “The agreement we have is that the donor is forever anonymous.”

Unlike adoption, which requires judicial action to create a relationship between the adoptive parent and child, parenthood via assisted reproductive technology is mediated entirely by the private agencies that supply the genetic material.

While the Food and Drug Administration requires donor agencies to screen for several communicable diseases, including H.I.V. and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, it has allowed the fertility industry to set its own rules regarding just about everything else. About 40,000 children are born each year through donor eggs and sperm, according to rough industry estimates.

Some fertility experts say they advocate anonymity to protect both donors and customers from being caught up in the murky issues of custody and liability. They point out that there is little established case law on the subject and that states interpret parental rights differently.

But critics say such policies are as much a shield for the booming fertility industry, which might suffer from high-profile legal battles or scandals like one case in the early 1990’s when a fertility doctor in Virginia was found to have fathered as many as 75 children by inseminating patients with his own sperm.

Pressure from a growing customer base of lesbian couples and single women, who have to explain the absence of a father to their children, has led many sperm banks to begin charging more for sperm from donors who agree to be contacted by adult offspring.

Still, perhaps because assisted reproduction is viewed as a medical procedure for adults, critics say the children are often forgotten. Unlike adoptees, who have gained the right to their original birth certificates, some donor-conceived offspring still do not know how they came to be. One reason for the pressure on the industry now is that more parents are telling their children about the method of their conception.

“Fertility clinics present themselves as simply providing treatment for people who are infertile, and they make lots of money doing it,” said Joan Hollinger, a leading scholar on adoption law at the University of California, Berkeley. “There isn’t anyone at the table assigned to think about the needs of any resulting children.”

When Eric Schwartzman and his wife were considering accepting donor sperm in 2001, no one suggested that their children might be interested in contacting the donor. Now, having listened to the yearning expressed by some donor-conceived offspring, they want their young son and daughter to have the option.

“At a minimum, they should be recording the live births and making it public,” said Mr. Schwartzman, 41, a tax lawyer in Manhattan who has formed a committee to draft a model set of rules for sperm banks, which might include testing for common genetic diseases, keeping health records and providing more biographical information, rather than charging extra for pictures of a donor or a tape recording of his voice, as is now standard practice.

Critics of donor anonymity do not expect further regulation of the industry’s policies any time soon, but they say they hope market pressure and public opinion will persuade the institutions to be more open.

Ellen Glazer, a social worker who arranges meetings between egg donors and recipients, says both parties often defer to the donor agencies for guidance. The meetings are often supervised by the agency.

“They’ll say, ‘This is great, let’s go out to lunch’ and then they’ll look at me and say, ‘Are we allowed?’ Ms. Glazer said. “And I’ll say, ‘You two are engaging in some of the most intimate connection that two women have, why wouldn’t you want to go out to lunch?’ “

Ms. Villalba, who told her triplets from the beginning that she had needed a “helper” to have them, said she wanted them to be able ask Ms. Drake whatever questions might arise. Ms. Drake, who has two children of her own, says she feels like an aunt to the children.

The women said the clinic, the Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco, initially insisted that they correspond only through its counselors, who censored identifying information out of their letters. When the triplets, now 3, were infants, Ms. Villalba asked to be contacted when Ms. Drake came to donate again, only to find that she had returned to Southern California. Finally the clinic set up a phone counseling session with both of them and agreed to disclose Ms. Drake’s address. A letter with pictures arrived a few days later.

The center did not return repeated calls asking for comment, but experts say many fertility centers follow similar guidelines, under the presumption that anonymity is the most compassionate approach for a couple already grappling with infertility.

“We want the recipient to feel she’s getting genetic material from the donor with which she can make a baby that is very much hers,” said Dr. Brian M. Berger, director of the donor egg program at Boston I.V.F. “If you then try to create a personal relationship between donor and recipient, it becomes more murky. The donor has an investment which we’d rather they didn’t have.”

Some fertility experts say there are more pragmatic reasons, too.

“Frankly I think it’s just easier for the industry to do it anonymously,” said Hilary Hanafin, a psychologist in Los Angeles who frequently consults with infertile couples. “If you’re in total control of the information, it’s more efficient and less work.”

A few sperm donor offspring have circumvented the system, finding their biological fathers through ad-hoc Internet registries and long-shot DNA tests, using the shards of biographical information provided by the sperm banks or clinics. On e-mail lists like DonorMisconception and an international group called Tangled Web, they argue that an institutional change is required.

Even some donors who initially coveted anonymity have said they now feel the tug of genetic bonds. They, too, have begun to petition donor agencies to open their records.

“I have this overwhelming desire to meet my genetic offspring,” said John Allison, 46, a software engineer in Tucson who donated sperm for easy money as a graduate student in the mid-1980’s and never had children of his own. “We’d rent a boat, we’d go fishing. I’d answer anything they had to say.”

Mr. Allison wrote to the sperm bank, Idant Laboratories in New York, several months ago expressing his willingness to meet, but he never received a reply.

March 20, 2006. Here is an interesting follow-up piece in the NYT Magazine.

German woman gives birth to healthy girl at age 64  December 2, 2007

A GERMAN woman aged 64 has given birth to a healthy baby girl, a national record and her first child after years of unfruitful attempts and false pregnancies.

“Mother and child are doing well,” doctor Elias Karam at the Aschaffenburg clinic in southern Bavaria was quoted as saying by Der Spiegel weekly.

The baby was born last Thursday by caesarian and weighed 2kg, the report said.

While the woman became the oldest German to given birth, it was far from a world record.

At the end of 2006, a Spanish woman of 67 gave birth to twins, pipping the record made the year before by another twin-bearer, this time a 66-year-old Romanian.

The German birth came thanks to the donation of ovules by a 25-year-old donor but used the sperm of her husband, who is also aged 64, Spiegel reported.

The ovule operation happened abroad because it was banned in Germany, the report said.

“This woman came to me because she needed my help. As a doctor, I gave it without question,” said Dr Karam.