Who's Your Daddy?
Sperm donors rely on anonymity. Now donor offspring (and their moms) are breaking down the walls of privacy
Like many parents, Mia Lentz often looks at her 9-year-old son, Brandon, and wonders where on Earth he came from. Not in the usual alien-from-another-planet or raised-by-wolves kind of way that parents imagine when their kids behave like creatures from a parallel universe. Lentz's questions are far more basic, as in: Who is your father, and what was lurking in his DNA that might be hiding in yours? "Every time I look at him, I can't help but wonder who else he is," says Lentz, 46, an advertising and marketing executive in Boca Raton, Fla.
What Lentz does know is that Brandon's other half is sperm donor No.1585: hazel eyes, college education, interest in architectural design, healthy family, piano-playing sister, and enough sperm donations to the Fairfax Cryobank in Virginia to father the von Trapp family several times over.
In the beginning of Brandon's life, those few tidbits were enough. But then came the autism like symptoms and the warning signs of precocious puberty, neither of which was part of Lentz's family history. Last year, Lentz learned--thanks to an Internet site that helps donor kids find their half siblings--that Brandon's half brothers and half sisters share some of the same physical attributes. But it's more than looks. The half siblings also share health problems, some of which are genetic. "I realize now I didn't do the right thing for my son by picking an anonymous donor," says Lentz, who most likely would have had little other choice in 1995. "The sperm banks have this information, and they're playing God with it. Our kids need the same rights as everyone else in this country to know their parentage."
Divine intervention notwithstanding, they may get them. Advances in the use of genetic medicine to predict and prevent disease, new DNA technology that makes it possible to trace ancestry, and the growing power of the Internet are galvanizing the donor community. In turn, they are challenging the limits of donor anonymity and upping the pressure on sperm banks to make information about biological dads available to donor children.
It is only a matter of time before the courts step in, say legal and ethical experts. "As advances in genetics continue to raise the question of health risks due to heredity, more people made in nontraditional ways will demand to know about their biological ancestors," says Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "I have no doubt that children's interests will dominate, and the courts will break down the walls of privacy just as they did in adoptions." Most states, for instance, now make birth certificates available to an adopted child if a court finds there is a good cause.
Open donor. In several European countries, including Britain, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands, donor anonymity has already come to an end. It is illegal to sell anonymous donor sperm in those countries, and a few cases that would allow donor children access to birth records are making their way through the legal system. The same restrictions on the sale of donor sperm, which have been accompanied by a dramatic falloff in supply in Europe, are not expected in the United States anytime soon. However, the nation's biggest sperm banks are responding to the growing demand from would-be mothers for donors who are willing to identify themselves. Last month, the Fairfax Cryobank, one of the largest sperm banks in the country, began an ID Consent Donor program. Donors must be willing to be contacted, via the sperm bank, by their offspring at age 18. Donors also agree to provide yearly updates on their whereabouts for 18 years following their participation in the program.
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