Thanks to Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval Glenn, and Karen Clark for helping to bring attention to the critical issues, concerns and needs of offspring conceived through third party gametes. The authors focused on offspring conceived through sperm, who may constitute just under 1% of all babies born in the US today.

I want to add a few notes about language, sale, and anonymity. As we all know, and as some of the offspring make painfully clear, most of the gametes, whether they be sperm or eggs, are not donated; they are sold. Use of the term “donor” suggests that gamete provision is an altruistic act.  Yet it is far more complicated than that, bringing in issues of commodification, gender, medicalization, parenthood, and identity.   For example, Yale sociologist Rene Almeling notes that: “In both egg agencies and sperm banks, the practice of providing financial compensation in return for gametes is called ‘donation,’ but egg donation is framed as a gift while sperm donation is framed as a job.” (72 Law and Contemp. Prob. 37, 56 (2009).   One of the survey respondents labeled the act of paying for a gamete “donation” an “oxymoron.”  (p. 26 of the report)

I’ll set aside (for this post, at least) the issues of payment,   but I do find something wrong with how we frame the act of providing gametes so that others can have children.  Our language does not recognize the mixed motives of gamete providers, and instead cloaks these transactions in the altruistic fantasy of donation. Moreover, given that these transactions result in the creation of babies, I also find something terribly wrong with not recognizing their interests, and I agree with the authors, Ross Douthat, and Wendy Kramer on the need to end anonymity.

I’m writing an article AND a book on the need to transform how we think about transactions in gametes: they are not simply medical procedures or business dealings — they also create families.