CHAPTER 9

MY SHORT, SCARY CAREER

AS A SPERM DONOR

Retrieving vials of frozen sperm from a liquid-nitrogen storage tank. Courtesy of California Cryobank

I realized that I needed to donate sperm, too. Not because I wanted to, quite the contrary. My son had been born in early 2003, so I was the father of two children, which seemed more than enough on most days. My lack of desire to donate is why I felt obliged to do it. No matter how often donors explained themselves to me, sperm donation befuddled me. I nodded and smiled at them as they listed their reasons, but my own brain was snickering. Why had they subjected themselves to such inconvenience? To such embarrassment? Roger had made the most compelling possible case for sperm donation to me, and I still didn’t get it. I had to find out for myself what I was missing.

I dutifully informed my wife about the plan to donate. “No way,” Hanna said. I argued that it was all in the name of research. She was unimpressed. I promised that I would stop the sperm bank before it could sell my sperm. She said she didn’t believe the bank would make such a deal. I swore that there was no chance they would use my sperm. I begged, which was not a pretty sight. She relented.

These days, all sperm banks recruit customers and donors through the Internet, so I cruised the Web and quickly found an application for the big local bank: Fairfax Cryobank, located in Washington, D.C.’s, Virginia suburbs. Fairfax Cryobank is to sperm banking what Citigroup is to real banking. It has branches in four states and Canada. The sperm bank itself is only one small division of a full-service fertility business, the Genetics & IVF Institute.

I completed Fairfax’s online application in a couple of minutes—it asked for the barest minimum of information, hardly more than my name and address. A week later, the mailman delivered a brown envelope with no name on the return address. Sperm banks, like pornographers, keep everything on the down low: mail invariably arrives in discreet envelopes. Bank staffers dislike leaving phone messages, but if they must, the message is almost incomprehensibly vague: “This is Mary, from Fairfax”—Fairfax what? I would ask myself—“We’d like to talk to you about your recent inquiry. Please call us at . . .”)

The brown package from Fairfax contained the full application, an eighteen-page slog. I trudged through the physical data: age, hair color, height, weight, blood type. Then I dragged my way through the biographical section: educational history, profession, musical talent (“None,” I wrote proudly), athletic abilities, hobbies. Then I labored through the medical questionnaire: alcohol use, tobacco use, drug use, tattooing history, how well I sleep, how well I eat, what medicines I take and why, what bones I have broken, whether I exchange sex for money, whether I had used intranasal cocaine in the preceding twelve months. I listed three generations of familial mental illness and felt my own ticker skip a beat when I wrote that all my male ancestors on both sides of the family had died young of heart disease. I declared that I wasn’t a carrier of Gaucher’s disease, Fanconi’s anemia, Niemann-Pick disease, Canavan disease, or thalassemia, although I had not the faintest idea what those illnesses were. I had to check off whether I suffered from any of an endless roster of symptoms—hoarseness, warts, blood in stool, goiter, tingling, dizziness, fainting, convulsions, seizures, fits, shaking, tremor, numbness. By the time I was done, I was suffering from several of them. I was asked sixteen ways to Sunday if I inject drugs or have sex with other men. I agreed to submit to an HIV test. Finally, I reached page eighteen, which was the scariest of all: “I agree that I release all rights, privileges, and disposition of my semen specimens to Fairfax Cryobank.” Hanna is going to kill me, I thought, and then I signed it.

According to the application, if my written application made the cut, I would be invited for an interview, where I would “produce” a semen sample for analysis. If that were satisfactory, I would return for more semen analyses and a physical. Only if I passed those would I qualify as a donor.

I mailed my application to Fairfax and waited. And waited. And waited. After two months, I was furious. How dare they ignore my semen? That semen had produced two healthy children! That semen had graduated from an Ivy League college! That semen had run a marathon! Then my rage turned to worry: Did Fairfax know something I didn’t about my health? Was my future that bleak? Was all that heart disease really so bad? Suddenly I found myself desperate to be chosen.

I had finally given up on Fairfax and applied to a bank in New York when I received an e-mail from Amanda, who identified herself as Fairfax’s laboratories coordinator. She invited me for an interview. She noted, oh so casually, that I would have to furnish a sample on the premises.

I made an appointment for the following Monday. Fairfax Cryobank was located beyond the Washington Beltway in The Land of Wretched Office Parks. The cryobank was housed in the dreariest of all office developments. To call the building anonymous would insult anonymity. The ugliness may be intentional: a sperm bank doesn’t want to draw attention to itself or its visitors. I hunted through the first-floor corridors, past the mysterious “microsort” room and “egg donor” facility, searching for the sperm bank office. I saw an open door and peeked in. I had stumbled on the vault—the room that housed Fairfax’s liquid-nitrogen storage tanks. I ducked inside and found myself alone with the tanks. There were four of them. They were head high and looked like fat silver men. I knew that each tank held tens of thousands of vials, each vial filled with millions of spermatozoa. My skin got clammy: it felt like the scene in the science fiction movie when the hero accidentally discovers the warehouse where the “friendly” aliens are freezing the millions of humans they have secretly kidnapped for their terrible experiments.

Finally I located the door marked “Cryobank” and walked into an uncomfortably cramped waiting room. A couple—not a young couple—was sitting there. They looked up, startled, when I entered. We half smiled uncomfortably at each other. All of us instantly recognized the awkward situation. They were there to buy sperm; I was there to sell it. We had each accidentally looked through a window into a world we did not want to see. I was sure the couple was thinking, That guy is a donor? The hell with this place, let’s go to Sperm World instead.

I flagged down the receptionist, who assumed I was a customer, too. When I explained I was there to see Amanda about donating, she was chagrined. I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had apparently come in the wrong door. Amanda was summoned from her office and hustled me into the back, out of sight of the couple.

Amanda led me to her office, a cozy place with wedding pictures and prints of sailing ships. She checked my driver’s license to make sure I was who I claimed to be. Then she pulled out my application and began reviewing it with me, line by line. In tone, it felt like a job interview with a vice president for human resources. In subject, it was rather different. “Okay, so you live in Washington, great. And your blood is B positive. You sure of that? No? That’s okay, we’ll check it. Hmm, so your family is from eastern Europe. Do you know exactly where? Can you check?” She noticed I was married and asked if my wife knew that I was there. I answered, “Of course. Don’t all wives know?”

Amanda acted as though this was very funny and said, “A lot of donors are married and don’t tell their wives.” (And these are the guys you want to father children?)

She asked me where I had gone to college. I said “Harvard.” She was delighted. She continued, “And have you done some graduate work?” I said no. She looked disappointed. “But surely you are planning to do some graduate work?” Again I said no. She was deflated and told me why. Fairfax has something it calls—I’m not kidding—its “doctorate program.” For a premium, mothers can buy sperm from donors who have doctoral degrees or are pursuing them. What counts as a doctor? I asked. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, optometry, law (lawyers are doctors? yes—the “juris doctorate”), and chiropractic. Don’t say you weren’t warned: your premium “doctoral” sperm may have come from a student chiropractor.

After a few minutes discussing the application, my attention wandered. I gazed absently at Amanda’s screen saver, a soothing blue-and-white pattern just over her shoulder. After a few seconds, I noticed that the white pattern wasn’t a pattern. It was a school of tiny sperm, tails waving jauntily as they motored across the screen. I took a second look at the mouse paperweight on Amanda’s desk. It wasn’t a mouse. It was a cute little sperm.

Such goofiness was, I came to discover, a hallmark of modern sperm banks. Fairfax hands out pens on college campuses that ask, “Why not get paid for it?” When I visited California Cryobank, the director of public relations gave me a T-shirt depicting swimming sperm. Around the sperm ran a circle of text that read “Future People” in a dozen different languages. California Cryobank distributes pens, too. They’re floaty pens, with a little plastic sperm swimming up and down, up and down.

Anyway, back to Amanda. At this point I am obliged to point out that Amanda was cute. In fact, she was distractingly cute. She was thirty, I’d guess, and looked Latina. She smiled all the time, a sexy, gleaming smile, and laughed when I made even the lamest stab at a joke. She leaned across her desk toward me as we talked.

Rule number one of sperm banking: The people who recruit donors are invariably women, and they are invariably good-looking. I suspect—no, I am sure—that this is deliberate, to get donors excited to join the Fairfax team.

Yet Amanda’s sexiness presented a kind of paradox. The chief activity of the sperm bank—its entire purpose—is masturbation. But my interview with Amanda was actually designed to desexualize what I would be doing. The goal of the interview seemed to be to eliminate the embarrassment that men feel about masturbation by replacing it with tedium. After the endless review of my application, Amanda walked me step by countless step through the qualification process—if my sperm count was above such-and-such a number, I would make the next round. There would be blood tests for gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis, and lots of scary diseases I had never heard of. They would give me a renal ultrasound. My sperm would again be counted, frozen, thawed, and recounted. Its motility—how well it swims—would be tested and retested. Only then would I finally be admitted as a donor—and even that was contingent on passing regular blood tests. Amanda then listed what I would be required to supply to the bank if I qualified: baby photos, an audio CD about myself, essays on such topics as “What is your most memorable childhood experience?” and “What is the funniest thing that ever happened to you?”

After that, Amanda held forth enthusiastically and at great length about money. “You will get paid $50 per usable specimen, for starters. Then you will get $5 for every vial from the specimen. The average is ten to fourteen vials per specimen. When a vial is released from quarantine after six months, you will get another $5. So the average payment is $209 per deposit.” She paused. “Now, this is ordinary income, but we don’t do withholding. We send checks twice a month, but later we will just give you a check every six months. We will send you a 1099 form at the end of the year.”

Amanda had managed to take a mysterious and sexual and profound process and make it sound exactly like . . . a job. I considered asking her about the 401(k) and dental benefits.

Finally, it was time for the money shot. She led me next door to the lab, where three women in lab coats were chatting about their weekends while gazing at sperm samples under microscopes. They ignored me. When I became a regular donor, Amanda said, I would come straight to the lab to collect a sterile cup and a labeling sticker. She handed me a cup. Amanda pointed to a small incubator—a warm metal box—where I would put the “specimen” when I was done. Next to the incubator was a pile of plastic sachets; they looked like the mustard packets you get with a deli sandwich. “That’s KY jelly,” she said. “It’s nontoxic for sperm. Still, just try not to get it, you know, on the sample.”

Amanda escorted me back down the hall to a donor room. Fairfax has two of these—sometimes known in the trade as “blue rooms” or “masturbatoriums.” The room was really no more than a large closet. A dingy beige love seat was pushed against the far wall. An erotic print hung on the wall above the sofa. It was a painting of a woman from behind; she was wearing some diaphanous lingerie. It was pretty sexy, to be honest. On another wall were a clock, a sink, and a cabinet. Amanda handed me a pen and told me to write the time of ejaculation on the cup when I was done. She turned on the taps and instructed, “Wash your hands with this antibacterial soap, and dry them well. Water is toxic for semen.”

“Here’s the exhaust fan.” She flipped a switch by the door, and a buzzing noise covered the room. She opened the cabinet again. “And here are the magazines.” She handed me a stack of High Societys, Gallerys, and Playboys, all, shall we say, well thumbed. “Fairfax Cryobank” was scrawled on the cover of each of the porno mags. Amanda, who did this routine several times a day, seemed unfazed. It was just a commercial transaction for her. I pretended I was unfazed, too.

She gave me the phone number for the chief lab technician and told me to call the next day to find out whether I had a high enough sperm count and whether my guys had survived freezing and thawing. “Now, of one hundred men who apply,” she said reassuringly, “we only interview twenty or thirty. And the vast majority of those—even men who have their own children already—end up being disqualified by sperm count. So don’t feel bad if you don’t make it.” She thanked me for coming in. She flashed me one more gleaming, sexy smile, closed the door, and locked it from the outside.

The next few minutes passed as you would expect and are none of your business.

When I was done, I walked my cup down the hall to the incubator. I tried to catch the eye of one of the technicians, to ask if I could take a sperm paperweight as a souvenir. None of them looked at me.

The next morning, I called the chief lab technician. “I was about to call you,” she said. “I have some good news. You passed the freezing and thawing. We want to make arrangements for your second trial specimen—that is, if you are still interested.”

I flushed. I couldn’t resist asking “So what were my numbers? What was the count?”

“Your count was about 105 million per milliliter. The usual is around fifty to sixty million. So you are well above average.”

I grinned—105 million! I considered breaking my promise to Hanna, and continuing as a donor. I was, after all, “well above average.” I started to make an appointment for my second deposit, then thought better of it. Hanna was right: Who knew what they were doing with my sperm? The longer I kept up the charade, the greater the possibility that my sperm would end up in the wrong hands (or wrong uterus). So I told the tech I needed to check my schedule and would call back. I didn’t call back. She phoned me again a few days later and left a vague message. I didn’t return it.

I was not much closer to wanting to be a donor than I had been before I started, but I was closer to understanding why someone else might want to do it. In the abstract, donating sperm had seemed fundamentally silly. But actually doing it was seductive. I had been accepted by the ultraexclusive Fairfax Cryobank! My sperm was “well above average”! My count was 105 million! What’s yours, George Clooney? Amanda, lovely Amanda, had asked for my help. The women of America—barren, desolate, desperate—needed me. They yearned for my B-positive, brown-eyed, six-foot-one-inch, HIV-negative, drug-free, heart-attack-prone, only slightly mentally ill sperm. And what kind of selfish monster was I to deny it to them?

From the vantage point of today’s fertility-crazed America, where people talk about their fertility specialists the way they used to talk about their plumbers, where every woman is either making a baby through in vitro fertilization, donating an egg so someone else can, carrying a surrogate baby for her daughter or mother or rich neighbor, or seeking to adopt her lesbian partner’s hormone-spawned sperm-bank triplets, where getting pregnant the old-fashioned way seems not merely old-fashioned but slightly foolish, it can be hard to remember that infertility used to be a badge of shame, that the only fertility choice women used to have was “Blue eyes for the donor or brown?” and that they were supposed to be grateful even for that. The most important thing—and arguably the best thing—Robert Graham’s genius sperm bank did was to transform how Americans thought about making babies.

Today, sperm banking is a business with “customers” instead of “patients,” marketing plans instead of doctor’s orders, professional donors instead of Johnny-on-the-spot medical students. None of this was true when Robert Graham started the Repository. Sperm banking—and American fertility in general—experienced a revolution, and Robert Graham was a most unlikely Thomas Jefferson.

To understand how sperm banks got the way they are today, you have to start with a very short article in the April 1909 issue of the journal Medical World. The article was titled “Artificial Impregnation.” The author was an obscure Minnesota doctor named Addison Davis Hard.

Hard wrote that twenty-five years earlier, he had witnessed a medical procedure so bizarre and so shocking that everyone who knew about it had taken an oath never to reveal what they saw. But the time had come, Hard said, for him to break the oath. In 1884, Hard continued, he had been a student of Dr. William Pancoast at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Pancoast was a professor of surgery, a former Civil War doctor who was just wrapping up a fine though unremarkable academic career. A wealthy Philadelphia businessman consulted Pancoast to learn why his wife wasn’t getting pregnant. Pancoast examined the wife thoroughly—it being the nineteenth-century (and twentieth-century, and twenty-first-century) assumption that if something was wrong it must be the woman’s fault—and found nothing amiss. The husband, too, showed no obvious “physical defect,” but Pancoast collected a semen sample just in case. He plugged it under the microscope: there were no sperm at all. Pancoast diagnosed the husband’s sterility as the result of a youthful bout of gonorrhea. Pancoast was confident he could treat the problem and restore the husband’s fertility. But when the businessman and his wife returned to Sansom Street Hospital two months later for the follow-up appointment, there was no change in the husband’s condition. Pancoast told his students that the merchant was a lost cause: his seminal ducts were permanently blocked.

But then, eureka! According to Hard’s account, “A joking remark by one of the class, ‘The only solution of this problem is to call in the hired man,’ was the probable incentive to the plan of action which followed.”

Pancoast, without telling the husband or wife what he was going to do, knocked the woman unconscious with chloroform. The six students decided who was the “best-looking” man in the class, and the winner obligingly provided a sperm sample. Pancoast placed the semen in a hard rubber syringe and squeezed it into the unconscious woman’s uterus. She woke up none the wiser. Later, Pancoast did deign to explain the insemination to the husband, who was “delighted with the idea,” Hard reported. The husband and Pancoast then conspired to keep the secret from the wife, who soon found herself happily pregnant. This was the first recorded use of a sperm donor and probably the first use of a sperm donor, period.

In due course, a son was born. Remarkably, Hard said, he looked very like “the willing but impossible father.” The boy, Hard added from the perspective of 1909, “is now a business man of the city of New York, and I have shaken hands with him within the past year.” (Why would Hard, a Minnesota doctor, have any reason to meet a young New York businessman? As A. T. Gregoire and Robert C. Mayer speculated sixty years later, Hard had no reason—unless of course he was that “best-looking member of the class,” and thus the boy’s father.)

Hard wrote that he was breaking his secrecy vow because Pancoast was dead and because he himself had concluded that donor insemination was a wonderful idea—a necessary eugenic remedy for a troubled nation. Too many men were secretly infected with gonorrhea, so babies needed protection from the “satanic germs” of their fathers. “Artificial impregnation” was the remedy. (“Go ask the blind children whose eyes were saturated with gonorrheal pus as they struggled thru the birth canal to emerge into this world of darkness to endure a living death; ask them” if they object to artificial impregnation, he wrote.)

It wouldn’t matter which man supplied the seed, Hard concluded with the certainty of true ignorance, because the child was shaped entirely by the mother. The father made no contribution at all: “It may at first shock the delicate sensibilities of the sentimental who consider that the source of the seed indicated the true father, but when the scientific fact becomes known that the origin of the spermatozoa which generates the ovum is of no more importance than the personality of the finger which pulls the trigger of a gun, then objections will lose their forcefulness, and artificial impregnation will become recognized as a race-uplifting procedure.”

I linger on the first donor insemination because it so perfectly prefigured the whole sorry history of sperm donation. From day one—from ejaculation one in Sansom Street Hospital in 1884—sperm donation has been characterized by its abundance of secrecy, embarrassment, deception, and ignorance. Hard’s article encapsulated the business to come, all themes struck: the authoritarian fertility doctor making it up as he went along and issuing awesome decisions casually (“Call in the hired man”) . . . the wife ignorant and unconscious, literally a mere vessel . . . the husband a coconspirator, lying to protect his own ego . . . the careless medical student, donating sperm without a thought to the consequences . . . the self-justifying scientific hoo-hah masquerading as empirical fact.

Artificial insemination is an elementary medical procedure—you can do it competently in your own home, after a few minutes’ training—so why wasn’t it practiced regularly until the twentieth century? One reason is that it took a long time for people to understand what sperm was or why it mattered, as Gina Maranto explains in Quest for Perfection. Until the seventeenth century, Maranto says, the male and female reproductive capacities were black boxes. Scientists knew about semen (obviously), but they couldn’t figure out what the milky fluid had to do with reproduction. Some hypothesized that male semen mixed with a “female semen” in the uterus to form a child. Others guessed that semen fertilized menstrual blood. Finally, in 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch inventor of the microscope, spotted sperm cells swimming in seminal fluid.

At first, sperm only confused matters. Another Dutch microscopist, Nicolaus Hartsoeker, speculated that a perfectly formed human being was curled inside the head of each sperm cell. These tiny men were dubbed “homunculi,” and they became the foundation of a bizarre theory called “spermism.” Spermism was a variation of the already popular notion of “preformation,” which held that fully formed people already existed, microscopically, in their parents. Taken to its logical conclusion, preformation said that if your teeny son is housed in you, then your even teenier grandson is housed in him, and so on for N generations, till the end of time. We were God’s own Russian nesting dolls. Until Hartsoeker, most preformationists had been matriarchal; these “ovists” believed that God had deposited us in the maternal eggs. (Therefore, Eve had held all of mankind to come, like some gigantic warehouse.) The homunculus flipped the attention to men, contending that humans came from sperm, and women were merely pots to plant in. The spermists and the ovists bickered for 150 years until they were both proven wrong. In the late eighteenth century, the Italian Lazzaro Spallanzani, performing what may have been the first artificial inseminations, showed that frogs and dogs couldn’t get pregnant without contributions from both males and females. Then, in 1827, the mammalian egg was finally discovered. In the nineteenth century, European scientists ran experiments on animals, tinkering with sperm and eggs, eggs and sperm, and concluded, at long last, that each was useless without the other.

Meanwhile, doctors facing the practical problem of infertility wondered how to use sperm to help their patients. In the 1770s, the celebrated London physician John Hunter (my father is named after him, incidentally) arranged the first human artificial insemination. Hunter’s patient suffered a penis defect that made it impossible for him to impregnate his wife, but he was still able to ejaculate. Hunter gave the man a syringe, told him to masturbate into the syringe’s barrel, and then inject the semen into his wife’s vagina. It worked. In the mid-nineteenth century, famed New York gynecologist J. Marion Sims used Hunter’s method—along with some very painful surgery—to impregnate women suffering from “hyperesthetic” vaginas with their husbands’ sperm. (The women supposedly had vaginas formed in such a way that they couldn’t have intercourse with their husbands. “Hyperesthetic” is Greek for “Not tonight, dear.”) Sims called his technique “ethereal copulation.” The success rate was low—less than 5 percent of the women got pregnant, probably because menstrual cycles were poorly understood. Condemnation was emphatic. The Catholic Church denounced artificial insemination: be fruitful and multiply, yes, but not this way.

Hard’s 1909 Medical World article was the first public hint that the new technique of artificial insemination could exclude the husband from reproduction. If artificial insemination using a husband’s sperm was morally questionable, artificial insemination by donor (AID, as it came to be known) was anathema. Doctors were outraged by the mere thought of it. Some, with a striking ignorance of human physiology, insisted that what Hard described occurring at Sansom Street Hospital was literally impossible: a woman simply could not get pregnant in this way—certainly not without her husband’s contribution. Others said that it was so immoral that it could not have happened. A doctor as noble as Pancoast would have been incapable of such a monstrous act.

But, immoral or not, AID was real, and it was useful, because it was the first effective fertility treatment. AID established the moral arc that all fertility treatments since—egg donation, in vitro fertilization, sex selection, surrogacy—have followed.

First, Denial: This is physically impossible.

Then Revulsion: This is an outrage against God and nature.

Then Silent Tolerance: You can do it, but please don’t talk about it.

Finally, Popular Embrace: Do it, talk about it, brag about it. You are having test-tube triplets carried by a surrogate? So am I!

With AID, as with the subsequent fertility treatments, three potent forces combined to overwhelm the initial disapproval. First, the distress of the husbands and wives, who would risk anything to have a baby; second, the enthusiasm of doctors to try something new (and profit from it); and third, doctors’ constitutional belief that they, not a backward society, should decide how their patients were treated.

After Hard’s article, AID slowly progressed from the denial phase to revulsion. Then, in the 1930s, revulsion began to give way to silent tolerance. In 1934, Dr. Hermann Rohleder wrote Test Tube Babies, a history of artificial insemination and description of his AI techniques. He initially asserted that the only suitable purpose of artificial insemination was impregnating a wife with her husband’s sperm and that donor insemination was outrageous: “What husband or wife, no matter how intense their longing for an heir, will consent to an injection of strange semen? Thank God that most people still have that much tact, decency, and moral feeling.” Yet just a few pages later, writing as a doctor rather than a moralist, Rohleder conceded that he would impregnate a woman with a stranger’s semen, under the right circumstances—if the husband was so desperate that suicide or divorce was a possibility, if the donor was healthy and unmarried, if the wife consented.

Rohleder’s pragmatism would triumph, and silent tolerance followed for fifty years. The use of sperm donors spread slowly but steadily in the United States and Great Britain, the two pioneering countries. Starting in the 1930s, British doctor Margaret Jackson began discreetly providing freshly donated sperm to patients. Donor insemination took off in the United States after the War. In the Eisenhower era, doctors in the big cities began performing AID regularly. They collected sperm from colleagues, from medical students, and, dismayingly often, from themselves. By 1960, American doctors were creating 5,000 to 7,000 babies a year by donor insemination, up from essentially none a decade earlier.

AID was the only fertility treatment that actually worked, and parents were grateful for it. Still, it remained a secret and shameful ordeal. Most patients went to one doctor to get sperm, then another for the pregnancy and delivery, so that the doctor delivering the baby never knew that the father wasn’t the biological father. Some doctors mixed sperm from the donor with the non-performing sperm of the father, so that the dad could pretend that his sperm had actually done the job. Doctors practicing AID usually kept no records at all, so there could be no chance of anyone finding out the truth. Doctors routinely signed false birth certificates, asserting that the sterile dad was the real one. The law encouraged such perjury: AID was technically adultery (still a crime in many states), and thus any child of AID was illegitimate.

In this first generation of AID, doctors tyrannized their patients. When a red-faced couple appeared at the office, mumbling about infertility, the doctor told them he would take care of everything. Mothers were discouraged from asking questions about the donor. The doctor did a little poking around for a suitable donor—often the closest medical student at hand. The doctor would make sure the donor was the right skin color—white patients got white donors. If the doctor was feeling benevolent, he would also try to match the eye color of the father. (Oddly, another trait that doctors sometimes tried to match was religion, as though it had some genetic component.)

If the pregnancy took, doctors instructed parents—and husbands redoubled the instructions to their wives—that they were not to tell the child anything. They must pretend to everyone that little Jill was Daddy’s girl, no matter how different father and daughter might look. The parents were told not to discuss it between themselves. They were even advised not to think about it. Fathers were ordered to behave toward the donor children exactly as they would behave toward their own biological children—advice that, not surprisingly, proved sadly impossible to follow.

This repression took its toll on families. Barry Stevens, conceived from AID more than fifty years ago, made a wonderful documentary, Offspring, about his search for his donor father. Stevens included clips of his own home movies, which show him, his mom, and his sister walking happily together and his sad-eyed dad trailing ten feet behind. His father, Stevens said in the movie, was always the family shadow—separate and unequal. The genetic disparity—mother connected by blood, father not—brought many DI kids closer to their mothers and drove fathers away. Most DI children never discover that their dad is not their dad. But those who do are rarely surprised; they always felt something wasn’t right.

When I started writing about the Nobel sperm bank, my inbox clogged with e-mails from kids of the first big wave of AID. Now in their forties and fifties, many were sad and bitter. They told me the same story: Dad wasn’t like a real dad. When Dad died, Mom finally spilled the secret. Now I want to find my donor dad. Their searches for their dads always fail. They just hit dead ends. They find that the doctor who inseminated their mom is dead. So are the nurses. The records have vanished or never existed. When they asked me for help, I always disappointed them. The best I could suggest was to advertise in the alumni magazine of the medical school where their mom got treated, because the donor might have been a student. But that has never worked either, as far as I have heard.

As AID became more common in the fifties, it started to poke its head out into the open, and society struggled with whether to welcome it or chase it back into its hole. Chasing was the first response. In the early fifties, a British parliamentary commission proposed criminalizing AID. The pope declared it a sin and recommended prison for doctors who performed it. In 1954, an Illinois state court ruled that AID—even with the husband’s consent—was “contrary to public policy and good morals and constituted adultery on the mother’s part.” Thus, any DI child was illegitimate. (A 1959 British movie, A Question of Adultery, hinged on whether donor insemination counted as cheating on your husband.) But public policy gradually caught up with popular behavior. As American society loosened in the 1960s, attitudes toward sperm changed, too. In 1964, Georgia became the first state to legitimize DI kids. In 1968, the California Supreme Court held that a father who consented to AID for his wife couldn’t later duck his paternal responsibility: he had become the child’s legal father by signing his name to the AID contract. It did not matter that he had contributed no DNA. “Since there is no ‘natural father,’ we can only look for a lawful father,” the court wrote. In 1973, the American Bar Association approved the Uniform Parentage Act, a model state law confirming that a husband is the legal father of a child conceived with AID.

New science also encouraged the spread of AID. In the first generation of AID, physicians relied on fresh semen, collected moments before from convenient interns and medical students. In 1949, a British researcher accidentally discovered that sperm frozen with glycerol could survive freezing and thawing. In the 1950s and ’60s, American cryobiologists perfected the freezing process. They mixed the fresh sperm with a solution of glycerol, salt water, and egg yolk, then gradually cooled it down to minus 196 degrees centigrade in liquid nitrogen.

Fresh sperm had advantages: it was easy to handle, and it was very potent: women got pregnant from it pretty easily. But frozen sperm could be shipped. Even more important, frozen sperm meant you didn’t have to rely on whatever donor was handy. Instead, you could stockpile the seed of all different kinds of men. You could have a bank.

Frozen sperm enabled AID to become a business. In the early 1970s, a few companies in big cities began collecting and freezing sperm in bulk and selling it to doctors who didn’t want to wrangle donors themselves. From the start, sperm banking was a cowboy industry. The federal government didn’t regulate it; neither did states. Anyone could open a sperm bank and usually did. Sperm banks were started not only by doctors but also by technicians, salesmen, and activists. Robert Graham—who called himself Dr. Graham—was an optometrist, as much a “doctor” and as much a fertility expert as I am. In most states, nothing stopped you from opening Fred’s Sperm Bank and Delicatessen.* ²

Amateurs went into sperm banking in part because banking and donor insemination were so easy. To open a bank, you needed a minimally equipped lab and some liquid-nitrogen tanks. And it was just as simple for customers. Doctors, trying to preserve their monopoly on insemination, had fostered the myth that AI was a complex procedure that only trained medical professionals could perform. In fact, it was a cinch. Anyone could do an insemination with a little training. You thawed the sperm, put it in a syringe attached to a “tomcat” catheter, threaded the catheter deep into the vagina (in some cases all the way into the uterus), and injected. Do-it-yourself inseminations—resulting in what were nicknamed “turkey baster babies”—had a brief vogue among feminists in the 1970s and ’80s. Adrienne Ramm, the mother of three kids from the Nobel sperm bank, was inseminated by her husband at home. She said, “It was very important for us to make it a ritual at home, very important not to go to a doctor’s office. It was a very mystical experience for my husband to plant that seed.” (The Nobel sperm bank used to teach its clients the procedure. If a customer visited the Repository in Escondido, one of Graham’s assistants might give her an impromptu lesson, right in the office, using a mirror and a few handy instruments—a Pederson vaginal speculum, a Makler insemination cannula, and a syringe. “So many women would tell me, ‘That’s the first time I have ever really seen myself,’ ” said Julianna McKillop, who directed the bank in the mid-1980s.)

Frozen sperm finally supplanted fresh sperm with the advent of AIDS. Some doctors who used fresh semen had collected from infected men; at least one woman contracted HIV from donor sperm. In the age of AIDS, the greatest advantage of frozen sperm turned out to be the delay it permitted between donation and insemination. Banks could test the donor when he gave the sample, store it for six months, then test the donor again to make sure he was still disease-free, thus ensuring that the frozen sperm was clean.

But even AIDS didn’t prompt the government to pay attention to sperm banks. There were compelling political reasons why neither party wanted to start regulating fertility medicine. Lefties didn’t want to tamper with sperm banking and fertility, because that would imply a government right to control what women could do with their own bodies. Abortion rights advocates feared that precedent. And the Right tended to ignore sperm banking and fertility because, although they were medicine, they looked like commerce. The free market was providing services that women wanted: Why mess it up?

In 1987 and 1988, at the urging of then-senator Albert Gore, the Office of Technology Assessment surveyed the American sperm industry—the only time then or since that the government has studied it. According to OTA’s count, there were hundreds of sperm banks and more than 11,000 doctors performing inseminations. OTA estimated that 30,000 children per year were being born from anonymous donor sperm—which suggests that by now, there are about 1 million AID kids in the United States alone. OTA also found that only half of doctors kept any records of donor inseminations; and 2 percent of doctors admitted to having inseminated patients with their own semen.

Doctors could get away with inseminating patients with their own sperm, because fertility was still a field characterized by domineering physicians and timid patients. This became glaringly obvious in the “Sperminator” case of the late 1980s. Federal prosecutors indicted Dr. Cecil Jacobson of northern Virginia, aka “The Sperminator,” on dozens of counts of fraud. Jacobson, one of the leading fertility specialists in the United States, was wildly popular with patients. But it turned out that he was giving infertile patients hormone therapy that made them register false positives on pregnancy tests. The women got their hopes up, only to discover they weren’t really pregnant. He gave some women as many as ten false pregnancies. That was bad enough, but what really appalled the public was something else: Jacobson had also promised patients he would find them sperm donors who matched the characteristics they sought. Instead of doing that, he had simply inseminated them with his own sperm. Jacobson had fathered as many as seventy-five children this way. Patients were so awed by Jacobson that they didn’t realize he was scamming them. (He was the very model of the authoritarian fertility doctor, prone to saying such endearing things as “God doesn’t give you babies; I do.”) Perhaps the most amazing fact about the Jacobson case was that inseminating seventy-five women with your own semen wasn’t even a crime. In 1992, Jacobson was convicted on fifty-two counts, but self-propagation was not one of them. He surrendered his medical license and was sentenced to five years in prison. The fate of his children, whose identities were protected by the court, remains unknown.

The Sperminator case sparked enough interest in regulating sperm that the feds finally acted. In 1993, the Food and Drug Administration finally drafted regulations for sperm banks, requiring them to register with the FDA and screen donors for risk factors. But the first of those regulations did not take effect until 2004—eleven years later. Some of the regulations are still not in effect.

Robert Graham strolled into the world of dictatorial doctors and cowed patients and accidentally launched a revolution. The difference between Robert Graham and everyone else doing sperm banking in 1980 was that Robert Graham had built a $70 million company. He had sold eyeglasses, store to store. He had developed marketing plans, written ad copy, closed deals. So when he opened the Nobel Prize sperm bank in 1980, he listened to his customers. All he wanted to do was propagate genius. But he knew that his grand experiment would flop unless women wanted to shop with him. What made people buy at the supermarket? Brand names. Appealing advertising. Endorsements. What would make women buy at the sperm market? The very same things.

So Graham did what no one in the business had ever done: he marketed his men. Graham’s catalog did for sperm what Sears, Roebuck did for housewares. His Repository catalog was very spare—just a few photocopied sheets and a cover page—but it thrilled his customers. Women who saw it realized, for the first time, that they had a genuine choice. Graham couldn’t guarantee his product, of course, but he came close: he vouched that all donors were “men of outstanding accomplishment, fine appearance, sound health, and exceptional freedom from genetic impairment.” (Graham put his men through so much testing and paperwork that it annoyed them: Nobel Prize winner Kary Mullis said he had rejected Graham’s invitation because he’d thought that by the time he was done with the red tape, he wouldn’t have any energy left to masturbate.)

It wasn’t just that Graham offered choices, it was that he offered the best—the Godiva of sperm, prime cuts of American man. In Graham’s catalog copy, the men were irresistible. He made them sound like men you could imagine talking to, men you could imagine taking a class from, and—above all—men you could imagine seducing. The physical descriptions included perfect, enticing details: “rosy cheeked, beautiful teeth.” A donor’s personality wasn’t merely “happy,” it was “happy and radiant.” One of Graham’s slyest marketing techniques was to scrawl handwritten comments on a catalog page—like throwing in the rustproofing for free: “Almost a superman!” he wrote on one.

Thanks to its attentiveness to consumers, the Repository upended the hierarchy of the fertility industry. Before the Repository, fertility doctors had ordered, women had accepted. Graham cut the doctors out of the loop and sold directly to the consumer. Graham disapproved of the women’s movement and even banned unmarried women from using his bank, yet he became an inadvertent feminist pioneer. Women were entranced. Mother after mother said the same thing to me: she had picked the Repository because it was the only place that let her select what she wanted.

Where Graham went, other sperm banks—and the rest of the fertility industry—followed. California Cryobank, Xytex, Fairfax Cryobank, and the other major sperm banks started expanding their donor descriptions from a few lines to dozens of pages and recruiting the most gifted men they could find. Today, American sperm banks are heirs of the Repository for Germinal Choice, though they don’t like to acknowledge its influence. To see the world Graham helped make, I paid a visit to Steve Broder at the California Cryobank, probably the world’s leading sperm bank. Broder is a founding father of modern sperm banking. He was the technician who helped Graham collect sperm from Nobel Prize winners in the late 1970s. Later, he went on to cofound California Cryobank, where he was director of quality assurance. Broder was tall and lean. He was fiftyish and young-looking, except for gray hair brushed up in a style oddly reminiscent of Robert Graham’s. Broder seemed good-natured but exacting, a characteristic you’d hope to find in a sperm bank’s director of quality assurance.

Unlike most other sperm bankers, Broder acknowledges his debt to Graham. When the Nobel sperm bank opened in 1980, Broder said, it changed everything. “At the time, the California Cryobank had one line about a donor: height, weight, eye color, blood typing, ethnic group, college major. But when we saw what Graham was doing, how much information about the donor he put on a single page, we decided to do the same.”

Other sperm banks, recognizing that they were in a consumer business, were soon publicizing their ultrahigh safety standards, rigorous testing of donors, and choice, choice, choice. This is the model that guides all sperm banks today.

Broder gave me a tour through California Cryobank, a low-slung redbrick building right next to the UCLA campus in Westwood. It also has offices in Palo Alto, right by Stanford, and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, within walking distance from MIT and Harvard. The locations are conscious strategy. California Cryobank realized that women wanted smart donors, so it went where the smartest boys were. Broder guided me through the back offices, past the five masturbatoriums. The door to one opened, and a slouchy, goateed twenty-year-old emerged holding a little cup.

We stopped at the lab, where the equipment and methods remained much the same as twenty years ago, Broder said. A white-coated technician invited me over to look into his microscope. He was counting sperm. His viewing field was divided up into a grid of squares. Each time he saw a spermatozoon in one of the squares, he clicked a counter. If he registered seventy-five live sperm in ten squares, the sample passed. That translated into a somewhat-above-average sperm count.

After the count, the techs mixed in cryoprotectant, the same formula of egg yolk, salt solution, and glycerol that’s been used for decades. The sample was also processed to remove white blood cells, damaged sperm, and other material in semen that might interfere with insemination. Eventually, the mixture was pipetted into vials, each containing at least 10 million motile sperm. One ejaculation produced anywhere from three to thirty vials. The vials were threaded into metal straws and eventually transferred to the bank’s liquid-nitrogen storage tanks, each of which holds 20,000 shots. More than six months later, the vials would be sold for $275 each. California Cryobank, like other major banks, uses only sperm collected on-site. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the American Association of Tissue Banks—the two trade groups that monitor sperm banks—strongly discourage allowing donors to collect and process their sperm at home. Processing the sperm in a lab improves its quality and ensures a reliable chain of custody. The bank can be sure the sperm came from the proper donor. (The Repository had permitted its donors to process their own sperm at home.* ³)

As the tech explained the storage process to me, a minidrama played out at the front desk. The slouchy, goateed donor was annoyed. The receptionist—a pretty young woman, natch—was gently admonishing him that his new sample didn’t make the grade and that maybe he should try abstaining longer. “Well, do I get paid anyway?” Slouchy asked. “We can’t pay you for a sample we can’t use,” she replied. “But I can give you free movie passes.” She handed him a pair of tickets. The exchange felt like something out of a surrealist movie: Your masturbation is a failure. Here, have some movie tickets.

The consumer revolution in fertility has made the banks’ job incredibly difficult. Imagine how picky you are when you shop for a CD player. Now suppose you expected the CD player to last eighty-seven years, occupy its own room in your house, get married, have children, and take care of you in your old age. You’d be pretty choosy, too. Sperm banks have to cater to that finickiness, or they fail. At the major banks, the attentiveness to consumer demand has reached extraordinary levels. Broder showed me how a prospective mom might shop for Donor Right at California Cryobank. He began by handing me the basic catalog, a three-page listing of all the current donors. The catalog is also online, which is where most customers view it. With two hundred–plus men available, California Cryobank probably has the world’s largest selection. It dwarfs the Repository, which never had more than a dozen donors at once. California Cryobank produces more pregnancies in a single month than the Repository did in nineteen years. Other sperm banks range from 150-plus donors to only half a dozen.

In the basic catalog, donors are coded by ethnicity, blood type, hair color and texture, eye color, and college major or occupation. Searching for an Armenian international businessman? How about Mr. 3291? Or an Italian-French filmmaker, your own little Truffaullini? Try Mr. 5269.

But the basic catalog is just a start. For $12, you can see the “long profile” of any donor—his twenty-six-page handwritten application. Fifteen bucks more gets you the results of a psychological test called the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. Another $25 buys a baby photo. Yet another $25, and you can listen to an audio interview. Still more, and you can read the notes that Cryobank staff members took when they met the donor. For $50, a bank employee will even select the donor who looks most like your husband.

To get a sense of what this man-shopping feels like, I asked Broder if I could see a complete donor package. Broder gave me the entire folder for Donor 3498. I began with the baby photo. In it, 3498 was dark blond and cute, arms flung open to the world. At the bottom, where a parent would write, “Jimmy at his second birthday party,” the Cryobank had printed, “3498.” I leafed through 3498’s handwritten application. His writing was fast and messy. He was twenty-six years old, of Spanish and English descent. His eyes were blue-gray, hair brown, blood B-positive. He was tall, of course. (California Cryobank rarely accepts anyone under five feet, nine inches tall.)

Donor 3498 had been a college philosophy major, with a 3.5 GPA, and he had earned a Master of Fine Arts graduate degree. He spoke basic Thai. “I was a national youth chess champion, and I have written a novel.” His favorite food was pasta. He worked as a freelance journalist (I wondered if I knew him). He said his favorite color was black, wryly adding, “which I am told is technically not a color.” He described himself as “highly self-motivated, obsessive about writing and learning and travel. . . . My greatest flaw is impatience.” His life goal was to become a famous novelist. His SAT scores were 1270, but he noted that he got that score when he was only twelve years old, the only time he took the test. He suffered from hay fever; his dad had high blood pressure. Otherwise, the family had no serious health problems. Both parents were lawyers. His mom was “assertive,” “controlling,” and “optimistic”; his dad was “assertive” and “easygoing.”

I checked 3498’s Keirsey Temperament Sorter. He was classified as an “idealist” and a “Champion.” Champions “see life as an exciting drama, pregnant with possibilities for both good and evil. . . . Fiercely individualistic, Champions strive toward a kind of personal authenticity. . . . Champions are positive exuberant people.”

I played 3498’s audio interview. He sounded serious, intense, extremely smart. I could hear that he clicked his lips together before every sentence. He clearly loved his sister—“a pretty amazing, vivacious woman”—but didn’t think much of his younger brother, whom he dismissed as “less serious.” He did indeed seem to be an idealist: “I’d like to be involved in the establishment of an alternative living community, one that is agriculturally oriented.”

By then I felt I knew 3498, and that was the point. I knew more about him than I had known about most girls I dated in high school and college. I knew more about his health than I knew about my wife’s or even my own. Unfortunately, I didn’t really like him. His seriousness seemed oppressive: I disliked the way he put down his brother. He sounded rigid and chilly. If I were shopping for a husband, he wouldn’t be it, and if I were shopping for a sperm donor, he wouldn’t be it, either. And that was fine. I thought about it in economic terms: If I were a customer, I would have dropped only a hundred bucks on 3498, which is no more than a couple of cheap dates. I could go right back to the catalog and find someone better.

One of the implications of 3498’s huge file—one that banks themselves hate to admit—is that all sperm banks have become eugenic sperm banks. When the Nobel Prize sperm bank disappeared, it left no void, because other banks have become as elitist as it ever was. Once the customer, not the doctor, started picking the donor, banks had to raise their standards, providing the most desirable men possible and imposing the most stringent health requirements.

The consumer revolution also changed sperm banking in ways that Robert Graham would have grumbled about. Graham limited his customers to wives, but married couples have less need to resort to donor sperm these days. Vasectomies are often reversible, and a treatment called ICSI can harvest a single sperm cell from the testes and use it to fertilize an in vitro egg. Now even a man who is shooting blanks has the chance to father his own children. The treatments are expensive, but they are gradually reducing the demand for donor sperm among married couples.

That means that lesbians and single mothers increasingly drive sperm banking. They now make up 40 percent of the customers at California Cryobank and 75 percent at some other banks. Their prevalence is altering how sperm banks treat confidentiality. Lesbians and single mothers can’t deceive their children about their origins, so they don’t. They tell their kids the truth. As a result, they’re clamoring for ever more information about the donors to pass on to their kids. Increasingly, they are even demanding that sperm banks open their records so that children can learn the name of their donor. (Lesbians and single moms have also pioneered the practice of “known donors,” in which they recruit a sperm provider from among their friends. The known donor, so nice in theory, can be a legal nightmare: known donors, unlike anonymous donors, don’t automatically shed their paternal obligations. The state still considers them legal fathers. So mothers and donors have to write elaborate contracts to try to eliminate those rights.)

More and more married couples have also embraced the idea of openness. The old insistence on secrecy is out of fashion. Psychologists increasingly advise telling children about DI, lest the secret haunt and rend the family. (There is a small library of new books on how to tell children about their DI origins.)

This attitude change is prelude to a legal and legislative struggle. For decades, adoptees have been fighting a brutal, and sometimes successful, war to open adoption records. DI families are about to open a second front in that war. DI kids and moms argue that children have a basic genetic right to know their father’s identity. Several countries, including Great Britain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, have recently ended donor anonymity and established donor registries for sperm and egg donors. When DI kids turn eighteen, they will be allowed to check the registries and learn their biological dad or mother’s name. (The British registry starts this year, which means that the first kids who can search for their donors won’t come of age until 2023.)

The United States is a long way from having a national donor registry, but DI families are beginning to organize and lobby for one. In the meantime, American sperm bankers are carefully watching what happens with the “identity release” program at the Sperm Bank of California. Way back in 1983, that progressive sperm bank inaugurated a program in which certain donors agreed that their children could contact them when they turned eighteen. The first crop of children have just reached majority, and a handful of them have now introduced themselves to their dads. Because these reunions are proceeding without too much trauma, other, bigger sperm banks are considering their own identity release programs. (This is a classic Europe-U.S. split. In Great Britain and Sweden, the government has imposed national donor registries to end anonymity. In the U.S., private sperm banks are trying to jerry-rig their own solutions to forestall government intervention.)

Some children, mothers, and donors are also circumventing the banks’ anonymity policies on their own. The idea of using the Internet to connect sperm bank families has taken off in the past few years. Yahoo’s Donor Sibling Registry has become a central warehouse where mothers, kids, and donors can advertise for one another. The registry, which is searchable by bank, mushroomed from a few dozen entries in 2001 to more than three thousand in 2004. These DSR listings read like singles ads, except that the object is a father or sibling, not a girlfriend.

Hi my name is K—. I have blond hair and blue eyes. I’m looking for my father. He has blonde hair, green eyes and he is 5′9".

There have been more than six hundred matches on the DSR so far. Most of these involve very young half siblings who are being connected by their parents. There are very few cases of children and donors finding each other, in part because so few donors have posted on the site. (Donor White is one of those who has posted.) For most American sperm donors, donating was something they did when they were quite young in order to make money. Most didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the consequences of their action, because they didn’t think there would be any. They counted on anonymity to shield them forever.

As anonymity crumbles in Europe and on the Internet, the sperm bank industry, now all too responsive to consumer sentiment, is being caught in a squeeze: it wants to deliver the openness its customers want, but it fears that the quality and quantity of donors will plummet if banks accept only men who are willing to be identified. In the Netherlands, for example, the supply of donors has dried up since donor anonymity was abolished. The American industry must choose between conflicting notions of consumer choice: the desire for a known donor versus the desire for the best donor. Customers, of course, expect both: incredible donors who are willing to be identified.

The consumer revolution in sperm banking has one more dark side that banks and families don’t like to discuss. Once you start thinking of sperm as just another product, you start treating it like just another product. As long as customers consider AID to be a form of shopping, some of them will inevitably be disappointed. In America, the customer is always right. A customer who is unhappy with a DVD player can replace it. What about a customer who is unhappy with a child? Shopping for sperm looks like any other kind of commerce. There are products, marketing, competition. It’s tempting to think that with enough knowledge, you will get exactly the child you want, as you can buy exactly the car you want. But sperm banks do make mistakes. They sometimes send out the wrong sperm. Sometimes they miss something dire in a donor’s medical history.

More important, there is serendipity in DNA. A great donor can pass on a lousy set of genes. A recessive illness may be hiding somewhere, or just mediocrity. Women shop carefully for sperm in hopes of certainty. But there is no certainty in a baby. It does not come with a ten-year warranty. In sperm shopping, there is a deposit, but there are no returns, no refunds, no exchanges.