Letters to the Editor
Parson Jim
Published Letters: 566 Editor's Choice: 7
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Families and Kinship Groups Exist for a Reason
[Read the article: And baby makes two]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/the-god-of-sperm/17290/?page=1
“No one on the sperm-bank side wants to talk about it,” says Kramer, “but there are over 1 million donor children in the world, and I know of several cases where unknowing siblings have ended up going to college together and having the same groups of friends. The industry says accidental incest is a statistical impossibility, but from what I’ve seen, it’s only a matter of time.”
And indeed, Kirk Maxey told ABC News last year that most of the hundreds of families who allegedly used his sperm came from within a 150-mile radius of his location, prompting him to worry about incest when donors are allowed to remain anonymous.
This is a problem that has long cut to the heart of our fears. Sir James Frazer was the first to demonstrate the universality of the incest taboo, in his 1910 study Totem and Exogamy. But it was the famed anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who elevated the incest taboo from a basic component of our subconscious minds to the “fundamental step because of which, by which, but above all in which, the transition from nature to culture was accomplished.”
He called the incest taboo a deep structure, unvarying and ubiquitous. Simply, incest is bad for the gene pool. Sleep with your brothers and sisters, and pretty soon mutations arise. If that pattern of intimate relations with intimate relations continues for more than a few generations, pregnancy becomes impossible. The line dies out. Incest isn’t just a cultural taboo; it’s a biological taboo. More than that, Lévi-Strauss realized that the prohibition forces us to breed outside the nest, and this commingling of families provided society with its most basic building blocks.
To ensure that this basic building block is not violated, sperm banks have long maintained a policy of limiting the number of women who can receive the sperm of a single donor. Britain has legally set a limit at 10 women; Denmark at 25 women.
In the U.S., the American Association of Reproductive Medicine suggests that an individual man’s sperm produce no more than 25 children within an urban area with a population of around 800,000 — which in California would apply to San Francisco, with 799,263 people, and San Jose, with 944,857. In much smaller cities like Long Beach and Fresno (population 491,564 and 464,727, respectively), this halves the limit of recommended donor offspring to 12. Unfortunately, there is no hard data governing populations like those of the state’s two largest cities, Los Angeles, 4 million, and San Diego, 1.3 million, or governing California’s dozens of small towns and cities, so there’s no way to accurately represent the dangers.
Yet because of sperm-donor anonymity, buyers have no idea if they are among a concentrated group choosing the same donor. Moreover, there is no law backing up these guidelines, which are voluntary. Nobody knows how often these guidelines are violated by sperm banks. Nor is there anything in place that stops a man from donating at California Cryobank and then traveling a few miles down the freeway and making another donation at Pacific Reproductive Services in Pasadena.
Instead, the sperm banks police their own limits (California Cryogenics, for example, draws its line at 20), but there are dozens of examples of this safety measure being boldly ignored.
This happens for a variety of reasons. Only about 40 percent of the women who utilize a cryobank’s services report back with news of a live birth, and nobody knows how many of the remaining 60 percent of women end up having babies thanks to purchased sperm or eggs. So the numbers of resulting children that the banks estimate may be woefully shy of the truth. Plus, sperm banks don’t cap sperm sales from a single donor until those 20 live births are reported. And because certain — think blond-haired, blue-eyed — donors are extremely popular, the banks often sell the same man’s sperm to more than the guidelines’ recommended number at once.
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An anecdote about me, a slob of a woman
[Read the article: Are our husbands really so helpless?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No, you're not a slob if you are a woman. You must be a man.
But if you are a woman, your male partner can't complain about you, or else he's sexist.
But if you complain about him, be empowered!
Male-bashing = a fun time smashing the Patriarchy
Female-bashing = a sexist hate crime
No wonder the marriage rate is plummeting in America. Who wants to be nagged to death constantly from one's wife and see the same message on television, movies, the internet, etc.
Gormless blobs, indeed.
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Enslaved by the new divorce laws
[Read the article: Are our husbands really so helpless?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And now men are enslaved by new divorce laws, in civil court where due process is not to be found, and debtor's prison sentences are made with impunity.
Numerous men are slaving away supporting women who won't go out and earn a living, and who believe housekeeping is beneath them, because that is the message they see at every turn. and when those women grow tired of their "oppression", they can continue to be supported by the same men, with the courts providing enforcement of their monthly stipend.
Gormless and blobby, indeed.