Don't start selling your sperm on a FB group without a good lawyer -- you may accidentally make yourself a legal guardian and be required to pay child support.<p>Don't start buying sperm without a good lawyer either. In some states, the sperm donor may legally request custody or visitation rights.<p>Family law is different in each state, making this a thorny issue. For example, Arizona's law states that a surrogate mother is the presumed mother of any baby she births. And if she's married to a man, her husband is the father. Making a contract that says otherwise in Arizona is not legally recognized. So... very few people choose surrogates in Arizona.
There are many aspects to sperm donation that hit a raw social/emotional/cultural/instinctual nerve.<p>— There is massive demand for sperm from desirable men but zero demand for undesirable men. There is only a shortage because clients are wholly uninterested in most sperm. This is a reminder of natural behaviors, but made more explicit when society used to soften the blow until now. If in the future, undesirable men have fewer and fewer occasions to reproduce, and are rejected more and more explicitly through increasingly online and impersonal services, this might probably lead to social unrest.<p>— The anxiety of not seeing your genes passed on. Even if you have an existentialist mindset, it can affect you on a fundamental level. I saw a comment on the NY Times section of a person saying their excellent genes might die with them. But isn't the possibility to reproduce the fundamental, inevitable benchmark for the worth of genes, by definition? It does invoke a strange impression that Isaac Newton not reproducing does imply a certain failure on an important criteria compared to a junkie having many children.<p>— From a Darwinian perspective, donating sperm to many different women but not having to expend any energy raising them is probably the ideal. Of course, from a cultural perspective it's frowned upon. Some of these donors are probably more genetically successful than many kings and conquerors of the past.<p>— The complex feelings successful donors experience as a result of all of this<p>— The clash of morality and Darwinian success. Most commenters on the Times noted the number of foster children awaiting care. But to me, that sounded completely tone deaf. The drive to reproduce is something so raw and fundamental that you'll have a hard time convincing people not to do it in exchange for fulfilling some vague moral appeal. Ironically, the ones who listen to this brand of morality and opt to raise another person's child will be rewarded by not passing on their genes. Conversely, adulterous people who employ to cuckoo tactic or parents who abandon their child for adoption are rewarded for it. Their personality and decision style passes on.
But... why? Why would you, in the middle of a pandemic, be emboldened to have a child? Did the financial situation of people wanting artificial insemination improve? Did it get harder to adopt? Are people loving their partners *more* thanks to the pandemic? Has seeing other people struggle being locked in with kids created a wish to personally replicate the same?<p>Very curious...
> A donor on Known Donor Registry told me that he used to donate to a big sperm bank but that it was too clinical and cold.<p>I can empathize with that. We did IVF, so I had to go through the same process a sperm donor goes through. It's quite clinical and not really very enjoyable.
We really are heading into some Brave New World situation, aren't we?<p>With that said, I recently used a sperm freezing service as I refuse to have children under the current circumstances (but wish to do so in the future) and this was always one of my concerns: that the business 'fails' and gets bought out by a large corp and my sample is just another asset on their balance sheet, so the vulture/disaster capitalism model is to take it as it assumes all liabilities and tries to recover its 'investment' and finds a certain Market need.<p>This pandemic baby model driven by low sperm access only proves why that would be a likely scenario after all, at the time I only had a very unsettling sense of unwarranted paranoia to back it up.<p>I'm not into online dating, as I need more bio-feedback than an online profile to even consider a woman as a possible partner, but hasn't the advent of tinder like apps pretty much made a 'Sperm donor' a SaaS?<p>> This is a net positive considering the US population is declining at an alarming rate.<p>I disagree, I think that growth should be curtailed far more this will allow us to implement a better system rather with a less messy transition than to breed only to throw more fodder into the pitfalls of our current casino, rent seeking, war addled, gig-economy mess of a system.<p>Anyone who has any experience living even remotely in that system often feels the same, hence why so many people even in developed countries with good jobs and partners opt for dogs instead of children these days.<p>I attribute it to the same reaction mechanisms you see with people in tech who work at Social media corps and do not allow their children to use the very same products they work on.
morality aside, the men who donate sperm will have an outsize influence on the genetic diversity of our species.<p>Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale.<p>also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time:<p>will humans still have a 50:50 gender ratio of men to women? seems like sperm donation facilitates a much lower number of men required to maintain populations.<p>will humans still desire relationships with the other gender, or will we be more like bears (men show up for 20 minutes, do the deed, then don't help raise the kids)?<p>lots of interesting implications to consider.