Ethical Questions Surround Unregulated Sperm and Egg Donations

c. 2006 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly (UNDATED) Ryan Kramer was born 16 years ago, after his mother received donor sperm. “I had no idea where the sperm came from or anything about the donor,” said his mother, Wendy Kramer. “It was always kind of a mystery.” When Ryan was 2 years old, Kramer said, “he […]

c. 2006 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

(UNDATED) Ryan Kramer was born 16 years ago, after his mother received donor sperm.

“I had no idea where the sperm came from or anything about the donor,” said his mother, Wendy Kramer. “It was always kind of a mystery.”


When Ryan was 2 years old, Kramer said, “he came to me and said, `So, did my dad die or what?”’

The older Ryan got, the more curious he became.

“There was this whole other side of me that I really was unsure where it came from. You know, an interest in mathematics and science and things like that was never really strong in my maternal side of the family,” he said.

According to some estimates, there are 8 million infertile women in the U.S. While improvements in reproductive technology offer thousands of women and couples the chance to become parents, the field remains relatively unregulated _ and complicated ethical and moral questions abound.

Dr. Kirk Maxey of Ann Arbor, Mich., who donated sperm while he was in college and medical school, is one of the few sperm donors willing to be contacted by his biological children.

“I had direct contact with infertile patients sometimes at the university where I was a student,” Maxey said. “And I knew that was pretty devastating. I would say (sperm donation) was 50 percent altruism, 25 percent monetary and 25 percent some other motivation.”

Maxey said that while not all donors believe the children are theirs, he does. “For me, they’re my kids. They’re kids that I adopted out when they were single cells. That’s it.”

Maxey said he has had contact with one of the children who responded to his posting on the Donor Sibling Registry, and they have traded pictures. But he has no plans to meet her.

“I’m quite sensitive to the fact that I don’t have a right to intrude on her family, especially her social dad,” he said.


Lori Andrews, a law professor and ethicist at Chicago-Kent College of Law, said the legal issues surrounding sperm donation have not been thought through.

“Over half the states have laws that say the consenting husband _ if the woman is married _ is the father of the child and the donor is not the father,” Andrews said. “But there are still some states where that’s a legal vacuum.

“And those are states in which we tend to see a lot of secrecy because the sperm donor is afraid of being hit with a paternity suit if the child learns his identity,” she said.

While secrecy in sperm donation remains the norm, that is changing as more and more women use donor semen and tell their children how they came to be.

Andrews said both donors and children should have protection.

“I think it should be regulated for safety reasons, so that there’s adequate screening of the donors. I also think that the children and the couples should be able to get medical histories of the donor, genetic histories, and that that information should be updated as the donor goes through life.”

Regulation is also an issue on the other side of the reproductive technology debate _ egg donation, a $6 billion a year industry.


“What we have in the United States right now is pretty much an extreme market _ sort of a Wild West of reproduction where everything is for sale,” said Debora Spar, a Harvard University professor and author of “The Baby Business.”

“I think we have to ask ourselves some tough questions about the extent to which this does raise moral concerns,” she said.

Many countries restrict the donation of human eggs and some don’t allow it at all. But in the United States, the business is virtually unregulated.

Spar said that no matter how commercialized the baby business has become, there is still a religious dimension to the experience.

“Even people who aren’t religious and who see _ see reproduction as a fairly scientific or mechanistic process, at the end of this process, when they have the child, they do believe that God somehow played a role in this.

(A version of this story first appeared on the PBS program “Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.” This article may be reprinted by RNS clients. Please use the Religion & Ethics Newsweekly byline.)


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