2007 Virginia Bill Prohibiting Donor Anonymity Fails 6-1

An interesting Washington Post article about the only state bill to attempt to outlaw donor anonymity (the comments in caps are mine):

RICHMOND -- A Republican lawmaker is sponsoring General Assembly legislation that would make Virginia the first state to prohibit anonymous sperm donations.

Delegate Robert G. Marshall, a Christian conservative from Prince William County, is sponsoring the House bill.

Mr. Marshall also is the General Assembly's foremost author of legislation to curb abortion and regulate birth-control methods. He said he filed the bill to protect donor-conceived children and that he feels for those who don't know the identity of their father.

Mr. Marshall said he recently saw a child wearing a T-shirt with the words: "My dad's name is Donor," then thought, "That's pathetic."

Australia and a few European countries [U.K., NORWAY, SWEDEN AND AUSTRIA] have banned anonymous sperm donations. In each country, donations have dwindled and the cost of fertility services has increased.[THIS IS ARGUABLE. SEE MY POST: http://itsshawnvandorsblogwow.blogspot.com/2009/05/should-there-be-state-or-federal.html FOR LINKS TO ARTICLES DISPROVING THIS POINT IN THE U.K. AND SWEDISH MARKETS].

Opponents warn about the same result in Virginia.

Katrina Clark grew up knowing only that her father was tall, blond and a third-year college student somewhere in Northern Virginia when he donated sperm.

Miss Clark, now 18 and a Gallaudet University student, is trying to persuade lawmakers to support legislation banning anonymous sperm and egg donations, so others won't grow up with the same questions she had.

"I just felt like something had been stripped away from me," she said.

Mr. Marshall's bill also would require women donating eggs to sign a disclosure detailing all known risks involved, whether from ovulation-stimulation drugs or harvesting the egg. Virginia law already requires that patients be told about the success rates and donor health before being treated.

More than 15,000 successful egg donations in the United States in 2004 resulted in about 6,000 births, according to the latest data available. Sperm donations and births resulting from them are much more numerous and much more difficult to track. No trade groups, medical associations or government agencies track either the donations or the number of births attributed to donor sperm.

The industry wasn't fully commercialized until the 1970s, and laws regulating it focus on testing, storing and administering the donations. Only recently has the discussion turned to the ethical repercussions.

Miss Clark's mother, Janie Price, of Newport News, was 30 and single but didn't want to wait any longer for a child when in 1988 she opted for artificial insemination.

"I talked myself into believing that if I loved her enough, it would be OK," she said. "What I didn't consider is that one's genetic component is very much a part of her identity. Why else would we spend so much money as adults researching our genealogy?"

Miss Clark said she grew up not thinking she was any different from her friends. That changed when she was 15 and saw a show about a woman who died of a genetic heart disease that she had no idea she was at risk of developing because she had been adopted.

"That's when it really hit me for the first time that something was missing," she said.

Miss Clark said she started the search for her father because she wanted answers about her medical past, not because she wanted a father figure.

She was one of the few lucky ones, finding her father on an online message board weeks later. After a few weeks of telephone and e-mail conversations, a DNA test confirmed what they already knew: It was 99.9902 percent positive that he was her father.

Most sperm banks across the country now give donors the option of allowing their identities to be revealed to offspring once they turn 18.

William Jaeger, director of Fairfax Cyrobank, said that only 29 of the bank's 265 donors have agreed to have their identities revealed, which shows the chilling effect a mandatory-identity requirement would have on the industry.

"Legislation of this type would really create a hardship for families who need donor sperm to conceive a child," Mr. Jaeger said.

He also said sperm supplies have decreased so much in Britain since it passed such a law in April that some clinics have closed and others must import sperm.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine also opposes the legislation, saying it would increase the cost for families to get help conceiving.

"It is [now] relatively inexpensive to conceive through insemination of donor sperm," said Dr. Robert Brzyski, chairman of the ethics committee for the group, in Birmingham, Ala. "If donors become scarce because the anonymity is removed, then the cost of that will increase."

Sperm Banks Can Be Sued Under Product Liability Laws

In April, 2009, a New York Federal judge ruled that sperm banks can be sued under product liability laws for failing to detect a sperm donor's genetic defect. The case clears the way for a 13 year-old retarded girl from PA. to sue New York-based IDANT[1] for using sperm with a mutation known as “Fragile X”[2] which caused her to be born mentally retarded.

So, if human sperm is officially a product, what does that make the child born via donor insemination? In the future, will parents be able to return their children to the cryo bank if the child fails to meet their specifications, like, if the child’s not blonde enough or not proficient enough with the violin? When is that going to start happening?

In the absence of any significant federal or state regulation of the Cryo banking industry the threat of product liability lawsuit is a very good thing. But, consider this: this isn’t exactly like a consumer being sold a faulty product, who is injured and then seeks a claim; this is the faulty product itself suing the company that made it (in this case, a her). I don’t think this has happened before. Ever. Imagine a single Toyota Prius suing Toyota for assembling its breaks incorrectly!

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[1] Owned by the DAXOR CORPORATION. You’ve really got to see their website: http://www.idant.com/ All it needs is some ‘80s David Cronenberg-esque analogue synthesizer and they're all set. No but seriously. Who would buy human semen from a company called IDANT who proudly proclaims: owned by the DAXOR CORPORATION? Also, DAXOR agents are now hunting me.

[2] No, I’m not making this up.

Food and Drug Administration Regulates Sale of Semen

In 2005, the FDA began regulating the sale of semen within the United States (though regulating might be too strong a word - they basically institutionalized practices that had already become the norm within the cryo banking community). Cryo banks that don't comply with FDA regulations don't risk being shut down but are not allowed to say they're FDA approved, which in the highly competitive sperm-banking business, might mean losing a leg-up to a competitor.

This is relevant to all things donor insemination, of course, because as mild as the FDA's regulations might be, it's one of the few regulatory gestures made by the Federal government towards the medically assisted reproductive industry. For the most part, Federal and state governments have wanted to steer clear of any kind of regulation, intentionally leaving the details of the baby-making business in the (no doubt, benevolent) hands of the free market.

Here's the FDA's statement:

Human cells or tissue intended for implantation, transplantation, infusion, or transfer into a human recipient is regulated as a human cell, tissue, and cellular and tissue-based product or HCT/P. The Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) regulates HCT/Ps under 21 CFR Parts 1270 and 1271. Examples of such tissues are bone, skin, corneas, ligaments, tendons, dura mater, heart valves, hematopoietic stem/progenitor cells derived from peripheral and cord blood, oocytes and semen. CBER does not regulate the transplantation of vascularized human organ transplants such as kidney, liver, heart, lung or pancreas. The Health Resources Services Administration (HRSA) oversees the transplantation of vascularized human organs.

Parts 1270 and 1271 require tissue establishments to screen and test donors, to prepare and follow written procedures for the prevention of the spread of communicable disease, and to maintain records. FDA has published three final rules to broaden the scope of products subject to regulation and to include more comprehensive requirements to prevent the introduction, transmission and spread of communicable disease. One final rule requires firms to register and list their HCT/Ps with FDA. The second rule requires tissue establishments to evaluate donors, through screening and testing, to reduce the transmission of infectious diseases through tissue transplantation. The third final rule establishes current good tissue practices for HCT/Ps. FDA's revised regulations are contained in Part 1271 and apply to tissues recovered after May 25, 2005. The new requirements are intended to improve protection of the public health while minimizing regulatory burden.

Fertile Markets

Here's a fun little precis I found online when I googled: international human semen trade. This guy really knocked himself out with all the double-entendres. Wouldn't you? Enjoy:

Not all trade barriers concern steel, corn and coffee. Major human semen exporters like the United States say they are having a hard time penetrating Mexico's sperm market. Human semen trade is an estimated US$100 million industry worldwide, but Mexico is abstaining from entering the market and using its own internal resources. Mexico has not banned the imports outright; however, strict federal standards and restrictions keep foreign semen out of the country. The Fertility Institutes, a semen supplier with offices in both the United States and Mexico, has been unable to swap semen across the border among its clinics. "Not because of a lack of need or desire, but because of the inability to meet all requirements of both countries, as well as FedEx and other international shippers," says Fertility Institutes' Jeffrey Steinberg. Meanwhile, strong demand in Canada for human semen on recent years--which sells for about the same price as cattle semen in the open market--eased border restrictions for sperm imports from the United States. Leading U.S. semen trader Xytex has shipped its U.S. genes to Canada and several countries in Europe since 1983, but the company says getting across its southern border poses a much bigger challenge. "It's virtually impossible," says Holly Fowler, spokesperson for Xytex. Foreign exporters trying to ship their specimen into Mexico apparently must overcome the country's main barrier to entry into the sperm market: national pride.

Amongst the Geraniums: An Interview with Donor Offspring Christine Whipp

Here's an excerpt from a phone interview I did with Christine Whipp in 2003. Christine has been active for many years in the British media as a voice for donor offspring.

1. Somewhere Else With Other People

Me: How old were you when you found out?

CW: Forty-one. I was already a mother and a grandmother by that time, myself.

Me: Who told you?

CW: My mother told me in a letter.

Me: Was it a surprise?

CW: No, not for me.

Me: Really? Why?

CW: I’d known there was something wrong. I knew there was something I hadn’t been told. By that time I had worked out that the man whose name was on my birth certificate couldn’t possibly have been my father.

Me: Why was that?

CW: He was fifteen years older than my mother. He was a diabetic and he’d had mumps when he was a teenager, when he was thirteen, so it worked out that he was probably impotent and infertile. Plus, I didn’t look anything like him. And I’d always felt that I just didn’t belong where I found myself to be. I always felt I should have been somewhere else with other people.

Me: Did you feel more comfortable with your mother?

CW: No, I didn’t get on well with my mother. We didn’t have a very good relationship at all, ever. I had a very strange relationship with her. My original social father died when I was six. My mother later remarried when I was nine, and had another baby. But I had it worked out. I knew that something was wrong and my mother had mentioned that there was a secret.

Me: At what point did she mention that?

CW: When I was in my late-thirties. She suddenly said there’s something about your past that you don’t know.

Me: What was that conversation like?

CW: I said to her at the time what is it that you’re not telling me? And, I mean, you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink so I knew that if my mother didn’t wish to tell me, she wouldn’t tell me and if I’d pressed the point she might simply tell me something else that wasn’t true simply to get me off her back. I knew I had to bide my time and wait for the right moment to be told the truth. I knew there was something. Important. Something big. As I said, by the time I did find out I had worked out roughly what it was. But I wasn’t quite on the right track. I realized that Wilfred couldn’t be my father, but I didn’t know who was. I also knew my mother wasn’t the sort of person to have an affair. So I thought, well, she couldn’t have had an affair and in the end I had kind of reasoned that one way that I could have been born was that she had been raped and that they decided to keep me. And I kind of thought that explained my mother’s dislike of sex and her dislike of me. That’s how I rationalized it in my own mind. When I fount out the actual truth, in a way it was a slightly better scenario that the one that I imagined.

Me: How long had you been living with that story that your mother had been raped?

CW: I suppose probably about five years. I mean, I knew I hadn’t been adopted because I’d lived in a small town and my birth and the stories surrounding it were…everyone talked about it. So I knew my mother had given birth to me. So I knew I hadn’t been adopted. I mean, I had a picture of me with the midwife and I knew the midwife so that didn’t really come into it. But I knew there was something not right. I applied for my full birth certificate anyway just to look at it and see if there was anything on it and although it’s supposedly a legal and binding document that tells the truth, I still said to myself, This isn’t true! I just knew.

Me: Wow. So your existence was basically corroborated by other people in the community?

CW: Absolutely. Yes. Everyone knew my mother had been pregnant. I was definitely her kiddie.

Me: And you thought that…

CW: Some of the people in my community perhaps had guessed. People are quite astute, really, and they knew that my mother and her husband had been married for five whole years without having any babies. They knew he was an older man and they knew he was sick. I think it probably crossed their mind that maybe I wasn’t quite as kosher as I could have been.

Me: So they didn’t necessarily know your true circumstances?

CW: Oh no. No. The family doctor did. And possibly other parents who had gone to that same family doctor and who had themselves had infertility problems…because I think there were quite a number of donor offspring in my community.

Me: What makes you say that?

CW: Back in the fifties there weren’t that many people recommending donor insemination. It wasn’t a common practice.

Me: Right.

CW: And particularly not in the West Country and particularly not amongst ordinary rural poor people. My family doctor clearly knew about it, believed in it, thought it was a good thing. Through research, I’ve discovered that he was at medical school at the same time as Margaret Jackson, my mother’s gynecologist. I also know that she was a personal friend of Jackson’s husband, who was himself a local doctor…they were both in the Army Medical Corps. together and they both served on some G.M.C. medical committee together in London. So he knew them. He knew these people and, clearly, he was of a like mind to them that donor insemination was a good thing. He must have sent other women in the community – besides my mother – to this gynecologist for treatment. So I think it’s quite likely that there are a number of Jackson offspring in my local community and I must have gone to school with them and mixed with them and known them.

Me: Is this something you’ve ever looked into further?

CW: Well, I have a kind of hypothetical list in my mind of people that I went to school with who could be like me. But I can’t go and approach them and say, Hey, guess what I think! That would be so cruel. I can’t go and say to other people, I think you’re a donor offspring. I don’t have the right to blunder into someone’s life and give them that enormous burden. By the time I came to know the truth, it was a belief to me. But if you go and tell someone who’s never guessed that they’re a donor offspring and they’re not ready to know that…I think it would be exceedingly cruel. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.

I have two boy cousins – my mother’s sister’s children – and I believe that she too went to Margaret Jackson. I believe that my cousins are probably both donor offspring, and the older cousin I think could possibly come from the same donor as me. In fact, that would make him my half-brother. So I haven’t spoken to him in twenty-five years and I’m not planning to go and find him now and tell him. I don’t think I have the right to blunder into his life and give him that burden. Because it is a burden, isn’t it, to be a donor offspring and to know and to have to work your way through feelings that come with it.

Me: Hm, yes.

CW: To suddenly realize that you’ve had parents that have lied to you all your life and that somewhere out there you have a whole other family that you’re likely never to meet, that you’re legally barred from knowing about. I mean, you suddenly discover that you’re actually a second-class citizen. I mean, in this country, donor offspring are the only group of people that don’t have a legal right to their own personal identity.

Me: The only group?

CW: The only group, because in this country all our adoptees have that right and we are the only group that is legislated against. We’re discriminated against and that’s wrong.

Me: Is there much of a DI community that you’re in touch with in the U.K.?

CW: No.

Me: Have you made attempts to find people or is that something that you’ve been interested in?

CW: One of the first things I did was go to the newspaper in hope of finding people like myself, but I only had responses from other people in the media who were interested in the subject, or from researchers. But donor offspring didn’t want to come forward and meet with me.

Amongst the Geraniums

Me: When you’re on television what kind of response do you get?

CW: Sometimes you have none whatsoever. It generally spawns the phone ringing all day with other journalists wanting to feature me in magazines and whatever.

Me: And you said you get laughed at?

CW: Well, for instance, in a documentary I was shown going to the building Margaret Jackson used as her private clinic. She had consulting rooms in what appeared to be an ordinary suburban house on the edge of Exeter. And I went there with a camera crew to look at this house because…I wanted to know where my mother had gone to have me. Where did this all happen? I wanted to see. But one of the reviewers of the television journal poked fun at me and said this sad woman wanting to go and look at the house where it all happened, what’s the point of that?

Me: Good God!

CW: But, if she doesn’t get it, never mind, that’s her sad loss, that she doesn’t understand why I would want to go and do that. It’s the only place my mother and my donor both went. They didn’t go together but they were probably there on the same day.

Me: Right.

CW: He had to go and deliver his fresh specimen, which he probably left in the conservatory in a brown paper bag in amongst the geraniums because that was the procedure. The donors used to go in the side door and leave it in the conservatory amongst the geranium plants.

Me: How does that make you feel?

CW: [Laughs] A bit of a freak.

Me: You feel like a freak?

CW: Absulutely!

Me: Why?

CW: My parents never met! Is that not weird?

Me: I’m in the same circumstance. I know.

CW: Well, I know. So that is weird, isn’t it?

Me: It’s different, yes.

CW: There was no courtship, no love, no lust, not a moment of passion, nothing. Two entirely separate human beings who never met.

Me: How has that played out in your imagination? What does that mean to you?

CW: Well, in a way it means I’m not actually human because human beings are classified by the various things that they do. There are people who walk upright, they eat food, they reproduce sexually. Well, I wasn’t created through sexual reproduction. I had a syringe involved in my birth. Mine was the…the divine conception.

Me: If you don’t feel human, what do you feel like?

CW: Slightly detached from the rest of the world.

An Entirely Different Sort of Person

Me: Do you still speak to your mother?

CW: She died a couple years ago. No, I didn’t speak to her after she told me the truth. I had to bargain with her to get her to tell me. I wanted to know the secret and she wouldn’t tell me. She said she would leave me a letter when she dies explaining everything. When it was her 70^th birthday I wrote to her, I wrote her a letter and said, Please, just tell me. I know there is a big secret. I promise I will never bother you again. And that was far too appealing for her so she knew she could get rid of me forever just by telling me the truth…And I never did bother her again. I went right out of her life and I made no further contact with her.

Me: And that was the last time you spoke to each other?

CW: Yes.

Me: Do you feel that the distance between you and your mother was caused by the donor insemination?

CW: Yes. From Day One our relationship was blighted by the donor insemination. She was mad as a hatter when she had this done. She was obsessed with having a baby. And people who are obsessed are not mentally well. And she had this absurd tunnel vision of wanting a baby and I wasn’t the perfect baby she had imagined, I wasn’t the one she wanted. She had to do this disgusting thing to get me, very humiliating…to have to go and have your legs up in stirrups and be poked about. She had the baby of a stranger. She was always afraid that someone would find out. You can’t have a normal relationship with someone when you’ve created a baby that way, and she never had a normal relationship with me…it didn’t improve, of course, when I was able to have children with such great ease. She was jealous of that.

Me: Right, further distancing…

CW: Yes, further distancing. I am not like my mother. I am not like her family. I have to be like my donor, whoever he is. And I know my mother and my donor would not have liked one another.

Me: Why do you say that?

CW: They would not have met in real life.

Me: Why do you say that?

CW: My mother was a factory girl. She left school at fourteen. She had no real education. She hardly went to school. She mostly stayed home and helped look after he mother and the younger brothers and sisters. She wasn’t interested in the kinds of things my donor would have been interested in. Margaret Jackson was a eugenicist. My donor would have been an entirely different sort of person than my mother. He would have been the kind of man that wouldn’t have spoken to her on the street.

In the Footsteps of Marie Stopes

Me: What are your feelings about Margaret Jackson?

CW: She was an outrageous woman. Outrageous! She was a pioneer and she, in the 1920s, when there weren’t even very many woman doctors, she became a gynecologist and she followed in the footsteps of Marie Stopes, who was celebrated for her work in contraception…she was one of the very early contraceptionists….

Me: Uh-huh.

CH: Jackson held clinics offering contraception, which was very novel, very avant garde; it was on the cutting edge of what was acceptable in British society. And she did this rather quietly in the local eye hospital. She clearly knew the head of the eye hospital through her medical contacts, and he gave her a broom cupboard and a desk and she held consultations in this corridor in a broom cupboard.

Me: Unbelievable!

CW: So on Thursdays, which was market day in Exeter, people would come from far and wide into the city and she wanted to attract farmer’s wives because she was concerned that a lot of farmers had young wives in their twenties who had six, seven, eight small children and she didn’t like to see them being worn down with the drudgery of having baby after baby. She wanted to help them do something about it. And she did. She developed her own varieties of contraception. She developed an I.U.D.

Me: What year was this?

CW: During the ‘30s she encouraged women to use a very early I.U.D….She’s famous for her contraceptive work and setting up family planning clinics but she’s not well known for D.I., you see, because it was a secret thing…she started doing DI in the ‘40s when the Luftwaffe were dropping bombs on Exeter, at the start of the war. Exeter was being bombed night and day, all the beautiful medieval buildings were being razed to the ground and people didn’t know if they were going to have a roof over their heads at night and Jackson thought, Well, let’s make some babies, that’s a good idea, we all need babies.

Me: Unbelievable.

CW: I can’t imagine what was in her mind at the time. Was it a good time to start making fake babies? But anyway, that’s when it started: 1940. She continued right up until 1983. She didn’t want to retire. She more or less had to be pulled away from her microscope. She was a work-a-holic and her love in life was helping women have babies.

Me: You seem a bit baffled by her motivations.

CW: Yes. Oh, absolutely. I think donor insemination is inappropriate. I’m against it completely in any way, shape or form. I just find the idea of her using her own family members as donors, I just find that so…I think she was just so totally detached form her emotions. Maybe to her, conception is just such a clinical thing. I don’t know.

Me: So you think she…

CW: …disregarded the importance of family, the importance of blood relationships. To me, that is something quite fundamental.

The Power of Wanting to Know

Me: What is your message when you go before the media?

CW: My original message when I go before the media is openness.

Me: I see.

CW: My message is that we all have a right to know who we are and that legislation should be changed. DI parents should be open and honest with their children and not lie to them because of media dysfunction. I don’t openly declare war on DI.

Me: Why?

CW: Because I would be shot down [laughter]. There would be open season on Christine if I said that too loudly. But I do try and make it clear that my underlying personal view of it is that I would not in any way recommend it and I don’t believe that it’s morally ethical.

Me: Do you talk about that with the media?

CW: That’s not something the media wants to latch onto. Their main interest is donor non-anonymity. That tends to be the thing. That’s the one subject which is quite big in the media, and the other thing is the openness issue in telling children and being honest with them.

Me: How is your message of openness received by the media?

CW: The media are absolutely fascinated and they tend to be very much on my side. We’ve had this openness with adoption for twenty-five, thirty years now and people do believe that we do need to know for medical reasons and just purely for peace of mind. So on the whole, the message is very much appreciated by almost everyone except those in the infertility industry and those who are infertile and have used it.

Me: And I understand…

CW:…the law is actually getting closer to being changed.[1] There has been a lot of public feedback for that and people who are not involved in infertility also agree that, yes, all children should be told the truth. It’s not right to pretend that there’s somebody else. There should be openness. You shouldn’t allow this family dysfunction to happen.

Me: And the people who oppose you are, like you said, members of the industry itself?

CW: Yes, mainly. Doctors, people who are infertile and want to use assisted reproduction with donor gametes. They are the most strongly opposed to anything I say.

Me: Because…

CW: I mean, it was very difficult when I came out – and I always say came out in the way that gays come out. I came out. I was received by hostility by the donor conception network because their ethos at the time was that they were a group of people who told their children right from age three, four, five that they were donor conceived. And their idea was that once you had told them and you made it part of their normal life, they would grow up happy and well balanced, accepting that as the norm and they would never want to know who the donor was. I don’t know why they thought that. But apparently because I said, well, yeah, fine, that I do want to know who my donor is, that I was denounced on British radio as, Christine was just terribly traumatized and very old, but our children won’t want to know who their donor is. They’ve had to eat their words because five years along they had to issue a statement saying they now believe that donors shouldn’t be anonymous, that they think it would be better in the future if people did have the right to know who their donors were. That’s because some of their own children are now reaching their teenage years and have started asking questions and saying I would like to know who my donor is. I think they were terribly afraid that their children would hear what Christine was saying and that I would be a bad influence on them. But they were just underestimating their own children, I’m afraid. They were underestimating the power of wanting to know.

Me: Do you feel somehow responsi…

CW: No, not at all.

Love Is Not Enough

Me: Is there a scenario that you can imagine where women donating eggs, for instance, could be a positive scenario?

CW: Well, I think women have opened themselves to severe danger because donating eggs carries such a huge medical risk. The drugs that you have to take for ovarian stimulation can cause problems, could even cause ovarian cancer in the future. You have to undergo a full anesthetic to have egg retrieval done, which puts the woman in danger. Why on earth go through a medical procedure that is of no benefit to you but puts you in danger? And what right do the medical profession have to offer a woman the chance to do that? I think that’s ethically wrong, don’t you?

Me: I’m not sure yet, Christine.

CW: You’re not sure, but I’m pretty sure. I’m also very concerned about how her own children are going to feel about the fact that mummy gave their brothers and sisters away. Because that’s what she’s doing. Okay, it may only be eggs now, but we know what those eggs are used for. And she’s giving them away to complete strangers over whom she has no control. In this country people are not vetted for their suitability to be parents to donor gamete children. But in this country we have a very, very secure vetting procedure for people who want to adopt babies.

Me: So, there’s no kind of criteria one has to meet to…

CW: None whatsoever.

Me: Interesting.

CW: I think that’s terribly wrong.

Me: And what would you do…

CW: The criteria here is that if people really want a baby and go to that length to have one and are prepared to have I.V.F. to have one, the baby will be so wanted it will be loved unconditionally.

Me: Right.

CW: I’m sorry, love is not enough and wanting something is not enough. I want a Ferrari but that doesn’t make me a good driver.

Me: [Laughs]

CW: I don’t even drive!

That’s Not A Father

Me: What’s your feeling about men donating semen? Is that something that could potentially be beneficial? Is it just?

CW: No.

Me: No?

CW: Why would any child want to discover his father is a man he is going to be deprived of having contact with? I’m just not happy with this idea that it’s okay for men to donate sperm and then when the kid’s eighteen he or she is magically allowed to have a list of their father’s finest attributes and may or may not be able to meet him. Those first eighteen years are the most important, formative eighteen years of anyone’s life. That’s when you need the man who is your biological father, not when you’re eighteen. What is the good of saying to a kid, here, this is your father: He was six foot two, he played baseball, he liked dogs, he had brown hair, blue eyes. That’s not a father. That’s a piece of paper. And it’s not just your father you lose through donor insemination. You lose your whole paternal family. His parents, your grandparents, all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom which they should be able to pass on to you. And you only get that through a relationship. You only get that through living with them. They just lose so much. It just mind-boggles me. I just can’t express myself clearly on how strongly I feel that is wrong.

Me: I think you’re expressing yourself quite clearly. But yet you don’t feel right in advocating this publicly?

CW: Publicly saying that? I would be shot [Laughs]. I’m working on it. I’m gradually getting around to saying it publicly. But you have to be careful what you say. I mean, if Bill Cordray[2] started saying that he’d no longer be invited to the seminars because most of them are run by people in the fertility industry or with an interest in fertility. He doesn’t get invited to the Infertility Network to stand up and say, I think what you’ve done is wrong.

They Have to Think Ahead

Me: Do you feel that progress is being made in terms of anonymity laws?

CW: It has in the UK, yes. We’ve had this donor consultation process and the majority of respondents to that were in favor of donors not being anonymous. But the government doesn’t want to do that yet, for some reason so they’ve stalled which is quite outrageous.

Me: This is recent?

CW: This is just recently, yeah. So we’re waiting to see how that goes when that all comes up again.

Me: It seems like the reasoning for this is that they’re afraid that no more donors will come forward.

CW: Yes.

Me: What do you think about that?

CW: Well, I’m not going to cry if no more donors come forward.

Me: Do you think it’s an accurate expectation?

CW: I think there will probably be a huge drop in donor numbers. I think that people who have been coerced into being donors have done so without really understanding what they’ve done, and they’ve been able to get away with it. But I think once they realize that they won’t be anonymous and they have to think ahead and think in terms of giving away semen as actually giving away real babies that will turn into real live people, then I think they will think more clearly. And when they realize that they may suddenly one day have a young adult walk into their lives and say, Hey, you and me, we’re the same. These donors are going to have to think, well, you know, maybe I’ll have a family of my own and I don’t want this cuckoo in the nest suddenly arriving. It’s not going to be the easiest situation, is it, when we suddenly have people turning up finding their donors, trying to squeeze themselves into the donor’s life? It may not be convenient for him. Life’s complicated enough without adding that to it, isn’t it? Well, you have to be realistic about what these donor reunions are going to be like. They’re not all going to be easy.

Me: Absolutely. And I think it sort of depends on what the child’s expectations are of that person.

CW: Yes. I think we’re all going to be very disappointed, any of us that do find our donors. And let’s face it. None of us actually want to have this extra burden of being a donor offspring and all the things that we have to think about.

Me: It sounds like you deal with this on a fairly regular basis.

CW: Yes I do, actually. More so than some.

I Should Not Be Here

Me: Okay, so, you don’t think donor insemination is a good idea. It’s kind of a mistake. Do you feel like you’re not a very good idea?

CW: Oh, yes, absolutely.

Me: But how do you…?

CW: I should not be here.

Me: But how do you…Surely, you must have worked that out somehow? I mean, you haven’t done away with yourself.

CW: Yeah, I haven’t. No. I mean, saying that I should not have been born doesn’t mean that I’m some kind of manic-depressive. I’m here. I have to deal with it. But I would not have chosen to have been born in the way that I was born. I would not have chosen to have lost my father at an early age. I would not have chosen the situation I was in.

Me: Mm-hm. But do you…

CW: I just wanted to be an ordinary person. I wish I was just an ordinary person like everybody else.

Me: Isn’t it possible that you are fairly ordinary?

CW: I am, I try to be [laughs].

Bought and Paid For

Me: Would you be interested in seeing an end to donor insemination?

CW: Yeah.

Me: Would you…

CW: In fifty years time, we’re going to look back and say donor insemination was an abomination. What an uncivilized country we were. We’re going to look at donor insemination in the same way we now look at slavery.

Me: Uh-huh.

CW: Because that is actually what donor insemination is, it’s the enslavement of people. I was bought and paid for, just human flesh bought and paid for like a slave. And I was enslaved to my mother. I had to do her bidding. She owned me and controlled me. I was a commodity.

Me: Mm-hm.

CW: We’re enslaving people for the benefit of others, for other people’s reproductive vanity.

Me: What about reproductive vanity? What causes that? What do you think obsessed your mother so much that she felt like she had to have a child at any cost?

CW: All her friends had one.

Me: The status symbol of the family?

CW: Yeah. To fit in.

Me: What about the biological need of having a child?

CW: We’re always hearing about these biological clocks ticking and, you know, the middle-aged women with their biological clock ticking. I don’t know. I don’t know if there is such a thing. It would be selfish to create a baby just because I want something to do with my life and it would be nice and I would enjoy it. That’s no reason to have children. They’re supposed to be the product of a normal sexual relationship. They’re not supposed to be planned.

---

[1] In fact, the law was changed in 2005, outlawing donor anonymity in the U.K..

[2] Probably the most active/visible donor offspring advocate in the U.S.. He invited me to speak with him on a panel at the American Adoption Congress in Boston several years ago. A very sweet man, non-confrontational man.

...

Republican National Convention 2008

You know, it's interesting: You can't find much RNC '08 on youtube which is really too bad. I mean, obviously, youtube is a left-leaning website and thus, for the most part, filled with left-leaning videos (most of which are retarded and beside the point...like cable television itself, yet even still more esoteric). Wouldn't it be great if youtube had more videos illustrating the opposition's point of view? Like, isn't that what good debate is all about? Trying to learn your opponent's arguments as well as your own?

I don't mind admitting to you that (for this very reason) I watched nearly every minute of this past RNC '08 convention, held in Minneapolis, MN. It was stunning, for many reasons, the least of which was that, from above, the convention center looked like what you've always heard hell looks like: a giant dark pit, with fiery red floor, bunch of half-broken people mindlessly wandering around. I don't know who was in charge of designing the '08 RNC but whoever hired them really had no idea what they were doing. Whoever that person is should have a glass of water poured over their head every night for the rest of their life.

Check out the enormous digital American flag. That's weird. That makes no sense. I tried to imagine who would think that's cool. I thought of myself when I was 12. And even then I might have thought that t was stupid. The live in-house progressive jazz band was amazing, so much so that they were hard to describe. They were uncanny, the way the guy in the bear suit, leaning over and sort-of fellating the butler in The Shining was uncanny. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any footage on youtube. That was probably THE MOST sterile music I have ever heard - and I like sterile music! It's weird and totally amazing in a non-human/post-human kind of way. (Where's Pitchfork when you actually need them?)

And, of course, the most amazing moment of the RNC 2008 was at the very beginning when an honor guard marches through the half-empty coliseum and the whole room stands in silence, their hands over their hearts, when a solemn voice comes on over the intercom (think mid-twentieth Eastern European internment camp) and commanded everyone to turn around and freeze for one full minute while a super-fancy camera overhead takes everyone's picture. Everyone turns around with their hat/hand over their heart and holds their pose for an entire minute while the camera takes their picture. Have you ever seen several thousand people in a coliseum freeze and hold completely still for a full sixty seconds? It's creepy. It's a lot like observing a ritual in the most old-school pagan kind of way. All political (and athletic) events are ritualistic (obviously), but most of the successful, modern events successfully (I think; and, really, this could be an entirely different post) somehow successfully mask their own Ritualness...the '08 RNC should go down in history as one of THE MOST POORLY disguised political rituals EVER. And that sucks. For all of us. If we're going to be a two-party system we have to act like it. We need both the D's and R's to really want it, and know how to want it. Do you get the feeling we have a third party slowly galloping our way? God, I hope they're smart.

Well, anyway, I did find this clip from the RNC '08. Enjoy:

Also: Doesn't this look more like a scene out of a new David Lynch film rather than a contemporary conservative political rally?

Incidentally, I had lunch with a political columnist from the New York Observer a few months ago who was at the RNC, and was standing on the floor when Sarah Palin gave her introductory speech and he thought she killed. He said he was there with his editor and they both thought that it was all over for Obama. It's funny: I watched the RNC on a live internet stream and I thought it looked cheap and poorly orchestrated and I thought, almost immediately, that Obama was definitely going to take it. Televised orchestration's a big deal. You've got to have a candidate that looks good, who plays well on-screen. But, I know you know that. Well, the Republicans had an off year. They were due.

Execution of Saddam Hussein-GRAPHIC CONTENT

I think this is an important video. It's footage of Saddam Hussein's execution as seen from an illicit cell phone camera. WARNING: This footage is not for everyone.

I've never seen a man taken to his death before. George Orwell's The Hanging has long been not only one of my favorite pieces of writing but was one of the first texts that made me want to write. I'll be honest with you: I gained respect for Saddam Hussein, as a man, after I saw this video. Politics aside, I thought he died with pride; he didn't let the room-full of masked executioners rattle him. When they chant "Moktada! Moktada! Moktada!" He sneers back, "Moktada? Please. That charlatan?" When they fill the room with chants, he prays out loud for himself, focused, complete.

Now contrast the first unofficial footage with the official staged version:

There's no live sound, just some douche-bag guy talking over it, reporting from his little edge of nowhere. He assures us that they won't actually show the execution - they'll just show you the part leading up to the execution...with an idiot talking over it.

Why is it we're not allowed to see: Men's Genitalia, Sex, Birth and Death? Why? Someone tell me. I give up.

Jimmy Scott

A friend of mine showed this to me. Enjoy.

Recent String of Events (in no particular order...)

Someone decapitated long-dead, frozen, baseball great Ted Williams. And then used his head as a soccer ball. Ladies and gentleman: The future of cryogenic freezing! Where your frozen cadaver can be mutilated for sport!

NASA fired a missile at the moon. And nothing happened. Yet. I don't think we're going to know much about this one for a while. Like maybe after you and I and all of our children are gone.

I stubbed my foot on the couch and broke my toe. Not only did I break my toe, I tore the joint. And now I'm wearing a boot (and it's really not as bad as I thought it would be).

Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning and I almost feel sorry for him. He's trapped in between the almost completely unrealistic positive and negative expectations that people have of him. I can't imagine this is easy for him (not that it's supposed to be). And now the Europeans just piled a Nobel on top of everything else. That just might have been one of the most unwanted Nobel Peace Prize's in history. (But...I think he might deserve it, after all.)

I read The Grapes of Wrath for the first time. I know you don't need me to tell you this but...it's a pretty good book. Not bad. Nope. Not at all. Not one tiny bit. The part about the machine-tractors replacing man on God's green field? That's not shit you ever forget. That's Biblical.

There was (what I like to call) the Free-Speech Five-Step:

1) Serena Williams lost her cool (and the match) in the semi-finals to (eventual champion)Kim Clijsters at the recent U.S. Open when she verbally abused a short, fat Asian line judge. No one talked about this as a racial "incident" but I think Serena thought it was (at least at first) and before she knew it she was over the edge.

2) Kanye West steals the microphone from what's-her-face at the MTV music awards while she's accepting an award. Awesome. Even the fact that what he did is stupid isn't interesting. But that fact is. Subsequently, Barack Obama is heard, off-the-record, calling Kanye a "jackass" for what amounted to a really excellent, unintended, social mores moment from a sitting president who is (socially) far cooler than the rapper. Think about that. That kind of moment doesn't happen too often.

3) Joe Wilson's hateful shout of "You lie!" to the president was disgusting. That's one of the most blatently shameful things I've seen in this country in a long time. I believe it was an assassination attempt. I think it means, "Back the fuck up, BITCH!X!X! or next time I won't just be throwing words." Hateful stuff. Make no mistake. Also: look at the faces of the two men next to Wilson. Do you trust those guys? They want to see Obama go down in flames - literally.

4) Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame acceptance speech was stunning. Flat out. I thought it was awesome. Painful and gross and weird and embarrassing...but awesome. It was just so honest. How many living legends (that's what he is) just come right out and say what they've been thinking throughout the years in one extended public speech? I think there's something kind of remarkable about it. He was like: "This is what I did to you people. And now I'm telling you about it." I bet he loved it. Probably felt like a fifty point game to him. There are millions of Michael Jordans but only one Michael Jordan. Here's the first part of the speech:

5) And Muammar al-Gaddafi's lengthy speech at the U.N. (By the way, has anyone's name ever been spelled so many different ways?) Behold, the King of Africa:

You can tell it's going to be a long morning by the way he sifts through his papers in the opening. I have to say: I watched about 45 minutes of this thing, and I didn't mind it so much. I find the disposition of contemporary dictators entirely compelling. For instance, I thought Saddam Hussein came off as completely brave and border-line heroic the way he faced down his masked executioners - he had far more composure than, I think, most Liberal Democratic leaders would. Imagine what Gaddafi would be like if he was ever put on trial at the Hague! He'd make Milosevich's pathetic, irrational, child-like defense look like a Supreme Court hearing.

Conan O' Brian fell down and hit his head.

David Letterman executed a flawless public apology by calling "sex" sex and came out even stonger.

I administered a stool test to myself and almost threw-up. (No photograph.)

I watched The Wizard of Oz twice. It's as good as The Grapes of Wrath. They're both primal contemporary American myths. It's genuinely creepy when the Witch writes Surrender in black swirling smoke lines in the sky. Also: So this is where David Lynch got so many of his ideas!

Roman Polanski was re-arrested for child rape and various high-end Hollywood

celebrities immediately made complete asses of themselves. Justice may be imperfect, justice may be fickle - say whatever you want to say about it - but don't try to say this guy is somehow above the law because of his artistic genius. That's so gross it's obscene. (I think Bitter Moon was one of the best movies of the nineties and Chinatown is an official classic but I still think he should serve his time.) Also: if you still think he's being treated unfairly read the Grand Jury Testimony for the explicit details of how he drugged and raped a child. Best of luck defending him after that. (Also: I just realized, in '70s, Polanski, looks like Rob Blagojevich.)

And last but not least: All hail William T. Vollmann! Ladies and gentleman, we have a real artist in our presence. Remember when that Nobel Judge said a few years ago that an American writer would never win now because American writers are so self-centered,

disinterested, etc? He's obviously not paying attention. I read Riding Towards Everywhere (a road adventure/national memoir), then Poor People (part repudiation of James Agee's And Now Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, part moral examination of the concepts of wealth and poverty (but I mean, really, aren't they inseparable?) I'm currently reading through IMPERIAL. It's a huge, mad, slow book but it's totally worth it. The end of part one when he imagines what IMPERIAL would be like if written by Flaubert or Steinbeck or an American border guard is absurdly hilarious. What other contemporary American writer even comes close to this guy's imagination/output/scholarly attention to detail? Give him the Nobel!