Educational Media Reviews Online

Can you question the way you were conceived? Does it impact your view on life, and how you view the world? Three individual people who were conceived through sperm donors tell their individual stories of loss and abandonment by their donor fathers. Each individual tells their story of how they found out they were conceived through a sperm donor. They have a burning desire to meet the biological father. It is a billion dollar industry and these individuals were produced by science and not sex—just masturbation.

This is a way for childless couples to have children, however no one thinks about how this affects the children. While the children know their birth mothers, they often wonder about their biological fathers. What does he look like? Do they have siblings? Why was their father a donor? Thirty to sixty thousand babies are conceived every year in the United States through sperm donation, many sold and shipped internationally without any tracking.

There are social networking sites devoted to those fathered through sperm donation. If they know the donor number of their father, they often advertise--“Have you seen donor #82?” The children conceived by donor sperm have many half siblings. Who are they? Is it the person they married? Is it the guy next door? They are eager and desperate to know the answers to these questions. People on social network sites respond to them with hatred, such as “How dare you not be thankful you are alive?”

In the United Kingdom, children have the right to know who their biological father is. In the United States the donor is anonymous. People conceived through donor sperm want things to change—they want donor records to be revealed.

One of the individuals conceived from donor sperm talks about the divorce of her parents, she is the biological child of her mother but not her father.

• Her father didn’t want custody of her, but he did want custody of her sister who is adopted.
• Her mother re-married and had a biological child with her new husband.

Another individual had problems understanding the reasons behind his donor father.

• After extensive research, he discovered he has over 500 half siblings.
• Why did his father sell is sperm, and does he realize these babies are human beings?

The United States is cowboy country when it comes to sperm donation. There is trading across borders, you could have half siblings anywhere in the world. The idea that kinship doesn’t matter is painful to the individuals conceived through sperm donation. We are purchasing people, using babies has products to be bought and sold. How ethical is this? Where is the morality? When a person has over 500 half siblings around the world are we indirectly contributing to incest? Sperm donation can be credited to children being born with deformities and other possible mental and physical issues.

Anonymous Father’s Day reveals the realities of a billion dollar industry of producing children without any concern for the rights of donor children. It reveals the realities of a billion dollar industry of producing children without any regard to the DNA or health information denied to them.

How do men who donate their sperm perceive this issue is a question that needs to be answered. Men who are young between the ages of twenty and twenty-five think about how much money they can make, and possibly just think about this potential child as a one night stand. If a man is smart, accomplished, has no children but has reached the age of fifty might feel he needs to help a childless couple and leave a legacy of himself at the same time.