Demand for American Sperm Is Skyrocketing in Brazil
wsj.com
wsj.com
In the hispanic and the greater spanish colonial world - "white is right" is a core ethic. It's how the spaniards ( with low numbers ) managed to rule so much of the native americans, asians, africans, etc for hundreds of years. It's interesting to know this also played a role in portuguese colonial world as well.
Consider that despite all the media attention surrounding women with careers freezing their eggs, statistically the percent of women who actually do this rounds down to 0%. In total less than 5,000 babies worldwide have been born this way, as compared with the 135M babies born each year.
Similarly, despite all the hype around banking cord blood, the actual number of families who do this is less than 1%. Most of those only do it because they got grants to do it for free due to some medical condition. And the number of times cord blood has actually been used to even attempt to treat some illness is less than 500 times total worldwide.
> Unlike in the U.S., it is illegal to pay men to donate their sperm here, so domestic stocks are low and information about Brazilian donors sparse. “It basically says ‘brown eyes, brown hair, likes hamburgers’ and what their zodiac sign is—that’s it,” said Alessandra Oliva, 31, of the information available on local donors.
In Brazil they make very little information available about the donor - not enough to reach any conclusions about race. People who go to fertility clinics in Brazil are usually wealthy, wealthy people in Brazil are usually white, and people generally want their children to be the same race as themselves. So those couples look for the closest country where they can get "certifiably white" sperm for accessible prices, which happens to be the US.
The article makes this look like black and mixed-race Brazilians are trying to whiten themselves because of racism which is completely incorrect.
However, as a white person, I must correct with facts the erroneous idea that there are few whites in Brazil. That sentence in the article is mostly based on the old prejudice that south of the border everyone is the same.
Especially in the southern area (Sao Paolo included), brazilians are mostly white, with the majority descending from Italians, Portuguese and Germans. Really, this prejudice is old and should stop in the information era we live in. Whites make 48% of the Brazilian population.
But of course, many white Americans have Irish, English and German background which have the lighter of the tones of the white race. I’m not contesting that these women are after such appearance and that it’s easier to find it from donors in the US than in Brazil.
If you think about, many very white people in Brazil get nicknamed "Alemão" (German), independently of their origins. That's a sign that we are not so white after all.
The rest of the world uses ethnicity/descent to describe skin colour/appearance.
Material from Brazilian sperm banks is fully anonymous and nearly devoid of data: skin/eye color are provided -- and I think profession too. In contrast, American sperm banks provide a trainload of information: there are photos, various indicators of health and intelligence, etc.
It's not even a difference in legislation, it's a difference in the ethical guidelines of the respective medical associations.
Kind of reminds me of another article I saw a while back about Chinese women coming to the US to give birth so their children would have the option of becoming a US citizen if they wanted to later in life. Apparently there's a big business built around it.
--edit--
Wow, downvoted for pondering on a simple question...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/01/china-us-birth-tou...
This desire is futile and I hope it's not really anchored in the atheist mindset.
It will, however, mean that something of him will continue on after he dies. It's hardly surprising someone may feel that way- I do, too. My children are not me, but they are what I'll leave behind, to hopefully have a positive effect on the world after me.
Like if a Brazilian male partner is infected, would they try to find a non-brazilian(to be safe since it's asymptomatic) sperm donor?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_Zika_virus_epi...
> It was estimated that 1.5 million people were infected by Zika in Brazil, with over 3,500 cases of microcephaly reported between October 2015 and January 2016.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zika_virus
EDIT: I don't care about the karma but I am curious what part of this comment is attracting the downvotes?
2) Is there any evidence that males will be infected forever and won't be able to have children?
3) Poor people don't import US sperm, rich people do. Rich people also are not the demographic impacted by Zika.
It's mentioned in the article they are doing it for white genes.
1) Yes. The whole scare around zika was that it causes birth defects if the mother has it (and the mother can get it transmitted sexually from the father). It was so bad that countries controversially advised all their women to "delay pregnancy until more is known about the virus and its impact on fetal development." See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_Zika_virus_epi...
2) Seems like it's still being studied since it's such a new disease. At least for now there's no cure and vaccines are still in the early stages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_Zika_virus_epi...
3) Mosquitoes don't care if you're rich or poor (j/k I do get your point). But if I were a rich person in brazil, I could and would take every possible preventative measure to avoid problems in a pregnancy.
The white genes argument doesn't make sense to me because they have a pretty large (like 50%?) local white population. But I guess my zika argument is pretty ridiculous even if there are tons of paranoid rich folks.
Perhaps someone from Americas - America can comment how common this is in their country?
As a first approximation using Google Translate, American translates as americano in both Portuguese and Spanish, while Mexican and Brazilian, for example, translate as mexicano and brasileño (Spanish) and brasileiro (Portuguese), respectively. I didn't find a way to limit this to particular locales as would be appropriate. These types of things can be subtle, and I'm interested to hear from good sources that can provide more insight.