The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Don't start buying sperm without a good lawyer either. In some states, the sperm donor may legally request custody or visitation rights.
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.
The California court's website states that cohabiting spouses is a conclusive presumption[1] and the exceptions to overturning are very limited, even with genetic testing. I'm not a lawyer and can't easily research precedent, but the law seems pretty clear that if you don't challenge before the 2nd birthday of the child, it can't be overturned. There may be other restrictions as well.
It seems like recent anecdotes I can find relate to the 2 year deadline. The father didn't challenge paternity at the time of divorce, found out he was not biological father (or that he could challenge) later, but it was too late.
Hopefully we can all agree it would be shitty to disown a kid you've been raising for years because you found out you weren't the biological father, but I can certainly have empathy for someone who has limited (or no) visitation and is stuck shelling out money for someone else's kid.
[edit]
It looks like the law was revised recently as well, so amybe the court website is out of date on some of this? AB2684 mentions "rebuttable presumptions" and was passed in 2018, going into effect in 2019. IANAL and don't have time to follow up on this.
Those laws were passed before DNA testing. It seems like they could be updated for that.
I think a better solution is taxpayers shouldering the burden than punishing an innocent individual (actually a victim).
One man had won a court settlement when he was young and the woman applying for benefits remembered reading about him in the paper, so she put his name and address on the application to get the money. The court ordered him to start paying child support. He tried to fight it in court with a DNA test, but you need to serve the mother and neither the court nor the social welfare agency would release her address.
Example: the father may take drugs to relieve the pain. Said father may invite the child to join him, setting up the child for life.
And I wonder also, if it'd be deemed undesirable to be able to pick and choose traits and prototypes..
All in all, fun conversation, and makes me want to read Brave New World again.
— 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.
— 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.
— 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.
— The complex feelings successful donors experience as a result of all of this
— 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.
> Others advertise their smarts. John in Arizona wrote: “I have a 1,400 chess rating and am an analyst. I have a peaceful demeanor and high spirits. I exercise regularly, prefer rollerblades.”
The range from 1400-1800 is mostly full of people who play casually but don't seriously train to become better. You can beat any friends who just happen to know the rules, but are at the very bottom tier of people who play regularly.
Saying that one is a 1400 player would be like someone who goes on a 5km jog around the neighborhood once or twice a week talking up their running ability. Sure, it's nice to be in slighty-above-average shape, but it's not really notable.
But like the average person could work up to doing a 5kg jog twice a week with a few months of moderate practice (see the couch to 5k program), so too could they become 1400 in chess.
The comment I responded to referred to cutting out middlemen and meeting with the donors directly.
Very curious...
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.
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.
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.
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?
> This is a net positive considering the US population is declining at an alarming rate.
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.
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.
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.
Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale.
also interesting to think about the implications on human evolution over long periods of time:
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.
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)?
lots of interesting implications to consider.
It's the other way around: the selection pressure drives the expected offspring to become equal. The expected offspring for an individual of a certain gender is (total offspring)/(number of individuals of that gender). The fewer individuals of one gender there are, the higher the expected offspring and the greater the selective pressure to produce more offspring of that gender. So the gender ratio is self-stabilizing.
Naively, one would think that if you have (in some antediluvian setting) village A with 50 men and 50 women, and village B with 10 men and 90 women (and children born with that gender ratio, respectively), that village B could "produce" way more offspring and grow faster.
A naive "group selection" view of evolution might even predict something like that to happen.
But, in village B, there is an incentive, so to speak, to cheat and have boys at a higher ratio, because that would increase expected total number of offspring. So, the gender ratio stabilises around 50/50 - a Nash equilibrium, if you will.
Btw, this argument about the sex ratio stabilizing at 1:1 is known as Fisher's principle. Fisher made another really interesting observation about how extremely exaggerated male ornamentation, like in peacocks, reaches its equilibrium when the aesthetic advantages from a large, attractive tail becomes offset by the practical costs of being slower, needing more food to produce said tail, being highly visible, etc. This one's called "Fisherian Runaway". These purely aesthetic traits will "run away" all the way up until they becoming detrimental to survival.
Possibly not on a smaller scale. The man with the most children was a ruler of Morocco with 888, and there was a guy breaking into sperm banks to replace the sperm of astronauts, neurosurgeons and all the rest with his own. He apparently sired over 600 children.
On that note though, perhaps relationships might be less common. Who knows, maybe we'll turn into bears.
Got a chuckle out of the Genghis Khan comparison. If I was an archer on a rampart, and I saw one of these guys on horseback dressed in Mongol armor, I'd probably laugh so hard that I'd fall right off the wall.