Even when it is anonymous, that doesn't necessarily mean anything goes:
> Today, choosing a donor is like ordering out of a catalogue. Women scroll through dozens of men’s profiles, searching for traits they believe would make an ideal biological father.
If somebody sells you one thing and then delivers something different, it's fraud. I'm pretty sure even outside of western countries, fraud is illegal. When a licensed professional does it, it's professional misconduct and that's serious as well.
Furthermore, several stories resemble this one where a fertility doctor used his own sperm and that is considered particularly egregious. Not only for the reasons mentioned above, but because doing so is considered lying by omission. There are also notions of fairness with respect to fathering children: don't father too many and fulfill your responsibilities towards the ones you do. Biologically fathering dozens if not hundreds of children and having nothing to do with them afterward is considered unfair to the children, even if they happen to have a real father who raises them.
I'd also argue that the doctor using his own probably has serious NPD, and if there is a genetic component to that, this is the last thing we need.
Not for the case of the author of the article, that one is even worse.
And generally, lying about any step with something like this is a massive breach of trust. If things are claimed, they are expected to be honest.
I suspect that there's no persuasive evidence that character traits are determined by genetic factors in ways that we can control or reliably predict.
A quick google found a twin study suggesting that they're significantly inheritable: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8776880/
I guess mental illness can count as a personality trait, but I think there's considerable scope for personality traits well below the level of mental illness.
Neither of our anecdata will be useful for much here; I could just as well say that actually children usually resemble their parents less than you seem to think.
> There is probably plenty of research out there that tries to find out how much is due to nature or nurture.
Probably! But I don't know what it is, or what its conclusion is, so just saying that it probably exists doesn't advance either of our arguments.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-018-0263-6
30-60% according to a bunch of studies. This particular study puts it closer to 60% than to 30%, which is in line with my own expectations but it's not a settled research question yet.
It matters who your father is. For emotional reasons, and for medical ones.
Collecting sperm off young men for $50 a pop is madness. And it seems that young men know it and do not donate. Hence the deception layered over the badness of the whole idea.
I do not think that understanding who your family is is a particularly "western" preoccupation.
The donor was supposed to be anonymous, but not random. You don't know their name, but you do learn things about them, and you pick the donor because of those things you were told. And in many cases here, what the recipient was told, was a lie.