Photo credits: Jessica Wynne for The New York Times.

Caption:
Shelby Siems, 44, with her son, Christopher, 2, has a boyfriend but is expecting another son from the same donor who fathered Christopher.

Today's New York Times Sunday Magazine has a cover story called "Looking for Mr. Good Sperm"--which is about the how mating and procreation rituals have evolved (devolved?) from internet dating and mate shopping on Match.com (so over) to internet sperm shopping.

The article is accompanied by photos of attractive women, the cover looks like something out of Sex in the City. In fact, internet sperm shopping seems exactly the thing Carrie Bradshaw might do, to create the world's cutest bebe to go with her Manolos and diamond-studded name necklace, if the show were still on.

What is disturbing to me, in my periodic rants about how fertility technology has outpaced our emotional capacity to make sense of it, is NOT just that it smacks of eugenics (there's that, too, but this is not the focus of my rant) the way prospective parents can become so focused on the physical appearance of the sperm (or egg) donor, but primarily I am disturbed because again, the baby/child has turned into a consumer product, solely for the pleasure of the parent. The more you pay, it is implied, the better product you get. To wit: one woman in the article was so taken by the "popularity" of a particularly cute guy's sperm that she "splurged" and bought up his remaining units from the sperm bank.

Again, where is the focus on the child? At the time, shopping for sperm might seem fun, exciting--all the possibilities!! A tall handsome guy who shares my love of cooking! But just as I get depressed seeing all the buy-and-dump detritus of our daily lives in places like the Salvation Army (where, admittedly, I like to shop precisely because our particular one has TONS of new clothes), buyer's remorse or just getting sick of a handbag or a set of golf clubs is wasteful and sad but not even approaching the magnitude of taking on the lifetime responsibility for a child. Of course, biological parents have children without thinking it through, but here we have a choice, and we need to remember that people are making money off of baby-hunger and impulses to "splurge."

This technology (both internet and fertility) is new. Brave new world, where will we be, say, in twenty years when these kids reach adulthood and want to know where they came from? I'm not saying that no good can come out of it, but I am saying, has anyone doing this stopped to wonder what the children might feel like? What about emotional issues of resentment that may occur is Mr. Good Sperm also comes with genetic malformations or disease? Or even, say, if Mr. Tall Dark and Handome that you picked and paid a nice premium for has a recessive gene for short, stout, and premature graying in his family? The paying aspect bring in all those ugly impulses of "you get what you pay for" when life doesn't work like that, and there is no red and black, profit and loss, or fixed payments in unconditional love.

Adoptees often have this gaping void, no matter how loving the current family situation, that comes from not knowing one's roots. Unless you pay extra for an "open" sperm purchase (this buys you the donor's contact info), this biological heritage is lost forever.

Adoption always has a sad side because it involves loss. But knowingly creating this loss, at least one side of it, through fertility technology? This issue begs to be thought through more.

Any opinions from the adoptees out there?