Ethics, Stories, and Hope-Filled Alternatives to IVF
While the numbers in that imaginary dialogue may sound like a joke, they are not—thanks to modern reproductive technologies. In the documentary Anonymous Father’s Day, viewers meet the man behind this story. His biological father was a sperm donor, and hundreds of humans are his father’s offspring—and thus his brothers and sisters—as a result.
Or consider the Donor Sibling Registry website. It was created in the year 2000 to connect people who are genetically related to one another as a result of others who gave away their sperm, eggs, or embryos. The largest group the website has brought together so far is two hundred half-siblings. One sperm donor linked up through that registry donated four hundred times in his lifetime, and since one donation can produce twenty-four vials, the fertility clinics he worked with could have sold as many as 9,600 vials. It is therefore. within the realm of possibility that this donor fathered hundreds, if not thousands, of biological children around the world. Currently, he is aware of twenty-two.
Stories like these raise this important question: Is it ethical to create human beings by science and not by sex?
In vitro fertilization (IVF) is one such procedure that makes children by way of science. With IVF, sperm and eggs are harvested from a man and a woman, combined in a petri dish where fertilization occurs, and the resulting human embryos begin their lives in glass (“in vitro”) instead of in their mother’s body. Ultimately, at least one, if not more, of the embryos will be transferred into a woman’s body.
Sometimes the sperm and eggs are the gametes of a husband and wife who are having difficulty conceiving naturally and enlist the help of science to establish fertilization in a lab. Other times, sperm and/or eggs are provided by third parties that are not the couple planning to parent. In some cases, the sperm is from one partner of a gay couple, but eggs are provided by a woman. Sometimes—and certainly this is the case with the latter scenario—surrogacy is pursued, where a woman is contracted to gestate a child in her womb and then relinquish the child at birth to the individual or couple who commissioned the baby’s production.
