The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/business/sperm-donors-facebook-groups.html

by aerophilic • 6 years ago

70 54 6 years ago

nytimes.com

ilovefood2• 6 years ago

This was a great and fascinating read. The final sentence made me spit my tea out. Tremendous reporting quality!

dvaun• 6 years ago

There were plenty of great moments throughout the article. This in particular cracked me up:

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.”

gamegoblin2• 6 years ago

This one is a little Dunning–Kruger-y to me.

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.

thursday0987• 6 years ago

morality aside, the men who donate sperm will have an outsize influence on the genetic diversity of our species.

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.

mpalczewski2• 6 years ago

In general 50:50 ratio is observed in most species even with great variability in male reproductive success because the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50.

yorwba• 6 years ago

the expectation for offspring is equal between male and female so the selection pressure generally keeps it close to 50

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.

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

The momentary blip of availability of sperm donors, moral acceptance, combined with eventually-to-be-figured-out reduction in overall fertility will probably have zero effect on our evolutionary trajectory.

Bjorkbat• 6 years ago

I don't think an increase in sperm donor activity will necessarily make much of a dent. The growing demands of industrial society and the perceived diminishing value of having a family compared to life's other pleasures won't be so easily resolved through readily available sperm.

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.

daniel-cussen• 6 years ago

Think ghengis khan except on a smaller scale.

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.

blueyes• 6 years ago

Why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Nellie Bowles good stories...

rvr_• 6 years ago

Cutting the middle man => having sex with some random dude who created an FB group.

lotsofpulp3• 6 years ago

Pictures at various times during their youth, vacations, with family members, and proof of employment by being on a selective school/employer’s website may very well be less random than taking a sperm bank’s word for it.

teachrdan• 6 years ago

Who's going to validate all that information? I would assume a (hypothetical) impartial third party who's paid by the sperm buyer. That same third party might even offer services like testing the sperm for diseases, storing it for future use if the donor travels, etc. Which is basically reinventing a sperm bank.

saagarjha• 6 years ago

As mentioned in the article, most men only offer AI.

gautamcgoel• 6 years ago

Took me a moment to parse that acronym. AI = artificial insemination.

_huayra_• 6 years ago

Yay I know I was a unique guy, being neither artificial nor intelligent!

ianhawes• 6 years ago

This is a net positive considering the US population growth rate is declining.

astura• 6 years ago

Why is population growth a net positive?

TeaDrunk• 6 years ago

Maybe the parent was talking about how artificial insemination might stem decline, not necessary about how it can grow the population. For example, artificial insemination might help the population remain unchanging.

d1zzy• 6 years ago

Easy solution: allow for more immigration :)

jslakro• 6 years ago

Pandemials

Melting_Harps• 6 years ago

We really are heading into some Brave New World situation, aren't we?

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.

robertlagrant• 6 years ago

This could result in some crazy cat-fishing stories in 9 months.

nostromo• 6 years ago

Don't start selling your sperm on a FB group without a good lawyer -- you may accidentally make yourself a legal guardian and be required to pay child support.

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.

aidenn02• 6 years ago

Surrogacy and sperm donation aside, in many states, the husband is legally the father, even if a paternity test shows otherwise, leading to men who divorce their cheating spouses being on the hook for financially supporting the result of the affair.

thisisnico2• 6 years ago

That is truly a nightmare situation that would drive me to suicide. I couldn't imagine a more horrible situation to be in.

Fezzik• 6 years ago

In what states is this true? I’m pretty sure it’s not true in any US state the way you have it stated. There is a rebuttable presumption that a husband is the biological father to a child born during wedlock (or a child born within 300 days after divorce, in Oregon, as an example). Disestablishing paternity once you have a DNA test is an easy matter, and DCS (Department of Child Support) will do the disestablishing for you if there is an issue where a mother is seeking child support. Source: I establish/disestablish fathers all the time as part of my job... this is not legal advise.

rootsudo• 6 years ago

This is interesting, and I wonder how a surrogate marketplace would fare in the likes of like airbnb...

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.

jedberg2• 6 years ago

A donor on Known Donor Registry told me that he used to donate to a big sperm bank but that it was too clinical and cold.

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.

searchableguy• 6 years ago

Do they not have machines in US like china?

0] https://youtu.be/QAZfHHi58AU

jedberg2• 6 years ago

Sadly no. Just CRTs with DVD players and plastic chairs with puppy pads.

beefman• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/3AFf6

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

But... why? Why would you, in the middle of a pandemic, be emboldened to have a child? Did the financial situation of people wanting artificial insemination improve? Did it get harder to adopt? Are people loving their partners *more* thanks to the pandemic? Has seeing other people struggle being locked in with kids created a wish to personally replicate the same?

Very curious...

Bakary• 6 years ago

There are many aspects to sperm donation that hit a raw social/emotional/cultural/instinctual nerve.

— 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.

jaygray0919• 6 years ago

Seems like eugenics to me. Isn't this mengele-redux; DNA-based population management?

The Sperm Kings Have a Problem: Too Much Demand

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