Embedded in the sperm wars

Battles over reproductive territory are being fought all around us. Single women stand up for their rights to have IVF: the Roman Catholic Church, encouraged by our Prime Minister, tries to have the Sex Discrimination Act amended to prevent them from having access to assisted reproductive technology of any kind. Lesbian couples proudly show off their children while others warn against the destruction of the family if not the end of civilisation as we know it. A Victorian woman fights in court to conceive using her dead husband’s sperm, against state opposition. A politician making political capital out of the return of a lost son finds himself bewildered over sperm that failed to behave as expected and the son vanishes. Debates about the meaning of that episode have fuelled conversations for months.

It was to bring some of the opposing parties together and to demonstrate that it’s not a simple them-and-us, bipolar dispute that we edited Sperm Wars: The rights and wrongs of reproduction. Sperm Wars travels from wanting a baby to the reflections of those babies as adolescents and adults. On the way, it covers society’s attempts to police who can reproduce; the slippage between donating sperm, selling it, and parenting; the role of specialist clinics; how women who need sperm get it; and families that don’t fit the mould.

Sperm Wars includes chapters by men whose children were conceived in the traditional way and who are bringing them up in nuclear families, alongside chapters written by sperm donors and men who became fathers using sperm from donors. There’s a chapter about the historical significance of sperm and the changing ways in which they have been understood and used, from the shock of seeing little wriggly things under an early microscope to the even greater shock of using semen as hair gel in a movie or artistically splashed across photographs in galleries. A radical feminist asserts her long-standing opposition to all kinds of assisted reproduction.

Diverse families are well represented, as are different ways of being fathers including speculation on what, indeed, fatherhood might mean. Children conceived by donor sperm give very different accounts of what it has meant to them, and mothers who have garnered sperm in a variety of ways describe how they explain it all to themselves, their children, and inquisitive strangers. One riveting chapter reveals what happened when a lesbian couple contacted the man whose donated sperm gave them a baby. In the next chapter, his wife tells what it meant to her.

These are pivotal times for reproduction. Making babies is big business, and the business of making babies is no longer something that routinely happens in the privacy of one’s own home. The right to parent is hotly contested. Biology isn’t enough to determine who can reproduce, and the state is unsure how to respond to the challenges of the new reproductive technologies. Battles over access to and use of sperm are playing havoc with our ideas of what makes a family and who is or can be a parent. Laws, moral codes, and public understanding lag behind what’s desirable and technologically possible.

The debate is currently dominated by a new attention to children’s rights. This emphasis is reflected throughout this book as many of our contributors grapple with what’s best for their children, born and unborn, and for a just society. The move to children’s rights has been both good and bad. The good is obvious: children need to be protected, well-cared for, and loved. But there has been an often unidentified tendency to see rights as hierarchical rather than complementary and for the principle of children’s rights to be used as a weapon in the battle over the family.

We argue that the rights of adults, children, and the community need to be balanced. We are concerned about the divisiveness of current disputes over who may or may not reproduce, and the role of the federal government in limiting what may be understood as a family.

Sperm Wars contributes to the complex task of untangling the dilemmas posed by new reproductive possibilities in Australia and elsewhere. They are intimate as well as political, sexual as well as medical. The book grapples with raunchy urges and profound longings in a context where we all believe we have right on our side. It links abstract ideas with policy, personal stories with analysis of the broader debate.

We wanted to do this book because it’s easy to keep silent about reproductive choices; because it’s too easy to decide that these are private matters that don’t affect what is going on around us. Case after controversial case illustrates the complex responses evoked by sperm, paternity and fatherhood.

The Raelians, as well as some entirely reputable scientists, claim that sperm are not always necessary for reproduction. Peter Costello is urging us to breed for Australia while threatening to restrict Medicare funding for assisted reproduction. We’ve got US soldiers freezing their sperm to avoid becoming infertile victims of friendly fire from biological weapons. And sperm donors are paying maintenance for donor offspring despite agreements reached before conception.

Through all this confusion surrounding sperm and their proper uses, masculinity, fertility, and virility remain linked. Indeed, the decline in men’s fertility with increasing age is rarely publicly acknowledged, while the reproductive feats of men like Charlie Chaplin in their 80s and 90s are celebrated as a mark of virility, with no suggestion that a genetic test could reveal a little assistance from younger sperm. It’s still an insult to suggest that a man is infertile, just as it is a threat to his masculinity if he discovers that he has been fathering children who are not biologically his.

Of course, it’s more complicated than masculinity, although that’s complicated enough. For many people the biological connection between parent and child matters: we are no more than our genes, modified, perhaps, by our environment. Genes symbolise heritage and continuity. Within their spirals they carry the weight not only of biology but of family and culture. Before we knew about genes there were other markers of our place in the world, other definitions of us. Genes now represent a kind of barcode, inserted when egg and sperm meet.

In spite of the increasing knowledge that there are few one-to-one associations between genes and inherited traits or diseases or characteristics, people continue to think of a gay gene, an alcoholic gene, a sporting gene, or maybe even a shopping gene. With genes having such a potent influence on our imaginations, we can’t dismiss the controversy about sperm - and the genes they carry - as male anxiety. But it is clear that the anxieties provoked by trying to determine the correct role for sperm can have terrible repercussions. The murder-suicide of a lesbian mother and her two-year-old son, "Patrick", after a bitter Family Court battle is a very sad example, to which a chapter in the book is devoted.

Determining the role of the sperm donor has occupied courts across the globe. Recent cases in Victoria, Scotland, New Zealand, and London have concluded with the provision of extensive contact to sperm donors despite opposition from lesbian parents, but there are no equivalent cases of a sperm donor to a heterosexual couple seeking to be defined as a father. This is both startling and almost entirely unsurprising. While much of the rhetoric of neoconservatives suggests that the nuclear family is under attack, heterosexual families do not find themselves defending their borders in the same ways that same-sex families do.

The heterosexual family is read as inviolable, the homosexual family as lacking. How this is played out in relation to sperm donation is not straightforward. For many lesbian or single-parent families, or lesbian single-parent families even, relationships with donors are very positive. There are dads and donors, regular visits, sleepovers, and once-in-ten-years drop-overs. All kinds of relationships flourish, but when things go wrong we are left with a legal system that struggles to manage.

So why do donors not seek the role of father in heterosexual families? Perhaps this is because sperm donors are reluctant to displace another man as father, or because lesbian or single-parent families are simply not seen as real families. Or maybe men who have traditionally been donors - young students who donated anonymously - are different from these more recent donors to lesbian couples or single women.

Traditional donors had no expectation of knowing the children born as a result, let alone of having a parental relationship with them. The transaction was handled by an impersonal clinic. When a man is invited by two women or a single woman to donate sperm for a baby whom he will be able to know from birth, the dynamics are completely different. A man who thought he could be no more than a friend to this child might be surprised by the strength of his feelings of love and paternity. If he is a man with little expectation of fatherhood any other way, his relationship with the child may feel like his only chance to be a father.

One of the many complications of the donor’s desire to parent the child is that the non-biological mother can be elided in this process; it is as if her gender allows the donor to envisage a parental role in a way that the presence of a non-biological father would not. For many lesbian families this intrusion is unbearable. Another explanation for a donor’s desire to be a father is that feelings change once a baby is born.

What seemed so straightforward in the passion for pregnancy is transformed by the presence of this new person. A baby who gurgles and smiles and cries and stays awake all night is very different from the idea of a baby. The mothers who are caring for the baby day-to-day may feel less like including a donor in their close family circle, and the donor may feel more like a father once he has held the baby in his arms. Already facing considerable societal stigma, they find the addition of a third party into their lives untenable.

The transition to parenthood is recognised as such a pivotal stage of life that there is a whole branch of psychology devoted to it. New parents find their lives changing in unexpected ways, no matter how well prepared they are. When people need help with reproduction, they commonly must devote so much time and energy to getting pregnant that there is little mental space left for imagining the baby. It’s not unusual for parents who have used assisted reproduction, such as IVF, not to set up a nursery or buy baby clothes until the baby is born; there have been so many failures and disappointments that it can be hard to believe there will actually be a baby to sleep in the cot or wear the clothes. And parents whose children were conceived using anonymous donor sperm may say that getting the sperm was paramount; they had not thought of the implications for their children of being unable to locate the donor. It is not just single women, lesbian couples, and their donors, then, who find that things that seemed right before a baby was born look all wrong afterwards.

Challenges from sperm donors are rare, of course. Most cases decided by the courts have privileged the biological connection of the donor with the child. The favouring of biology over relationships can also be seen in so-called paternity fraud and where mix- ups have occurred in the use of sperm in IVF. One famous English case occurred when a white woman, Mrs A, who had a white husband, gave birth to mixed-race twins after IVF. The judge concluded that the sperm of Mr B, a black man attending with his wife for IVF, was accidentally used to fertilise Mrs A’s eggs. When Mr B sued for custody the judge refused to allow it, although she declared him to be the twins’ legal father. Mr A was left as their legal custodian, having failed in his bid to be also their legal father in spite of having his sperm supplanted by another man’s.

Anxiety over sperm goes hand-in-hand with anxiety about what makes a family. The burgeoning of reproductive technologies and the rise of sperm manipulation and donation have sharpened fears about the social order. The letters pages of the daily papers make it clear that some men are afraid that they have become redundant.

In intersecting and diverging ways, cases like the mixed-race IVF twins, the deaf lesbians, paternity testing scandals, politicians’ indiscretions, objections to spermatic art and so on tell us about families, being male or female, social values, the significance of genetic connection, and other complex, profound, slippery matters represented by sperm.

Men are still here, despite the decline in the Y chromosome and the lesbian baby boom. But the uses and misuses of sperm continue to confound science, popular culture, and the law. And us.