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Embedded in the sperm wars

By Heather Jones and Maggie Kirkman - posted Thursday, 26 May 2005


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.

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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.

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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.

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Article edited by Margaret-Ann Williams.
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About the Authors

Heather Grace Jones lectures in radio at Macquarie University and works for ABC Radio National. Sperm Wars: The rights and wrongs of reproduction, edited by Heather Grace Jones and Dr Maggie Kirkman, is available now.

Maggie Kirkman is a Research Fellow at the Key Centre for Women’s Health in Society, the University of Melbourne. Sperm Wars: The rights and wrongs of reproduction, edited by Heather Grace Jones and Dr Maggie Kirkman is available now.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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