Ryan represents the next wave of industrial rationality. She’s bringing the innovations of Costco and Burger King to the business of human flesh.

. . .

She charges $2,500 per embryo . . . Ryan figures each batch costs about $22,000 to make. The yield from the first round was 26 embryos . . . At $2,500 per unit, a batch of 26 viable embryos would gross $65,000 and net $43,000.

. . .

All the donors are white, since the clients are white. Ryan is no bigot, but business is business. “There is simply a demand for white babies,” she shrugs. In fact, three-quarters of the DNA in her first two batches comes from blue-eyed blonds. This isn’t eugenics; it’s narcissism.

Please, please take the time to read the whole article. We’d love to warn you that this is where we’re headed, but folks, we’re there already.

When I first met Alana, I was at Columbia University Law School screening my documentary film, Eggsploitation. I had done an earlier screening during the day at Fordham University Law School and noted at both of these screenings “they” were following me. They being the women who typically attend my screenings to give me pushback and reject and/or discount the message of the film, that “donating” (often times it is selling) your eggs is risky and potentially quite harmful to young women. These women who follow me around are someway involved in the fertility industry. They are reproductive lawyers, egg brokers, women who they themselves struggled with infertility and used egg donors and/or surrogates to conceive. Understandably, these women have issues with the film.

But on this particular night, I noticed in the back of the auditorium, a young woman holding up a card board sign which read, Anonymous Us. I had only recently heard about this website and the project which was being run by this woman Alana S. Newman. At one point during the Q and A period of the night, Alana raised her hand and was called upon to ask her question. She challenged the audience to consider the children being created in this enterprise, the children intentionally created and largely separated from their biological mothers and fathers (in the case of sperm donation) and half-siblings. Her message resonated with many in the audience. I chatted briefly with Alana after the screening. She was off to play music at a gig she had that evening and she handed me her music CD which was packaged in a paper bag. That music I would later use in my next film, Anonymous Father’s Day, which highlights the stories of donor-conceived people – including Alana herself, one of the people interviewed in this film.

The next day, while reading my google alert news on the film, I was mortified to see Alana referred to as “Shark Tank Girl” by one of the women attending the screening. This woman maintains a blog on third-party reproduction and had attended my screenings at Fordham and Columbia screenings. She wrote:

I was civil and level, as neutral as I could be in my questioning until Shark tank girl-well ,I only took one little pot shot, couldn’t help it. I asked is there a model by which ART is practiced elsewhere that they think is done according to their standards and that they would consider acceptable and I got an answer that made no sense-it might have, but it was just blah blah blah, nothing substantive. Which was when Shark Tank girl chimed in on how in other countries there is a homestudy done just like they do for adoption, to see if it’s a home and family fit to be parents. My pot shot was-maybe they also do a better job of screening donors too (this girl supposedly passed through and donated twice herself). I reminded the Panel that I was asking about all ART and not just Donors and that in adoption there are different risks & liabilities for placing an existing child compared to who is entitled by law to have children through any form of reproduction.

Why on earth, I wondered, was this woman calling Alana “Shark Tank Girl”? I couldn’t imagine an older woman calling Alana by such a pejorative name. I mean, as an older woman myself, watching another older woman ignore this young person’s very real pain and concerns and calling her names? So I emailed Alana, who gave me the backstory. Alana had once been invited to speak at a workshop for people considering having children via reproductive technologies – she felt she had been thrown into a shark tank because her message was not well received and she is seen as an enemy of the infertility industry.

Since then, I’ve appeared on the Dr. Oz, addressing these issues, with Alana in the audience. And of course “they” were there too. Alana’s attacker wrote again here:

Shark Tank Girl stood up to say that she is 5 months PG, that she has been an Egg Donor and is a Donor Offspring herself, here at The Dr Oz Show to say that Anonymous Donor Conception is wrong because it strips the child of their rightful PARENTAL connection to, you guessed it, the Donor. A parent and a donor are not the same thing.

Recently, Alana has come under fire again for her latest piece calling out the “new sexual predators” as it relates to older women and gay men needing young fertile women in order for them to have a child. Of course her analogy went over like a lead balloon within the industry.

Here’s what I know about Alana. She is strong and powerful and gentle and loving. She has a heart for people struggling with infertility but wants to be sure we don’t harm others, exploit the poor, see or treat children as commodities in our desire to pro-create. She’s fearless in her willingness to go anywhere and talk to anyone – even if that means being thrown to the sharks.

Click on the image below to see a larger version of the postcard with photos from the trip.

You made this possible.

Thank you.

I think in a way that I am still a little bit numb, but when the feelings come, they are strong and painful. It’s always on my mind. Always.

The worst part that I see so far, is that no one in my circle of family and friends even has the slightest clue as to what I am feeling. I should put an exception on that though, because, despite my parents wishes, I told my 30 year old daughter. She was nearly as crushed as I was. We identified so strongly with my Dad’s Scottish heritage. It was part of who we were.

I have not told my 25 year old son yet, as he is in the military, stationed in another state, and I know this will crush him. I want to do it in person. I have to be there for him.

Until then, I will wait for my DNA results to come back and hope that I can find a few clues as to who this man was. My mom only had very vague memories of what the doctor told her when he did the procedure. I was able to find out the name of the doctor and find some of his background information online, but he died about 15 years ago. I know my parents only wanted children, and that maybe, at best, the donor only wanted to help someone.

The unfortunate part is that now, all the pain and misery is heaped on me. Knowing what I know now, I strongly believe that Sperm Donation HAS to be an open procedure. That the child should full access to the donor’s information. It’s the only moral thing to do.

Struggling,

S.G.

She is dating a woman. She is trying to conceive a child. She wants to use free sperm from a man she trusts. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration won’t let the Oakland woman enter motherhood quite so easily. Under federal regulations, the donor must undergo procedures and verify his health in tests that the woman sees as expensive and time-consuming. So “Jane Doe,” as she calls herself, is suing. Cause of Action, a government accountability group, has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on her behalf against the FDA . . .

What Jane Doe wants to do — get pregnant on her own, without paying for a fertility clinic or a sperm bank, and without government interference — is not uncommon in the Bay Area, where many same-sex couples live, local medical experts say. But the FDA does not permit those informal transactions. A donor is required to have his blood and urine tested in a medical setting within a week of every body-tissue transfer. Those rules, argues Cause of Action in the lawsuit filed last week, are “costly and burdensome” and “unconstitutional to the extent that they operate to regulate noncommercial, sexually intimate choices and activity.”

Smith’s take is:

I think she’s right. If she had intercourse with her friend and got pregnant, she would be pregnant. The government doesn’t regulate that activity. I don’t see how it can regulate private insemination.

But I also think that in private artificial inseminations, the donor should be the legal father — just as in sexual intercourse. Equality, after all, is equality.

Your thoughts?

“And a sociological account should be only the beginning: if we are committed to the wisdom and ethicality of selling sex cells, we must face honestly not only the great blessings but also the difficult issues these markets raise for sellers and buyers alike — and most especially for the children whom these markets create but who have no say in entering into them.”

Anonymous International continues to be a theme, this time on the silver screen.

Vince Vaughn is slated to play a sperm donor in a film entitled Starbuck. This is a Hollywood remake of a French-Canadian film that seems to have been a hit, earning 86% from critics and 98% from audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Here’s how Variety describes Starbuck:

Vaughn is in talks to play a middle-aged man whose life is turned upside down when he learns he has fathered 533 children through sperm donation. When a few hundred of the children express an irrepressible need to meet their father, the donor codenamed Starbuck, he must decide whether he will step up and reveal his identity.

A new Bollywood film also has a sperm donation plot. Vicky Donor, according to The Times of India tells the story of

Vicky Arora (Ayushmann Khurana) is an aimless and jobless Delhi boy. He is persuaded by Dr Baldev Chaddha (Annu Kapoor), an infertility clinic owner to become a sperm donor that could help childless couples. After much resistance, he finally agrees to the act to earn some easy money. Soon he makes a fortune out of his potent attribute. He also marries the love of his life Ashima (Yaami Gautam) but things take a drastic turn when she comes to know about his covert contributions to the sperm bank.

A separate article in in the Times of India mentions, almost in passing, that the film has caused of “rush” of men wanting to donate sperm.

I would be very curious to know how these filmmakers came to this subject for their films. It would also be interesting to know what attention, if any, they give to those conceived by sperm donation, how they feel and what they think.

This, of course, is why we made Anonymous Father’s Day, to give a voice to, as someone used to say, “the rest of the story.”