A daddy you just can’t bank on…
Painful questions the children of sperm donors can’t answer
ERONICA Kondile* is angry. She has been on a quest to trace her roots for the past year and she has been asking her mother, Maureen, about her father’s whereabouts. “I don’t know where he is. He deserted us – simply walked out the door and disappeared, leaving no contact details,” her mother, Maureen, repeatedly tells her.
Finally worn down by her nagging, Maureen says Veronica was fathered by a stranger who anonymously donated his sperm to a sperm bank.
Maureen tells her that when she was 37 she desperately wanted to have a child, but she didn’t have a partner. Her biological clock was running down and the chances of finding a suitable partner soon were slim.
She was a successful lawyer with her own practice and she knew she had the financial and emotional wherewithal to single parent a child, so she made the huge decision to be artificially inseminated.
She approached the Androcryos Sperm Bank in Parktown, Joburg, one of only two sperm banks in South Africa.
“I would like the semen from a black, fairly light-skinned man,” she specified. He must be about 1.95m tall and not overweight. He must also have a tertiary education.”
The success rate of artificial insemination is between 30 percent and 40 percent.
Being a sperm donor is not as simple as it may sound. Only a small percentage of men are accepted. Candidates are vetted thoroughly and have to qualify on several counts.
Potential donors must be between 18 and 30 years old, and DNA and background health checks are carried out for sexually and familiarly transmitted diseases.
Finally, the potential donor has a full psychological examination to assess their mental well-being.
A donor must provide sper m 30 times over 12 months. Once the sperm is frozen it is put into quarantine. Repeat HIV and hepatitis B tests are carried out after every 10th specimen.
Maureen can’t complain. She is one of the fortunate recipients who
Vconceived shortly after her third artificial insemination. Seventeen years later, her daughter Veronica is attractive, black and light-skinned. She doesn’t resemble her mother, but she shares Maureen’s interests and also wants to study law.
Peggy Birrell-Senior, medical technologist at the Androcryos private sperm bank, says all donors and recipients are strictly anonymous. The donors are allocated a code and only this appears on the databases.
“Donors are usually students needing extra cash or men with a genuine desire to help childless people conceive,” Birrell-Senior says.
“Men also… freeze sper m for later use. Some men want children, but only much later in life, or they are ill.”
Others want care-free sex.
“Once they freeze their sperm and store it at Androcryos Sperm Bank they have a vasectomy to avoid impregnating any sexual partners until they are ready to become fathers.”
Dr Herman Netshidzivhani, the first qualified black fertility doctor in South Africa, has rooms at the Park Lane Fertility Clinic. In 20 years, he has assisted thousands of women.
“In my opinion, all children born from an anonymous donor’s sperm want to know their father. Children feel a need to find their roots and put a face to the man responsible for their existence. From the child’s point of view it’s understandable.”
We all need the sense of belonging derived from having biological parents. But children conceived through artificial insemination, like many adopted children, don’t get to know their biological fathers because of legal inhibitions.
Could children like Veronica risk unknowingly dating or falling in love with a brother or sister?
“This is a possibility, but it’s not very probable,” Netshidzivhani says. “A DNA test would clarify if a couple is biologically related.”
Dr Herhold Moatshe, of the Sthemba Clinic in Rustenburg, runs the only all black fertility centre in South Africa and is no stranger to artificial insemination procedures.
“Women specify what qualities they are looking for, but it’s difficult to provide precisely what they want.
“How can one promise to provide the semen from a man with the exact height, hair and eye colour and level of education a woman wants?”
Moatshe says sperm is often collected from HIV-positive men whose partners want to have their children, but don’t want to have unprotected sex for fear of contracting HIV or passing it on to their newborns.
In these cases, once the sperm is collected, there is a sperm wash to eliminate HIV. Once the sperm is free of all traces of HIV, an intra-uterine or an intralytoplasmic sperm injection is performed.
However one views it, sperm donation is a blessing for the infertile or those yearning to become parents. But for the offspring of anonymous sperm donors, like Veronica Kondile, the question “Whom do I belong to?” will loom large.