Focus Features

Lisa Cholodenko’s comedy The Kids Are All Right celebrates core family values: the responsibility of people to be loving parents, of kids to be good children and of family members to be there for each other. The twist in this film is that the two parents are a lesbian couple, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore). The drama is provided by the arrival on the scene of Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the Y-guy (as in Y chromosomes). Paul is the “sperm contributor” (the politically correct term for sperm donor), who helped Nic and Jules’ two children come into the world.

It is a sign of the times that the controversy surrounding the film does not revolve around the fact that Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska) have two mommies. Rather serendipitously, The Kids Are All Right is arriving in theaters as a national debate has erupted over artificial insemination, sperm contributors, marriage, parenthood, how best to raise healthy children, and whether or not to regulate the nation’s laissez-faire market in human semen. For example: A federal district judge is set to rule on the legality of California’s Proposition 8, anti-gay marriage law passed by voters. The Atlantic featured a sensationalist July/August cover story, “The End of Men: How Women are Taking Control—of Everything.” In July, the journal Pediatrics published a study, “US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents,” that claimed children born to lesbian mothers had greater self-esteem, more confidence and performed better academically than children raised by straight couples. And on May 31, the American Values Institute published a study, “My Daddy’s Name is Donor,” that claimed children conceived with contributed sperm suffered serious a higher incidence of mental health problems and drug abuse as a result of this non-traditional parentage.

The battle over sperm and society’s attempts to control its dissemination is not new. Regulating the male libido, and what issues from its release, has long been part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Leviticus 15:16 puts it this way: “If a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water and be unclean until the evening.” To this day, the Catholic Church continues to try, despite very public failure, to control what its priests do with their sperm. Keeping religious leaders celibate has been and is an effective way to guarantee that priests and nuns (both of whom are, in effect, married to God) die with no heirs but the church. And, perhaps out of internalized frustration, church leaders in turn have sought to control believers’ reproductive/sexual lives. The basic argument goes that sex was meant for procreation, not fun.

In line with Catholic dogma, many puritanical Protestants in America viewed sex-for-pleasure, not only as a sin but a waste of vital energy. Semen was a product to be strictly controlled. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist, brother of the breakfast cereal maker and anti-masturbation crusader, wrote that “neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism."  Between 1856 and 1919, the U.S. Patent Office granted inventors received 49 patents for anti anti-masturbation contraptions—14 for men and 35 for horses. The metal restrainers on the right and left were to be worn beneath the underwear, while the device on the left was designed to wake the sleeper in the event of a nocturnal erection.

Today, religious authorities are equally adamant about controlling sperm. Father John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary defines artificial insemination with the sperm of an outside donor as a “third-party invasion of the exclusive marriage covenant in a kind of mechanical adultery.” The “two-in-one-flesh union,” writes the late Hardon, a prominent Jesuit theologian, is the only appropriate way “for the generation of a child.” Strict Jews, like Catholics, don’t like anonymous semen either. “Placing in the womb of a married woman the seed of another man is a great abomination of the tent of Jacob,” said the late Israeli Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg. “This destroys all the sublime concepts of purity and holiness of Jewish family life.” Evangelical Christians are similarly outraged by the idea. Rev. Matt Slick writes that if a woman invites “the intrusion of another man’s seed into herself,” this is adultery. We should be “very careful not to let situational ethics govern biblical principles.”

In 1884, the first recorded case of human artificial insemination took place at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. Dr. William Pancoast, (who gained renown for his study of conjoined twins; above is his drawing of the double clitoris of Millie-Christine McCoy) discovered that one of his patients, an unnamed Quaker woman, was married to a man with a zero sperm count. So he invited her into his office for an examination, asked her to lay on the examining table, anaesthetized her with chloroform, and, as six of his students looked on, used a rubber syringe to impregnate her with semen contributed by one of the students. Nine months later, she gave birth to a boy, but she was never told how she conceived. The procedure was kept secret until 1909, 12 years after Pancoast’s death.

Today, 126 years later, the sperm market is a big, if selective, business. Only 1 or 2 percent of men who want to sell their sperm are accepted as sperm contributors—like those in the Xytex Cyro International Sperm Bank advert above. TSBC (The Sperm Bank of California) established in 1982, sells a vial of sperm for $605 (after you pay the $100 registration fee).

The man who is accepted as a viable contributor (no men under 5’7” need apply) receives five benefits:

• You receive free ongoing health screening throughout your participation in the donor program.
• You learn about your fertility and genetic history.
• You are paid $100 for every ejaculate that meets our minimum sperm count.
• You are paid $500 when you complete the exit blood test, which is required six months after you retire from the program.
• You help someone have the family they always wanted.

However, if you live in the European Union, you will have shop elsewhere. The EU regulates its sperm market, and Denmark is the sperm bank leader, partly because, unlike England, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway, the country allows contributors to remain anonymous.

In June, BeautifulPeople.com, a dating service for the certifiable pretty (you have to be voted in), established its Fertility Forum, a “virtual sperm and egg bank for people who want to have beautiful babies.” Beautifulpeople.com founder Robert Hintze puts it this way: "Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone—including ugly people—would like to bring good looking children in to the world, and we can't be selfish with our attractive gene pool." The Fertility Forum site explains: “[R]esearch shows that the two most important requirements for recipients of potential donors are attractiveness and intelligence. Due to the fact that BeautifulPeople.com members are aesthetically blessed, their genetic donation is in high demand. This, combined in some part to a global shortage created by failed government legislation, has created a high demand for new donors.” BeautifulPeople.com member Jon, an American, shown above, volunteered his sperm: “Would love to be a sperm donor for a single female or couple,” he said on Fertility Forum. While Eirik Bjørlo (center), a Norwegian, says, “I am available as a sperm donator.” The Count, another U.S. volunteer, says, “I don't see ANYTHING wrong with selecting sperm or eggs based on attractiveness.” However, Dr. David King of Human Genetics Alert is not amused: “It's the symptom of a very dangerous tendency in our society, a eugenic tendency I think, that says we can take control of everything to do with reproduction and have it exactly the way we want it.”

One of the progenitors of BeautifulPeople.com was the attempt in the 1920s by Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov to create a human-ape hybrid through artificial insemination. (Ivanov, a world-famous inseminator, had had great success creating never-before seen mammal hybrids.) The dream of the experiment’s funders in the Politburo was that such a human-apes might be deployed as “a living war machine,” or as Stalin reportedly told Ivanov: “I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat.” Setting up a camp in Africa, Ivanov tried to impregnate chimpanzees with human semen, with no success. Returning to Russia, he planned to use ape semen to impregnate five humans, but his orangutan died before the experiment could be carried out.

Ivanov’s experiments are not as far fetched as they sound. It is thought that after the ancestors of humans and chimps formed two separate lineages, they continued to interbred for 1.2 million years. And in 1977, J. Michael Bedford discovered that human sperm could penetrate the outer membranes of a gibbon egg, but not the membranes of monkey eggs. In Scotland, Dr. Calum MacKellar, director of research at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, has been pushing for legislation to prohibit inseminating chimpanzees with human sperm. He worries that medical entrepreneurs might try to develop a new human-chimp species to meet the growing demand for organ donations. “If they could create these humanzees who are substantially human but are not considered as humans in law, we could have a large provision of organs,” he told the Scotsman. “[Britain’s] Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill prohibits the placement of animal sperm into a woman. The reverse is not prohibited. It’s not even mentioned. This should not be the case.” Hugh McLachlan, who teaches applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Law and Applied Sciences, says he can see no ethical prohibitions to breeding humanzees, if such a feat were possible. (Above are photos of Oliver, who was said to be a humanzee from the Congo, but turned out to be a chimp, and an artist’s rendering of what a humanzee might look like.) “Any species came to be what it is now because of all sorts of interaction in the past” he says. “If it turns out in the future there was fertilization between a human animal and a non-human animal, it’s an idea that is troublesome, but terms of what particular ethical principle is breached it’s not clear to me.”

Add to the search for beauty and the beast the desire for brainiacs, and you have Robert Graham’s Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank that specialized in the semen of the intellectually gifted. Between 1980 and 1999, the Repository provided sperm that fathered more than 200 children—however none of them were the offspring of the three Nobel Prize winners Graham recruited for his scheme. David Plotz, in his book The Genius Factory, explores Graham’s attempt to raise the IQ of the nation. “He thought too many stupid people were having too many children,” said Plotz. “He wanted to change the world one sperm at a time.” While the success of Graham’s experiment is unknown, what he did succeed at was change the way that sperm was marketed. Today, consumers wanting to buy some sperm are able to peruse donor information, and pick out the attributes that are most important to them in a sperm contributor—height, weight, color of eyes, kind of hair and ethnic background.

If sperm is an input, the child is the output—an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 of such children are born every year in the United States. Above Cynthia Nixon and Ricky Martin are shown with their children, born with the aid of artificial insemination. Psychologists uniformly agree that children should know about the origins of their birth. Carole Lieber Wilkins advises parents of children conceived with the help of a sperm contributor to tell their children about the nature of their conception from birth, so that the parents can get used to vocalizing what might be an uncomfortable story during the time children are preverbal. Gayle Peterson, a family therapist, writes online: “All children love to hear the journey parents went through to have them. Whether it be driving through the proverbial ‘snowstorm’ to be born or finding the necessary combination to bring their bright little souls into their rightful place in your family, your children will bask in the glow of being ‘wanted’ and the efforts you went through to bring them into your lives.” While Jenifer Taubenheim cautions parents: “To lie and cover it up is to show that we believe that there is something wrong with the way that the child was conceived or the way that they came to be ‘ours.’ ”

Into this debate steps the Commission on Parenthood’s Future, and its recent report, “My Daddy’s Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived Through Sperm Donation.” The authors, Karen Clark, Elizabeth Marquardt, and Norval Glenn, reportedly discovered, in the words of Clark, that “sperm donor offspring struggle with serious losses from being purposefully denied knowledge of, or a relationship with, they sperm donor biological fathers.” According to the study authors, “donor offspring are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25. They are more than twice as likely to report having struggled with substance abuse. And they are more than 1.5 times as likely to report depression or other mental health problems.” However, a cloud hangs over the study. The Commission on Parenthood’s Future does not allow its studies to be peer reviewed. And the commission is part of the Institute for American Values, which maintains that children should be raised by their two biological parents. Or as the study authors advocate: “We must have an active public debate over whether it is ethical for the state to support the deliberate conception of children who will never have the chance to be raised by their biological parents.” It naturally follows that the institute opposes single motherhood, gay marriage, divorce of married couples, cohabitation outside of marriage and the conception of children via sperm contributors. And, apparently, it not only opposes these things, but skillfully cooks up the research to back up its claims. Above is an anti-artificial insemination demonstrator in Moldova.

However, Marquardt, Glenn and Clark are not spouting total nonsense. They rightly recommend that it is time for the U.S. government regulate the sperm market and that the United States follow the lead of Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden by ending the practice of allowing anonymous sperm and egg donations. (They don’t call for a ban on artificial insemination, like the law enacted—and protested against—earlier this year in Turkey.) In effect, such a law would grant children rights that supercede the desires of the sperm contributor to remain anonymous or of parents to deny their children this knowledge. Like Laser and Joni in The Kids Are All Right, children once they turn 18 should have the option of learning the identity of their biological father. In her article Sperm for the Lesbian Family, Kathy Belge advises readers to choose a sperm contributor who does not hide behind anonymity. She writes that some “donors are willing to make themselves known and even meet your child after a certain age. You may not think you want this option now, but it may be something that is important to your child in the future.”