Adventures with sperm donors - the third installment

Adventures with sperm donors – the third instalment
It’s all about the money!
© Melina Magdalena (2007)

i. subversity
It is illegal in Australia to buy and sell body parts. This means that I cannot sell off a kidney, an egg, some skin or a knee-joint to help someone in need. I can give these away if I choose, but I cannot be recompensed for my troubles.

Interestingly, body parts include bodily fluids – not just blood, but sperm. Before I was aware of this, I put together little ads for noticeboards around the universities, offering to pay cash for the donation of sperm. My notices were brightly coloured, with strips cut along the bottom, showing my email address for making contact. Then, being obsessed by email and completely possessed by the idea of making a baby, I sat at my computer like a broody hen waiting for dozens of virile and poverty-stricken male students to make contact and offer me their sperm. I even had a set of questions planned for sorting whose sperm I wanted.

In my seven or so attempts with this process, I received a grand total of one response.

Now I acknowledge – it’s potentially embarrassing to be observed, ripping off an email address from the bottom of a notice that is offering cash for your donation of sperm, but I am still astounded by the lack of responses, given that these young men didn’t see me putting up the notices. Were they all just too busy studying and making ends meet in their conventional ways? Were they savvy enough to know that what I was proposing was illegal?

Is it all about the money?

There are two songs whose subversive themes of independent baby-making consume me.

“All That She Wants” (Ace of Base)
and
“All I wanna do is make love to you” (recorded by Heart)

The theme of these songs is the conception of a child by a woman who wants nothing from the man she sleeps with, except his sperm to start the baby. I find this completely exhilarating and liberating.

You cannot imagine how many times I have fantasized about emulating the example set by these fine songs. If I had it in me, and if I trusted my gut instincts to be able to pick men who were healthy, I would probably have long-conceived my children by risking having sex with men I didn’t know, and who didn’t know me. Do you understand where I’m coming from? This has nothing to do with the thrill of the chase, with the idea of having sex with a man; it’s not about the taking of control over a man; it’s not about deceiving a man; it has very little to do with the man in fact – it is purely to do with the making of babies and children.

However, I am sexually maladroit and too well informed about male power and the potential of disease, to travel down this path with any sense of realism. I do find it ironic in the extreme that this is the path oft chosen by women who have children out of wedlock, whether they choose this consciously or not.

ii. heteronormativity
As a woman-identified-woman and a feminist, I disallow myself this path. So all that is open to me is a path less travelled* – the path of open, honest intention, commitment and the eternal risk of being maligned, misunderstood and even having my child taken from me because its father is a known donor.

In seeking a donor, and in my intention to raise the child outside of a heterosexual couple, I have no choice but to allow the law to advantage me where it does, and accept that in the greater part, the law naturally disadvantages me. (On the one hand, I can claim Parenting Payment at the Single Rate. On the other hand, as a single lesbian in South Australia, I have no way of accessing fertility clinics unless I pay a lot of money or travel interstate.)

Where does this leave a woman who – on the one hand desires to fulfil her own potential in bearing a child and who is exhorted by her Prime Minister to do so, but who on the other hand is not recognised as a legitimate child-bearing woman by that Prime Minister or his government? What is the correct course of action for her to take? Must she pander to heteronormativity and dupe some man into inseminating and marrying her?

Who is better off within an unhappy marriage… an arranged marriage… a marriage of convenience? Is it better for the woman (the wife, the mother)? Is it better for the man (the husband, the father)? Is it any better for the children?

It has been statistically proven that marriage is good for men, and that marriage is not good for women**. Marriage is only better for children if the level of material support offered them within the marriage is better than they would have while living with a single mother. It is a truism that single women cannot support their children the way married women can. We are bound by the laws of the society in which we dwell – these laws do not allow us the material resources to raise our children in anything but poverty. Naturally, we are blamed for making the “choice” to do so.

Besides, men these days are wise to the wiles of women. The prevailing stereotype is the man who will not commit, will not support, will not acknowledge the needs of his female partner whose biological clock ticks like that time bomb in the pit of her hollow womb. Men who do not consider a wife and children to be a financial liability and an impediment to their freedom would seem to be a decided minority these days. Bitter divorcees and non-custodial fathers scream loud and long at being deprived of their fatherly and husbandly rights and being forced to cough up because their fickle wives have opted out of partnership with them. For such men it would seem that it is indeed all about the money. (If you think this is unfair, why don’t you consider the effect their behaviour has on the children they claim to love so dearly.)

iii. giving
I’ve never read The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), and I haven’t thought a great deal about altruism. I’ve been confronted during my activism by the ideas that my upbringing and social conditioning determine my worldview. I accept that it’s impossible for me to have no prejudices. To be human means to judge and to make meaning according to my experiences. My past judgments affect the way I see the world today.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to give without a corresponding belief that my gift is worth something. In giving, I naturally accord a value to my gift. To some people, this seems to detract from the purity of giving simply because I am able to do so, and devalues the meaning I find in choosing to give. The prevailing idea seems to be that (because of the fallacy of altruism) one only ever gives with the expectation of getting in return, whether directly (i.e. karma, just desserts) or indirectly (what goes around comes around).

I recall a passage in the Siddur*** I used at a Reform Jewish Synagogue about different kinds of giving. One of the highest forms of giving was to give without needing the receiver to know that you were the one who gave to them. Next up the hierarchy was to give without knowing who would receive; again the receiver would not know who had given.

Is this the gift to which I aspire to, in seeking a man who will donate sperm so that I can have a child?

iv. rationalism
The dynamic that forces money issues into the raising of a child is the economic rationalist concept that it is irresponsible to bear a child outside of a world of material security. This argument suggests people on the edge of survival have many children in the knowledge that only a few of them might survive, and that people whose livelihoods are newly assured will have many children because they know these children will survive. This argument provides facts and figures that prove how expensive it is, to raise children. This argument suggests people who live in affluence really have better things to do, than raise children. This argument permits advertisers to promote junk food and consumer goods to children because cajoling their parents into spending money on them is really all that children are good for. Once those children are grown up (the sooner the better really), they will be out of their parent’s hair and able to engage with the world as a full-time consumer, thereby fulfilling their life’s purpose.

I come from a different place, a different understanding and a different kind of rationalism. For me, material security is a red herring. It is a figment of some economist’s imagination. It is not real. At any moment, conditions change. The trick is to adapt, to support, and to assist where one is able. That is what human beings are good at – living in community.

I am not trying to say that poverty too, is a figment of someone’s imagination. Financial stress is real. The fact that I finally have secure housing plays a large part in my determination to follow my dream. I just don’t think money is the deciding factor in whether one should bear children, and I don’t think people with a lot of disposable income have more reproductive rights than those who struggle.

v. responsibilities
Another stereotype about men and sex is that a man will tend to seek his sexual pleasure wherever it is to be found, with scant regard for (a) the appearance of the woman he is having sex with and (b) the comfort or pleasure derived by the woman he is having sex with. Of course – this stereotype is a sweeping and insulting generalisation that implies men in general do not care about their sexual partners, and that men are incapable of vicarious pleasure found in giving sexually to their partners. Despite the fact that my limited experiences with men support this generalisation, I do not subscribe to this belief.

However, I wonder – could it be true that a man would be more willing to give me his sperm if I had sex with him, even though any child so conceived would legally be his responsibility? This would seem to go against my argument that it is all about the money.

The baffling thing for me is that the question of finances has been raised by 10 of the 12 or so potential donors with whom I have been on the roundabout of will they or won’t they.

Perhaps these men don’t realise that the law in Australia makes a clear distinction between the fathers of children who are conceived through heterosexual intercourse and the fathers of children who are conceived through artificial or self-insemination?

As donors, men are not legally obliged to provide any material assistance towards the raising of the children they father, even if their names appear on the child’s birth certificate. Mothers and fathers do not have to bring the Child Support Agency into their little families. They can make private arrangements that may or may not include financial support from the father to the mother.

The main reason not to include the father’s name on the birth certificate seems to be a means for women to control how much the father of their child can interfere in their child’s life. A father’s name on the birth certificate is a step towards Family Court proceedings that may well end up awarding parenting rights to a donor father. This issue is kept strictly separate from the issue of child support.

The precept that to be a father is mainly about giving material support to the mother of one’s child has tainted any other possibility of what it means to be a father. This drives home the prevailing attitude that dictates that it is all about the money. It guarantees that people who attempt to discuss the creation of family before they bear children together, will start from a point of selfishness and materialism.

The responsibilities of a parent are towards the child, and not towards the other parent(s) of that child. Where responsibilities are concerned, it is not about who pays for what, so much as providing what a child needs to thrive and grow. Responsible parents must consider the roles they play in creating and sustaining the child’s home environment.

vi. rights
As a woman who chooses to bear and raise children outside of a heterosexual relationship, I also have the right and responsibility to make choices about how I wish to live and raise those children.

My proposition is radical only because the fact that women have raised children in this way for time immemorial is rendered invisible within the mainstream. It doesn’t make me wrong, and the mainstream right. The fact that I openly make the choice, rather than having it forced upon me through divorce or the death of my partner, should not affect the outcome.

I am not about cheating a man of his rights and his desires to be a father. It is not my intention to use a man to support my children and me. For me, the question of material support is irrelevant to the question of whether a man will give me his sperm so that I can have a child.

My rights as a mother are not about depriving another human being of his. If I take the responsibility for raising that child, then the father’s rights surely end where my responsibilities begin, whether or not he chooses to offer material support towards the raising of that child.

I have thought long and hard about the role a father could, would and should play in my child’s life. This is an important relationship. Like any human relationship, it depends entirely on the individuals involved. Despite our social conditioning, is not prescriptive. Different fathers want different kinds of relationships with their children.

My feeling is that on the whole, the men who have contacted me with regard to the possibility of donating sperm so that I can have a child are reluctant to give me their sperm because they feel that they are going to be somehow cheated of their rights as fathers. My feeling is that they have thought little about the rights of their child, and not at all about the mother’s rights.

I wonder what these prospective donors consider to be the responsibilities of a father towards his child, other than providing material support? What do they propose to contribute to their child’s well being? How do they propose to enrich their child’s life? Have they ever seriously thought about who they want to be, in the eyes and the life of their child?