My parents conceived me in 1979 in an era when sperm donation, even if it wouldn’t have been openly discussed, was already a well-established practice in the U.S. In 1979, American obstetricians only used “donated” sperm to help heterosexual, married couples when the man was diagnosed with infertility. The few sperm banks that existed wouldn’t sell sperm to single women or lesbian couples, and few doctors in private practice, like Dr. Adler, would have helped unmarried women conceive. In turn, the doctors who controlled this business also controlled the sperm. Today, sperm donors are tested thoroughly for any physical or psychological health issues in their own history or their family’s history. Some sperm banks boast that it’s easier to get into Harvard than have your sperm approved by their bank for selling. In the 1970s and for much of the 1980s, the decision about what sperm to sell was almost entirely in the doctor’s hands and completely unregulated. Furthermore, couples had little say about what donor the doctor might choose, and as recent stories have revealed, many doctors lied to their patients about the donor’s profile. These doctors didn’t anticipate the accessibility of twenty-first century technology that would have the ability to expose their lies.
The secrecy surrounding sperm donation has a long history. Because sperm donation doesn’t require any complicated technology, it’s far from a new practice. The now infamous gynecologist J. Marion Sims, who practiced his experimental gynecological techniques on enslaved women, wrote about his failures trying to impregnate women using artificial insemination. He never succeeded in his experiments, we now know, because he misunderstood the timing of women’s menstrual cycles and thought that women were most fertile during their periods. Some journalists and academics believe that William Pancoast, another medical doctor, is the first known American doctor to successfully inseminate a woman using a donor’s sperm in 1884, but the history is murky because this account was written about twenty-five years after its supposed occurrence.2