Category: Sperm Donation

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Podcast Sperm Donation

Golden State

This is a long video, but it’s absolutely fascinating and amazing—how they caught the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo.

Just to be clear: I’m thrilled he was caught! But it’s crazy that the same technology used to find this evil man was also used to find me, a private, law-abiding citizen.

What’s even wilder is that DeAngelo actually had more privacy rights than me on Ancestry.com and 23andme. The data from those sites can’t be used for crime fighting–he was found through a separate, much smaller site that is similar to the big two, but users have to explicitly opt-in to allow their data to be used for law enforcement. His capture was delayed by a couple of years because he had privacy rights that I didn’t.

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Sperm Donation

I don’t have to tell you anything. But I will give you health records.

Great discussion about sperm donor privacy on The Gist Podcast today. Thanks Mike Pesca for cutting to the heart of the matter.

After I talk to other sperm donors, my opinions might evolve, but my belief is:

  • There are reasonably good arguments for donor conceived individuals to get updated health records about their sperm donors. I really don’t have an issue with that.
  • Donor conceived individuals have no right whatsoever to any other information about their sperm donors, if the donor doesn’t want to give it out.

The donor conceived individual who tracked me down, in the same way that the Golden State Killer was found using familial DNA matching, informed that, in her belief, I had no right to privacy whatsoever. I found her entitled attitude to be jaw-droppingly counterproductive.

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Site News Sperm Donation

Introducing the Donor Privacy Initiative

Americans believe in privacy. On any poll that relates to the topic, no matter how the question is phrased, large supermajorities of over 70% agree about its importance.

Most sperm donors, particularly those who donated decades ago, were promised lifetime anonymity. The decision they made to donate was based on that promise. Yet modern DNA test kits have allowed the curious genetic offspring of sperm donors to play detective and find out the identities of people they would never have been able to through any legal channels.

I think that most Americans, if they stopped and thought about this issue for a minute, would agree that something isn’t quite right about this.

I have a story that is soon going to be told and I hope it brings people around to a different point of view.