Science and Technology Committee - Fresh sperm for sale

Fresh sperm for sale

Currently, the HFE Act only regulates gametes that have been stored and used in treatment. A website “Mannotincluded.com” offers an “introduction” service, where clients can get fresh sperm from anonymous donors for insemination. Should this be subject to regulation and licensing?

Legal status: Lawful and unregulated

Scientific status: Technology currently available

Links:
http://www.hfea.gov.uk/PressOffice/Archive/35645735

Anonymous introduction services!?!

posted 06/02/2004 - 18:35 by Tim

Roll up! Roll up all you lesbian couples and single women [1]. Buy a fatherless [2] child for just £1490 [3]! Select the donor by height, weight, ethnicity, hair colour, eye colour, blood group, educational history and more [4]. An offer not to be missed!

Should this sort of thing be subject to regulation? Of course it should!

The very name of this company (ManNotIncluded) is insulting to the male sex and our God-given role in procreation. "Mannotincluded.com believe that it is every woman's right to have children if they so wish" [5]. Well I believe that it is every child's right to have a father, and that this right takes precedence over any a prospective mother might have to bear children. The HFE Act 1990 wholeheartedly agrees with me: treatment services shall not be provided "unless account has been taken of the welfare of any child who may be born... (including the need of that child for a father)" [6]. The scope of this Act should be broadened to outlaw this sort of "anonymous... introduction [sic!] service" [7], whose aims clearly contravene the spirit of the law. This should be done as a matter of urgency, before any more fatherless children are willfully brought into the world.

[1] http://mannotincluded.com/qa.asp
[2] "If a single woman is inseminated in the UK without a male partner, the resulting offspring will have no legal father" [http://mannotincluded.com/qa.asp]
[3] http://mannotincluded.com/price_silver.asp
[4] http://mannotincluded.com/qa.asp
[5] http://mannotincluded.com/about.htm
[6] http://www.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1990/Ukpga_19900037_en_2.htm
[7] http://www.mannotincluded.com/DonorPack.pdf

Anonymous introduction services!?!

posted 09/03/2004 - 17:32 by Leslie Bean

"unless account has been taken of the welfare of any child who may be born... (including the need of that child for a father" Actually, this part about the need for a father is no longer to be a part of the Act. I guess the HFEA recognise that in today's society, the mere presence of a man in not necessarily the "B all and end all" and in fact, the important thing is that the child has a stable and loving environment in which to grow.
Also, man's role in procreation is not "god-given" and procreation is a seperate issue from parenting. "Mannotincluded" does exactly what it says on the tin. It provides sperm (so man's role in procreation is, in fact, safe there) but it does not supply a father for the child to grow up with. But then, no-one can gaurantee that anyway. My only issue with Mannotincluded is that the sperm is fresh and I worry about the safety of the women and children born as a result of it in terms of undetected STIs.

Message from the committee secretariat

posted 09/02/2004 - 15:14 by robertsa

I suspect that the difficulty here is defining the scope of any legislation. The Government might feel anxious not to legislate what goes on the bedroom.Where would you draw the line?

Would it cover any commercial transaction involving gametes? Would this cover any other scenarios?

Should it cover private agreements between individuals? A company could claim that all it is doing is putting people in touch? What they do with their gametes is up to them, it could be argued.

A further problem would be websites operating overseas. How could they be policed?

What goes on in the bedroom

posted 10/02/2004 - 11:04 by Josephine Quint...

Obviously Government's do not interfere in the bedroom, unless there are issues of underage sex or the like.
However - it is difficult to equate what goes on in the bedroom in the natural course of events with the production and commercialisation of sperm as undertaken by Man-not-included (nice discriminatory name there by the way) and others of that ilk.

There are regulations in place for the harvesting and distribution of human tissue and these will be ever more restrictive when the European Tissue Directive is implemented this year, so it will be impossible to avoid Government interference in this sphere anyway. If only these protocols went beyond issues of health and safety.

For what is always at stake in human reproduction, and the last consideration of most regulators, is the offspring.
Do we have no duty at all to the psychological and physical welfare of the children these new technologies produce? Some children will have a very hard time when they discover their father was selected and paid for over the internet, and his anonymous sperm couriered in a freezer container to the front door, with insemination performed with a turkey baster. If you want to pursue the feelings of offspring, try reading 'Living Laboratories' by the Australian feminist writer, Robyn Rowland.

What comes off in the bedroom...

posted 10/02/2004 - 17:08 by Tim

Perhaps I am a bit too morally conservative for this post-modern age, but I see no reason why the bedroom should be off-limits to the law. In the past, there have been countless Acts related to this arena: the age of consent, rape, buggery, zoophilia, prostitution and incest all spring to mind. Only last year, this government introduced a law against necrophilia (a curiously old-fashioned law, in our 'if-it-feels-good-just-do-it,-so-long-as-nobody-gets-hurt' age!).

But getting back to the point: I am sure, Mr Roberts, you are right that defining the scope of this legislation will be difficult. However, I very much hope this is not an argument against trying. Equally, I would like to think that it is morals, rather than feelings (especially ones of anxiety), that influence government policy in these matters (...more fool me?!).

To answer your questions: I do not think, in the first instance at least, that it would be practicable to control private agreements between individuals, even where money is involved. This does not mean that I condone such actions; merely that I cannot see how they could be policed effectively. But a company that sets out to facilitate such an action is in a different category altogether, and could (should) most certainly be regulated. This would serve many purposes, not least ensuring the welfare of the children and avoiding unwitting incest (by checking with the HFEA Register, for example). That such companies are merely putting people in touch (anonymously!) does not affect this, as far as I can see; this may be all that a pimp is doing, but he stands no less guilty under the law for it.

What comes off in the bedroom...

posted 09/03/2004 - 17:51 by Leslie Bean

It is hardly the same as a pimp. It is not a "bedroom act", it is a transaction which there would be no need for if our Government would catch up with the times and allow homosexual couples to access treatment on the nhs rather than leaving it up to the individual hospitals to discriminate arbitrarily.
My concern is also around the safety of the sperm as it is fresh and there are no gaurantees that the donor has not become infected withan STI between the time of testing and donation.
Perhaps, if our laws were less discriminatory and recognised that lesbian couples and single women are going to have children regardless of the obstacles put in their way, then websites like Mannotincluded will become unnecessary. I believe these services should be subject to strict controls to ensure the SAFETY of the women (and therefore the unborn child). However, it is true that if everyone could have access to fair and unbiased treatment on the NHS this website may never have needed to be set up.

What comes off in the bedroom...

posted 17/03/2004 - 13:01 by Tim

I used pimping merely to illustrate that "putting people in touch" can, in certain circumstance, be a crime. I did this to counter the Committee Secretariat's proposed defence that "A company could claim that all it is doing is putting people in touch". I did not compare the activity of pimping to that of ManNotIncluded (although there are certain parallels).

We appear to disagree fundamentally on whether the ideal environment for raising a child is the traditional family unit consisting of the child's biological mother and father. This is clearly the pattern God (through direct revelation and through nature) intends to be normative. To talk of lesbian couples and single women "having children" is a biological nonsense. It is a sad irony that, despite their name, ManNotIncluded are prominently trying to recruit more men for their dubious activities ("Any man over 19 and under 45 is welcome to register with ManNotIncluded"... "your participation is greatly appreciated." [1])

[1] https://www.mannotincluded.com/donorform.asp

anonymous sperm banks

posted 11/02/2004 - 17:13 by johnmryder

I think the problem is the genetic safety of the sperm (hereditary diseases, etc) and the morality of to whom it is given, but otherwise I see no problem.

is a father a disease you might get in the future?

posted 12/02/2004 - 00:48 by Fiona

so johnmryder - are you saying that all those children born from donor insemination should (a) be denied any knowledge about their father's experiences, personality, interests, beliefs, and (b) are stupid and unreasonable for wanting to know?

Do you really think a father is reducible to a list of hereditary diseases?

Donor conception is the new slavery

posted 13/02/2004 - 17:18 by Christine

As one of those adults unfortunate enough to have been born from the clinical act of donor insemination, who has been denied any knowledge about their father's experiences, personality, interests, beliefs, and who has been called ungrateful for complaining that such a morally indefensible way of creating human beings is wrong, I would like to suggest that donor gamete technology represents a new form of human slavery.

Gametes are bought and sold, and traded across international boundaries not simply by shrewd commercial operators (like Mannotincluded.com operation) but even with the blessing of the HFEA who allow the import and use of frozen sperm from the Cryos bank in Denmark. Such gametes, fresh or frozen, bought or bartered, are the raw materials of life, intended for the deliberate creation of new human beings. When visible living people are bought and sold for the purpose of satisfying the needs of the purchaser we call it slavery, but when gametes are used to provide babies to circumvent (but not cure) infertility or to assuage the reproductive vanity of the involuntarily childless, we call it family building.

The essence of human life should not be treated as a commodity.