Writing for New York Times Magazine Jennifer Egan covers the increasing use of sperm donors by single women.
Karyn said she hoped to join a population of women that everyone agrees is expanding, although by how much is hard to pin down because single mothers by choice (or choice mothers), as they are sometimes called, aren't separated statistically from, say, babies born to unwed teenagers. Between 1999 and 2003 there was an almost 17 percent jump in the number of babies born to unmarried women between ages 30 and 44 in America, according to the National Center for Human Statistics, while the number born to unmarried women between 15 and 24 actually decreased by nearly 6 percent. Single Mothers by Choice, a 25-year-old support group, took in nearly double the number of new members in 2005 as it did 10 years ago, and its roughly 4,000 current members include women in Israel, Australia and Switzerland. The California Cryobank, the largest sperm bank in the country, owed a third of its business to single women in 2005, shipping them 9,600 vials of sperm, each good for one insemination.
As recently as the early 60's, a "respectable" woman needed to be married just to have sex, not to speak of children; a child born out of wedlock was a source of deepest shame. Yet this radical social change feels strangely inevitable; nearly a third of American households are headed by women alone, many of whom not only raise their children on their own but also support them. All that remains is conception, and it is small wonder that women have begun chipping away at needing a man for that - especially after Sylvia Ann Hewlett's controversial 2002 book, "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," sounded alarms about declining fertility rates in women over 35. The Internet is also a factor; as well as holding meetings through local chapters around the country, Single Mothers by Choice hosts 11 Listservs, each addressing a different aspect of single motherhood. Women around the world pore over these lists, exchanging tips and information, selling one another leftover vials of sperm. (Once sperm has shipped, it can't be returned to the bank.) Karyn found both her sperm bank and reproductive endocrinologist on these Listservs. Three-quarters of the members of Single Mothers by Choice choose to conceive with donor sperm, as lesbian couples have been doing for many years - adoption is costly, slow-moving and often biased against single people. Buying sperm over the Internet, on the other hand, is not much different from buying shoes.
Even if these single women had managed to find a suitable man to marry them some women would have ended up as single moms anyway.
Discussion of single motherhood nearly always leads to talk of divorce. More than a third of American marriages end that way; often there are children involved, and often the mothers end up caring for those children mostly on their own, saddled with ex-spouses, custody wrangles and nagging in-laws. Considered this way, single motherhood would seem to have a clean, almost thrilling logic - more than a third of the time, these women will have circumvented a lot of pain and unpleasantness and cut straight to being mothers on their own.
Anyway, who wants all that hard work and compromise involved in being married?
While nearly every woman I spoke with had her own history of romantic near misses and crushing disappointments, most also saw advantages to proceeding on their own. "This baby will be my baby, only my baby," Karyn told me that night at Caliente Cab. "The thing I'm afraid of is that after doing this, I might not want to get married. It seems like a lot of hard work, a lot of compromise. Someone ends up short, and usually it's the mom, because by the time you get to the child and your husband and the dog, there's not much left."
Women want men with higher status. But there's a limited number of chiefs to go around and a lot of men up stuck being indians. Not every man is bright, funny, sexy, and successful. Not all the men who are want all the compromise and hard work involved in being married either.
So what still holds back many single women from having children on their own? The desire for security - financial and otherwise, the desire for a man to help out with all the work of raising children, religious beliefs, and fear of disapproval from friends, family, and co-workers.
The single mother route is a tough road to travel.
The fact that Shelby is in a relationship at all is unusual; the majority of mothers I spoke with - even those with older children - had remained single. Many expressed a willingness to date if the opportunity were to come along, but they work long hours to support their kids, and when they're not working, they want to see them. For all the comparisons between being divorced with children and having them alone, there are critical differences: an ex-husband who spends any time at all with his kids frees up pockets of time when a woman could potentially see someone new. Even minimal child-support payments would reduce the financial burden on her, and substantial ones could allow her to work less. Perhaps most important, a child with only one parent is immensely dependent on that parent, and the mother of such a child tends to feel her responsibility acutely. It can be painful - and expensive - to leave your child with a baby sitter after a whole day away, just to go out on a date.
I see a few ways that advances in biotechnology will lead more single women without good mate prospects to choose donor sperm:
I figure if risks of bad outcomes can be lowered, women can have babies later in life after achieving greater financial security, costs drop, and women can make far more informed choices among sperm donors then a single woman in her 30s or 40s or even 50s will be alot more likely to have children on her own.
As I've stated here many times previously: most women will have better DNA choices from donor sperm than from the best man each can manage to find to marry (if they can even find a suitable man to marry - and many can't). Cheap DNA sequencing will highlight what is already the case now and make the differences in quality a lot more transparent. This transparency will increase the number of women who choose donor sperm over mate sperm. The transparency about sperm DNA will also increase the willingness of women who can't find a mate to go it alone.
Also see my previous post "Personal genetic profiles and the mating dance".
Thanks to Rob for the tip.
By Randall Parker at 2006 March 23 07:02 PM Biotech Society | TrackBackAs far as I am concerned they are selfish! This is why we have "couples" to share the burden placed on us with the most important job that there can be,..parenting. Indeed it will be a very tough and stressfull road ahead for the next 16-22yrs for single women/lesbian couples to raise their kids. Adolescence years are the most trying especially with girls due to neurotransmitter/serotonin problems. That is why it is good to have two parents to relive the other when the yelling starts. Remaining calm is hard when overworked and stressed out we are.
Also, think of the odd person who decides to start a family tree/genealology project.
I wish them luck. But society seems to be cracking at the seams.
Marvin
'Q., the former yeshiva student who ended up choosing the 6-foot-2 German rugby player as her [sperm] donor, developed severe hypertension during her pregnancy and had to be hospitalized several times. Her symptoms lingered even after her daughter was born, and she became preoccupied with what would happen to the baby girl if she were to die. Her brother and a sister are selfish, she says, and her mother is elderly. Last fall, she went to the Donor Sibling Registry and got a shock: the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting � he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families � four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers � have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007. "I was elated," Q. told me. "To quote the granny on 'The Beverly Hillbillies,' I wanted her to have kin. Now here's kin that look like her; that're in her same age range. I even thought that if I get to know somebody really well from this group, maybe I would pick one of these other mothers, if they would be interested, to be designated as a guardian for my daughter."'
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/magazine/319dad.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
James Bowery: That really highlights what a lot of women find valuable, doesn't it?
Randall: How about going beyond screening every sperm donor and choosing the best donor for a given woman's genotype to choosing the best sperm cell? I'm no biologist, so my understanding of these things is at the popular science level. Is anyone trying to develop a way to clone sperm cells so that one can be destructively sequenced while its twin remains viable? The same question can be asked about eggs.
Furthermore, do you know if anyone has been thinking about how to create custom sperm? That is, go a step beyond selecting the best sperm for a woman's genotype to actually creating the best sperm for her genotype.
I read an article a few years ago in which the same organization that made Dolly the sheep claimed to have removed a selected gene and replaced it with another. Since then, I haven't seen much about such techniques. Has much progress been made on this kind of germline engineering?
From reading this site, I get the idea that cheap sequencing is five to ten years off. I also get the idea that biotech is exploding. Do you have any idea how long the time period will be between the advent of cheap gene sequencing and the advent of cheap germline engineering?
Will there be a tipping point when enough people know enough children who are the products of sperm donation? If these children are all they're cracked up to be: intelligent, attractive, etc, won't it be a viable option. More and more women may find that having a few "super kids" alone actually outweighs having "normal kids" with a husband. If the specter of Nazi eugenics didn't haunt this issue, some governments would already be subsidizing this.
It was unfortunate that eugenics got associated with the nazi party and their extremes of negative eugenics. When you say the word eugenics people think of the nazis and blonde haired, blue eyed hitler youth.
Russ you are right that a more intelligent generation should easily be able to subsidize the costs of single mothers. Plus as I have argued most of children's time is already being spent with the state, not the parents. From preschool, to k-12, to after school sports, to state or corporate daycares, to government funded places for children to hang out, or after school activity.. A high percentage of our children's life is with the state.
I am not a collectivist, but the reality is we live in societies which are quite collectivist.. and becoming more so by the year. So in my collective I want more capable commune members. Not to mention the goal of a healtheir and more attractive generation.. a gift to our children.
Antimony,
I do not see how to fully test each sperm without destroying it. By contrast, one can take a single cell from a multi-cell embryo and test that cell. The PGID technique is used to that pretty routinely at this point.
Alternative, choosing exactly which chromosome from each pair to take to create a sperm or egg is a hard problem. Maybe microfluidics will allow solving that problem eventually.
Sequencing a donor's full genome will allow identification of donors who have greater similarity in desired features on each chromosome in each pair of chromosomes. The problem is that the woman doesn't know which chromosome of each pair she will get. So with testing women will be able to choose donors who have what she most wants in both chromosomes of each pair.
I'm not sure when DNA sequencing will become very cheap. That'll be done by shifting to an entirely different DNA sequencing technology as compared to what is used now and those sorts of shifts are hard to forecast. Multiple VC-funded start-ups are working on the problem though and that capitalistic drive to solve the problem makes me optimistic.
As for germline genetic engineering: First we need really good ways to do gene therapy. Those gene therapy techniques are being worked on for a lot of other reasons. My guess is we'll have medical gene therapy treatments years before we have germline gene therapy techniques.
Gene therapy on eggs and sperm might not be the way germline genetic engineering gets done. I can see two other major approaches.
One is to do the genetic engineering to the fertilized early stage embryo.
Another is to take adult cells and turn them into cells that can become sperm or eggs (using SCNT (somatic cell nuclear transfer) into an egg or perhaps some technique that dedifferentiates without the use of an agg). Then on those cells do the gene therapy. Then cause those cells to become eggs or sperm.
I think the latter approach offers the best advantages. One can do lots of experimentation with that approach to get what one wants and grow up a large number of cells with lots of testing on the cell lines before trying to create sperm or eggs. But that approach involves more steps and more problems to solve. Though it is my vague memory that already turning pluripotent cells into sperm has been done in either rats or mice.
So, my question is that if women choose to become single mothers, the technology exists to select sperm that best matches her genotype, and that in the future we can create custom sperm that matches her genotype, then why are we talking about "children" and not "daughters"?
It seems that the point being made is that to a segment of the population men are unnecessary, so why would that segment compound their problem by having male offspring?
Dave,
That is the point feminists have been trying to make all along. The problem is that these selfish short sighted types cannot see that a child even with the right genes reqires a male role model. boys are especially disadvantaged when they are raised away from uncles, fathers and other male role models. Even though technology facilitates selection of genotypes I don't buy the sigle parenthood argument: it's proven beyond reasonable doubt that children raised in single parent families are more likely to be indisciplined, grow up inpoverty and gravitate towrds criminal activity. There is also a pshycological drain where kids gow up asking "where daddy is."
Randy Parker,
Life is more than just good sperm and eggs. It also includes a social realm. That's why families, societies, communities and countries are formed. Even with gene sequencing some fail to note that you cannot totally preclude faults since it takes contribution from two; good contribution from one side doesn't rectify faults inherent in the other.
Alan,
A kid with a 125 IQ with a single parent is going to turn out way better on average than a kid with a 100 IQ and two parents.
Judith Rich Harris argues that parents matter very little. Are you familiar with her arguments?
Also, the results of a Korean baby adoption study entitled What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families strongly suggests that genes are far more powerful than family. Also see this follow-up. Where's the power of SES? Income of adoption parents had no influence on income of their adopted children.
After genetic variations my guess is that noise in the system of gene regulation during development plays a bigger role than socio-economic status of parents.
Sure, parents matter some. Abusive parents will certainly mess up kids. Malnutrition inflicted by ignorant poor parents will exact some toll in cognitive development. But my guess is that once lower IQ women can choose sperm that make their offspring smarter then those women who choose donor sperm will get better outcomes than those women who marry and have children with spouses of similar intellectual endowment.
I just thought of an example that may be a detractor from the two parents argument. Look at how many children in the US and Europe today grow up with one parent.. At least for a substantial portion of their childhoods. Then compare it with the solid families of southwest asia and India. Yet Europe and America have per capita incomes 10-30 times higher then these other areas.
I'm starting to think children's income is related to the parents income not because of better schooling, values and so on.. but because the children's IQ is related to the parents IQ for obvious reasons.. and IQ is such a strong determinant of income.
I can't imagine caring for my 18 month old without my wife. It's definitely a tag team affair.
Randall
In the end I think we must go a step further and ask about egg donors as well. What can we infer about egg quality? What is the quality of the women who are making these decisions? Do they really have the best DNA? Are they not signaling to the rest of us that they do not have very good social skills? They do not seem to be capable of have intimate relations for an extended period of time with a male. One could easily raise the question if they have the requisite skills to have solid personal relations with other humans. How will they relate to children? Is it prudent to have a world where women of questionable quality make decisions solely on sperm quality?
Another question is who will pay the social costs associated with these self-fulfillment babies? Are they then going to ask men to bear the costs associated with there care? The answer is yes they will. Men will have to work extra hours as they take maternity leave. Men will be asked to pay the costs associated with education. They have no right.
The social contract that is now in place assumes men and women are joint participants in the process. As the contract is tossed aside by these women lets revisit the social contract. I do not want to pay for these women in any way. They can play with turkey plungers all night if they wish but I will not pay the costs. These women can take a hike.
Families and social ties matter to child development!!! Anyone who has done social work knows this simple fact. There is a TON of research that points to how important family life is to child development. The facts are overwhelming from decades of research on child development on this point. Randall to give one researcher who BELIEVES otherwise is sheer foolishness.
Marsha,
I don't believe Randall formed his opinions on the basis of a single researcher or study. I belive the 'twins raised apart' studies and the korean adoption study support what Randall has said. The statistics he cited recently for incarceration rates of men with high IQ supports his position.
Since illegitimacy and step families increase in prevalence as one goes down the IQ scale, have you considered whether all those other studies were measuring the effects of intelligence at least to some extent?
Marco,
People who are paying $50,000 to get Ivy League women to donate eggs (and that's about the going rate) are getting eggs from high IQ women. Of course, some pay for cheaper eggs from a waitress who is studying to become a hair cutter.
As for the women who have kids with their own eggs: The teenagers who do this are mostly not too bright. But I bet the women in their 30s and 40s who do this are above average in intelligence.
As for why these women can't land a suitable man: Some of the women are not sufficiently attractive physically. Some have very high standards and couldn't find a suitable man who also was sufficiently attracted to them. Some got caught up in careers and by the time the realized how far along their biological clock had ticked most men their age were looking at younger women as more sure things for fertility and higher physical attractiveness.
The social costs of self-fulfillment babies: Those costs depend very heavily on how bright the kids grow up to be. 130 IQ kids are big net contributors for example.
Marsha,
Most social scientists do not control for certain factors because it is politically incorrect to do so. As a result, lots of social science studies have wrong conclusions.
See this graph on IQ for IQ and young white adults in the United States. Note that at higher IQ levels illegitimacy, criminal behavior, and various social pathologies become very rare. What's the cause? High intelligence. It causes all the other results. But you'll never hear that from a left-liberal sociologist who embraces the Standard Social Science Model (and also see here for more on the SSSM).
If the women who get donor sperm use sperm from higher IQ men then the result will be kids which commit less crime, achieve more in school, and earn higher incomes. Of course that is a big if. Cheap DNA sequencing will allow women to make far better choices when choosing donor sperm. The result will be smarter kids on average for women who use donor sperm versus the average woman who gets pregnant from her mate the old fashioned way.
While women need male sperm for off-spring, men may be the true immortals thanks to their testes. Researchers in the UK suggest that testes may be a great source for stem cells. Men will be able to be forever young and not need female reproductive powers. This will probably greatly lessen the value of female reproduction. Women will want male sperm for more than one purpose. The question may become will they be able to afford male sperm.
The question may become will they be able to afford male sperm.
That's like asking whether they will be able to afford drinking water. Male reproductive strategy does not involve scarcity of sperm.
At some point, we will might see some men's sperm becoming an expensive commodity. But that won't happen until after a lack of genetic diversity forces sperm banks to practise better husbandry.
For those of you seeking a sperm donor, I would ask you to view my website
www.jewishspermdonor.net
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I dislike when people say that a child must have two parents, esp. considering how many children today are being raised by one parent, and for the majority of children, the child ends up fine. I ended up just fine when I only had my mother raising me (a great mother). Don't you think that is the key, a great parent and great genes? Can't say too much about my father, though. So, for all you men, esp., who think two parents are better than one -- think again. Yes, ideally speaking, I'm all for two parents, but what happens when you're single, no prospects in view, hearing your biological clock ticking and know that you would make as good a parent as the next person or couple? Let's think realistically and not idealistically for a change.
Wow, yes, I agree with Marvin, these women who are so called "professionals" aren't too smart in the parenting arena. Appharently, it takes two to raise a kid. I'm 23, and they are all in their thirties/fourties and yet they think as immaturely as this? wow, what is the world (society) coming to?!
I honestly can't see how a parent who is educated, financially stable, and dedicated to their child is somehow horribly selfish. In the average marriage there is almost always a fight and/or the threats of divorce. Do you truly believe that a woman who refuses to remarry after her spouse dies is also a selfish and irresponsible parent?
A single parent can also provide the kind of consistency that two parents generally don't give, especially after divorce.
Where's Daddy? Are you kidding me? I grew up without a father in our home and I really never felt traumatized. I joined the Air Force, I'm married, and I'm getting a BS in Physics.