Word: sperms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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French law offered little guidance, and so the whole case rested on exquisitely philosophical arguments about what the dead man's frozen sperm really was. An organ transplant? An inheritable piece of property? State Prosecutor Yves Lesec, siding with the sperm bank, argued that it was part of the dead man's body, even though separated from that body. The dead man had a basic right to "physical integrity," the prosecutor concluded, saying in effect that his widow had no more right to his sperm than to his feet or ears. Not so, retorted Parpalaix's lawyer...
...case encapsulates all the ambiguities more dramatically than that of the late Mario and Elsa Rios, a Los Angeles couple whose orphaned embryos now lie in a freezer in Melbourne, Australia. Doctors there had removed several of Mrs. Rios' eggs in 1981, then fertilized them with sperm from an anonymous donor. Some were implanted in Mrs. Rios, and the remaining two were frozen. "You must keep them for me," she said. The implant failed, and the couple later died in a plane crash in Chile. Australian laws grant no "rights" to the two frozen embryos, but though local officials...
Beyond the argument about experimentation lies an even more touchy controversy: eugenics, the idea that the species can be improved through selective breeding. Now that it is possible to create human embryos by a process of selection among donor eggs and sperm, is it desirable to leave that selection entirely to chance? In one sense, doctors are already applying eugenics when they screen donors for genetic defects, a standard practice that many feel should become a lot more standard. In another sense, they are engaging in eugenics when they select medical students as sperm donors, a procedure that one survey...
...institution that most nearly fulfills the dubious idea of selective breeding is the Repository for Germinal Choice, of Escondido, Calif., which announced at its opening in 1980 that it would use sperm donated by Nobel prizewinners. The repository has received the cooperation of only three such prizewinners and now relies on donors of less than Nobel stature, but Founder Robert Graham is as enthusiastic as ever. "We're proud of our results," says he of the repository's 15 children. "These kids will sail through schools. We are indicating how good human beings can have...
Given a choice, most parents would probably prefer a bright child, but intelligence is hardly the only variable. Many sperm banks now offer prospective parents some options on what the collaborating donors look like, on the ground that it is preferable for the child to resemble its legal parents. From there it is only a short step before some parents try to choose blonds instead of brunets, or boys instead of girls. A German clinic in Essen claims that its sperm donors include "no fat men, no long ears, no hook noses . . ." "We can talk in impressive pseudoscientific terms about...