Sperm DonationPicture this: You haven't been married all that long and are pregnant with your first child.

Your tall, handsome, well-educated, impressively healthy husband is taking a year off before starting law school, working on a novel, trying to make a few bucks here and there. Suddenly, he comes up with a great idea to pay the bills: He'll become a sperm donor.

Do you -- would you -- go for it?

What if I told you that, over time, your husband's sperm (for which he is paid $70 per sample, every few weeks), pretty much unbeknownst to him, would be responsible for the births of at least 22 children. In other words, that baby you're carrying, made by you and your husband in the throes of newly married love (and any future children you and your husband might conceive), would have at least 22 half-siblings born to and raised by women you have never met before.

And you may never know who most of them are.

Given all that, do you go for it?

To me, the pretty clear answer is no ... freaking ... way. Not now. Not ever.

But apparently the wife of a sperm donor profiled in the current issue of The Atlantic either answered differently or perhaps was never asked the question.

The article mentions the wife of the man they're calling Raul Walters, who made $10,000 total from his sperm donations and found out about the number of children his biological contributions had produced only years later, only in passing, not mentioning what role, if any, she played in Walters' decision. But I can't stop thinking about her. Did she know her husband was donating sperm? Did she not care? And how could she not have cared? Or did she feel she was somehow sharing her good fortune (a tall, healthy, intelligent man to father her children) with other women who longed to be moms, too? If so, what altruism!

All I can say is, the idea of having untold numbers of unknown half-siblings of my children walking around, biologically fathered by my own husband, is something I could never see agreeing to. Could you?

Can you imagine ever letting your husband be a sperm donor?

 

Image via Mikael Colville-Andersen/Flickr