IT'S A CONSERVATIVE WORLD; WE JUST LIVE IN IT

Hello, I'm Your Sister. Our Father Is Donor 150 (Amy Harmon, NY Times, 11/20/05)

Like most anonymous sperm donors, Donor 150 of the California Cryobank will probably never meet any of the offspring he fathered through sperm bank donations. There are at least four, according to the bank's records, and perhaps many more, since the dozens of women who have bought Donor 150's sperm are not required to report when they have a baby.

But two of his genetic daughters, born to different mothers and living in different states, have been e-mailing and talking on the phone regularly since learning of each other's existence last summer. They plan to meet over Thanksgiving.

The girls, Danielle Pagano, 16, and JoEllen Marsh, 15, connected through the Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site that is helping to open a new chapter in the oldest form of assisted reproductive technology. The three-year-old site allows parents and offspring to enter their contact information and search for others by sperm bank and donor number.

"The first time we were on the phone, it was awkward," Danielle said. "I was like, 'We'll get over it,' and she said, 'Yeah, we're sisters.' It was so weird to hear her say that. It was cool." . . .

"I hate when people that use D.I. say that biology doesn't matter (cough, my mom, cough)," Danielle wrote in an e-mail message, using the shorthand for donor insemination. "Because if it really didn't matter to them, then why would they use D.I. at all? They could just adopt or something and help out kids in need."

The half-sibling hunt is driven in part by the growing number of donor-conceived children who know the truth about their origins. As more single women and lesbian couples use sperm donors to conceive, children's questions about their fathers' whereabouts often prompt an explanation at an early age, even if all the information about the father that is known is his code number used by the bank for identification purposes and the fragments of personal information provided in his donor profile.

Before we start feeling too superior, one of the donor children in the article introduces his half-siblings as a brother and sister from another mother -- the same locution OJ uses to refer to the non-Judds on the blog. Below, there is a post about the alienation and isolation technology brings to modern life, which is a genuine issue but raises the question of what connection we find here that we can't find with actual people. It is not, perhaps, that surprising how many of us live in Blue states.

The need for community, for a direct connection, to see ourselves reflected in another is the most basic human drive, subsuming both survival and sex. But if we have access to artists, authors and even bloggers whose business it is to exploit that feeling of connection, what have we lost. Yesterday, I was talking to a Mexican-American I met randomly this week in the course of business. After next week, I'll likely never speak with him again. And yet in the course of a quick five minute conversations, we discovered two or three unlikely connections. He lives where I went to college. He has a cousin, a retired Air Force major, who converted to Judaism. His cousin owns a restaurant that I've at least walked past, although it's located at least a thousand miles from where either of us lives. It is these unforeseen connections, and the loss of the idea that any other person is totally "other", that we are losing as we cocoon within artificial communities.

Posted by David Cohen at November 20, 2005 10:29 AM