Making Babies in a Brave New World

When I was out dancing a few weekends back, I saw most of the usual characters. There was the guy who sweats too much, gets in my face, and points his finger into the air along to the beat. Then there was the guy who I can’t tell whether he’s straight or gay by the way he flirts when he bumps butts with me. There was the girl who doesn’t understand that personal space also exists on dance floors and always manages to step on my toes while I’m getting down, and then there, between the sweat and the bodies, was Simona.

I knew Simona only by the fact that I had met her sister years ago during a bad temp job at Macy’s corporate headquarters. Simona’s sister had introduced me to the very DJ that Simona and I were dancing to on this night, and I walked up to give Simona the hug I’d give her every time I saw her on the dance floor.

“How’s it going? What’s the latest?” I asked while keeping my feet moving to the beat.

Simona rubbed her protruding belly and smiled, “I’m pregnant.”

I immediately made the modern-day San Francisco faux pas. “Oh, wow. Who’s the lucky Daddy?” It wasn’t until after I had said it that I recalled the last time I had seen Simona. She had been getting down on the dance floor with her girlfriend.

“My friend donated his sperm,” she answered my question nonchalantly, as if all the thirty-something girls were doing it these days.

Well, maybe not all thirty-something women are outsourcing for their sperm, but the numbers are certainly up. Liza Mundy, a Washington Post Magazine staff writer, points out in her new book, Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World, that donated eggs for IVF have grown twenty percent each year. There are now around three million IVF children in the world and if it weren’t for single women and lesbian couples, the sperm donation business would have gone out of business years ago. Mundy, on her book tour, spoke at The Commonwealth of California to explain that while the technology is more accessible and communal, it may, at times, appear a little extreme.

Demand for egg donation is growing to the point that now some clinics are procuring egg donors from more affordable countries like Romania. The frozen sperm can be shipped, fertilized with the Romanian eggs, and the newly-frozen embryos can be flown back to the U.S.