"Fathered"

From the Sun:

British sperm donor ‘fathered 600 children’ 

A BRITISH scientist may have fathered 600 children after making donations to a fertility programme he ran with his wife.

And one of his biological children has suggested the number may even be as high as ONE THOUSAND. 

Bertold Wiesner - who was born in Austria - ran the Barton Clinic in London which helped more than 1,500 women conceive. 

Barry Stevens, a film-maker from Canada, was concieved using Wiesner's donated sperm and said the number could be much higher. 

He said last night: "He was the one that found the donors so it's possible he didn't tell his wife and she believed the donations were coming from a lot of different men." 

Wiesner ran the controversial clinic with his wife Mary - until he died in 1972. Research shows he regularly made donations from the early 1940s until the mid-1960s. 

David Gollancz, a London-based barrister also conceived at the clinic, said last night: "A conservative estimate is that he would have been making 20 donations a year. 

"Using standard figures of live births which result, including allowances for twins and miscarriages, I estimate that he is responsible for between 300 and 600 children," he added. 

Allan Pacey - a male fertility expert at Sheffield University said a healthy man could make up to 50 donations a year. 

He said Gollancz's estimations were "plausible". 

Last year it emerged that one anonymous American sperm donor had fathered more than 150 children.

None of these children were "fathered". They were produced, in an industrial process, for a profit. They came to be as a result of a business transaction.

"Fathering" is being with your wife when she has the ultrasound, and walking your baby at night when she has colic, and going to her preschool play, and her soccer game, and her graduation, and her wedding. It's guiding her and protecting her and loving her and putting her through college when it means you'll never retire and vetting her fiance with a microscope and letting her go when you don't want to and then being there for her whenever she needs you.

Hopefully many of these kids did have fathers, of the adoptive or step- sort. Those men are their real fathers, not some jerk who jerked for profit or ego or whatever.

Sadly, I suspect that many of these kids grew up without fathers of any kind. A brutal thing to do to a kid.

We are at the edge of an abyss. The biological revolution-- particularly the ability to engineer conception without conjugal love-- is the most dangerous skill man has acquired, much more dangerous than splitting the atom.

We are changing what it means to become human. People will increasingly be products. Those of us who understand what is happening need to insist that we tell the truth, that we respect language and meaning, even if we don't respect human dignity.

No one is fathered in a sperm clinic. A sperm clinic is the antithesis of fatherhood.