by David Plotz
Since he didn’t know what was actually happening to his children, he had to imagine it. Roger removed a little black notebook from one of his manila folders. He leaned over conspiratorially—though we were alone in the room—to show it to me. Each page of the notebook listed a birthday. Often there was a first name written below the date. Every time Dora informed him of a birth, Roger recorded it here. A surprising number of parents mailed baby photos to the Repository as thanks, and Dora sent them on to Roger. He had a dozen of them. Each of them was backed by a sheet of cardboard, sealed in its own protective plastic bag and inserted into the notebook by the corresponding name.
Roger leafed through the black book. He pointed to a boy named Avi Jacob. “He’s probably Jewish,” Roger said, smiling buoyantly at me. “So, David, you are not the only one here who has a Jewish child!”
On the next page were twins, a boy and a girl. Roger had two pictures of them: one at four months, a second at eleven months. Roger noticed what I didn’t, that the boy was smaller than his twin sister in the first picture and bigger in the second. “Look how much he is growing!”
Next came a darling curly-haired boy: “He was just four pounds when he was born. They were worried. But now look at him!”
Then Roger showed me a large, curious picture of a baby boy in a bathtub. The bathtub was at the top of a tower in the middle of a forest. “Dora said his parents worked as fire watchers,” said Roger. What’s his name? I asked. It was not written on the notebook page. Roger shrugged, then grinned. “Dora didn’t tell me. But I even have names for those whose names I don’t know. So I call him ‘Watchtower Boy.’ Or sometimes ‘Boy in Tub.’ ”
Roger closed the book. “Maybe Dora should not have shown me these pictures, but I am glad she did. These children are very pleasing to me,” said Roger. And here, “pleasing” meant something very much more than pleasing.
He handed me several letters. They were thank-you notes sent by “White” mothers that Dora had passed on to him. One read, “Every mother believes hers to be the most special baby ever born, but mine truly is.” Another read, “You have given us the greatest of all gifts, more precious than anything money can buy, and changed the way I feel about human nature. You are an unseen but not unfelt member of my family.”
Roger commented that Joy was not the first of his children whose identity he knew. In the late 1980s, Dora had, as usual, told him the first name of the latest White child. It was an unusual name, “Jeroboam,” let’s say. A couple of years later, Dora mentioned to Roger that the boy was about to have a baby sister, also by Donor White. The next week, Roger happened to see a birth announcement in his local newspaper. The announcement mentioned that the new baby girl had an older brother, Jeroboam. Roger was thrilled. He looked up the family in the phone directory and realized they lived only a mile away. He took to running by their house on his morning jog, especially on Christmas morning and on the kids’ birthdays, which Dora had told him. Sometimes he would see Jeroboam playing in the yard. Once, when Roger jogged by during the boy’s birthday party, Jeroboam shouted to him, “Hello, Man in the Hat.” Roger stopped and said, “Happy Birthday.” Soon after, he made a plan to meet the boy. He ran by the house carrying a beach ball and rang the doorbell. He pretended he had found the ball on the street and wanted “to give it to the little guy who sometimes waved at me when I jogged past.” The mother, suspicious, stayed inside the house. Roger had to shout his story at her through the locked front door. She thanked him and asked him to leave the ball on the porch. Later, he saw Jeroboam playing with the ball. It was ten years since then and he had never spoken to the boy—or his sister—again. He knew that he should not.
As Roger showed me his notebook and told me his stories, I felt heartsick for him. This was what happened when a deliberate man with a pure soul became a sperm donor. He had tracked his children because he felt he must. It was the closest he could come to being the father they deserved. He knew he would never—and could never—interfere in their lives, and that agonized him. The Repository children—at once his and not his—were excruciating for Roger. In October 1991, he wrote an article for San Diego Woman magazine, under the pseudonym R. White. (It was an early draft of the article that Dora had shown Beth when she was shopping for donors.) The magazine article described the sperm bank kids as being a kind of comfort to him, because at least he had the satisfaction of passing on the genes of his ancestors (not his own genes, he was too modest to say that). He also joked about his fertility: “It is really beyond the imagination of a fifty-seven-year-old man, who thought only five years ago that he might be infertile, to realize that he now has enough boys for a baseball team (with one extra to umpire) and enough girls for a basketball team.”
But mostly Roger’s article was elegiac because he knew that he would never see his children. “Fathering children anonymously is somewhat akin to producing paintings that to you are beautiful and priceless, but doing this with the understanding that when they are finished they must be given away and likely never seen again.” This was a haunting image. Whenever someone asks me what it’s like to donate sperm, I quote them that passage. For Roger, every time he learned of another birth, he felt pride and he felt loss: every donation was an act of loving-kindness and of pain.
Roger stopped donating shortly after he wrote the article. He had fathered nearly twenty children. The Repository professed a limit of twenty per donor, but Graham had urged him to continue anyway. Roger thought he shouldn’t. His sense of obligation made him stop.
Becoming a semifather had another effect on Roger, one he hadn’t expected. The children—the children he couldn’t ever know—made him feel he had wasted too much of his life on work. In the mid-1990s, he retired, full of regret for all the hours squandered at the office. Whenever I mentioned to Roger that I was taking a business trip, he rebuked me for spending time away from my wife and kids. As we were chatting in the hotel about something else, he suddenly grabbed my arm: “I was a workaholic. I regret it. I missed time with my family. Don’t ever do that, David.”
All of the nineteen White children occupied Roger’s thoughts, but the one who occupied them most was Joy. Their 1991 meeting—when Beth had dropped baby Joy at the Repository so Roger could see her—had affected him profoundly. As we talked, Roger recalled the visit as if it had been the day before: When Dora had called, he and Rebecca had raced over to the office. Joy, he said, had immediately held out her arms to him, inviting him to pick her up. He had been astounded at how much Joy looked like his sister had when she was an infant. For half an hour, Roger had held little Joy on his lap while Rebecca and Dora snapped Polaroid after Polaroid. Roger had kept these, of course, and he slid them out of a folder and showed them to me: Joy was wearing a light blue romper, with a tiny lace collar. Roger, then in his late fifties, stared at the camera with a stunned expression of wonder, fear, shock, and gratitude. I recognized the expression from family snapshots of me after my daughter’s birth. It was the look of all first-time fathers.
Eventually, Roger said, Joy had squirmed off his lap, scooted over to her stroller, and tried to pull herself into it. She couldn’t manage it on her own, so Roger had lifted her up and placed her in the seat. Joy had been annoyed at the assistance. She had slid herself off the stroller and tried again till she managed to climb in by herself. This also reminded Roger of his beloved sister, who could never tolerate being helped. Roger had turned to Rebecca and said, “We really have ourselves something special here.” After forty minutes, Dora had told Roger they would have to leave. Roger had kissed Joy and said, “I will see you again.” She couldn’t understand him, of course, and he had known it was impossible, that he could never see her again.
Roger’s reaction to the visit showed why sperm banks forbid meetings between donor and child. Roger was supposed to be a detached, anonymous donor, a source of fine DNA and nothing more. But this visit had bonded him to Joy. She was no longer simply “donor offspring.” She was his daughter.
When he got home from seeing Joy at the Repository, Roger wrote a letter to her, a letter he could not send, since he did not know her last name or address. In it he told Joy that the visit had been enough to make him feel like a father. He had kept the letter since then, locked away safely at home.
After meeting baby Joy, Roger tried to accept that he would never hear from her again. But a few years later, he started receiving occasional photos of Joy, sent by Beth and passed on by the Repository. When the Repository permitted the correspondence between him and Beth to accelerate in 1995 and 1996, he was ecstatic. He wrote much less than he wanted, for fear the Repository would stop the letters if he was too avid. Roger framed the pictures of Joy that Beth sent. He hung a collage of eight snapshots in his living room and put the photo of Joy skiing—blurry, unrecognizable—above the mantelpiece. He was proudest of a picture of Joy sitting on the lap of a Confederate soldier. Dora had told Beth about Roger’s dream of his Confederate great-grandfather. When Joy was two Beth had taken her to a Civil War reenactment near their town and had a photo taken of Joy with a Confederate soldier. Beth had thought Donor White would appreciate the coincidence. Roger showed me a photocopy of the picture of Joy and the reenactor. The soldier in the picture, he said, looked just like his great-grandfather in the dream.
Donor White was heartbroken when the correspondence with Beth ceased in 1997. He didn’t know why it had ended, because the Repository didn’t send him the explanation that it sent Beth. Then, two years later, he received a letter from the Repository’s medical director, announcing that the sperm bank was closing. Roger feared that once the bank closed, his faint remaining hope of finding Beth and Joy again would vanish. He started improvising. He reexamined the photographs Beth had sent him. Printed on the back of one—and overlooked by the Repository—were the name and address of a Pennsylvania photo studio. Then he studied Beth’s correspondence and noticed that she had used personal stationery for the first letter she had sent, way back in 1991. That stationery was embossed with a lily. It occurred to him that her last name might be “Lily.” He searched for an Elizabeth Lily in every state. He found only one, and she lived in Pennsylvania, near the town where the photo studio was located. He immediately sent a letter to her. It was extremely cryptic. In it, he wrote that a person named Beth had befriended him through a third party and that third party was no longer available to pass on information. If Beth Lily was the Beth who had befriended him, then she could write to him at such and such an e-mail address. He added that he had only the very best intentions toward Beth and that if she was the wrong person, she should please discard this strange letter. He put no return address on it. No one but Beth herself would have had the foggiest idea what he meant.
Roger had guessed wrong, and he heard nothing back from Elizabeth Lily. He resigned himself to the loss and to a life without children. He filled his retirement with studying Civil War history and investigating his family tree. In 1999, he finally told his eighty-nine-year-old mother about his sperm bank kids. She took the news very cheerfully. When she died a few months later, Roger was relieved that he had shared the secret with her.
In early 2001, right at the time I published Beth’s plea for Donor White in Slate, Roger fell seriously ill. I had feared his yearlong silence might have meant he was dead, and, in fact, he almost was. Although he slowly recovered, he wasn’t the same man. The illness had left him with permanent complications. He had shed thirty pounds, wasting down to skin and bones. He couldn’t jog anymore. He wasn’t even seventy yet, but he could barely manage to shop for groceries now. A great specimen of a man, he had become weak, his athletic body slack. If his body was broken, his spirit was worse. “I thought, ‘Life is not worth living. If I die now, that’s fine.’ ” As he slowly recuperated, Roger berated himself for having spent his life in the lab. He belittled his scientific accomplishments; his patents meant nothing next to his nineteen children—the children he would never know.
In June 2002, a friend e-mailed him a Web page with a link to an Internet search engine, Alltheweb.com. Roger was a novice Web surfer. He had never even heard of search engines. He went to Alltheweb, and the first thing he typed in was “genius sperm bank.” The first entries were for my Slate series on the Repository. He scrolled down the page. Halfway down he saw this listing: “A Mother Searches for ‘Donor White.’ ” He was stunned. He e-mailed me that day.
June 16, 2002—four days after Roger wrote to me—was Father’s Day. Roger logged on to AOL. “You’ve got mail.” A message from an unfamiliar address was waiting. He opened it. It was from Beth. It began, “Happy Father’s Day!”
CHAPTER 9
MY SHORT, SCARY CAREER
AS A SPERM DONOR
Retrieving vials of frozen sperm from a liquid-nitrogen storage tank. Courtesy of California Cryobank
I realized that I needed to donate sperm, too. Not because I wanted to, quite the contrary. My son had been born in early 2003, so I was the father of two children, which seemed more than enough on most days. My lack of desire to donate is why I felt obliged to do it. No matter how often donors explained themselves to me, sperm donation befuddled me. I nodded and smiled at them as they listed their reasons, but my own brain was snickering. Why had they subjected themselves to such inconvenience? To such embarrassment? Roger had made the most compelling possible case for sperm donation to me, and I still didn’t get it. I had to find out for myself what I was missing.
I dutifully informed my wife about the plan to donate. “No way,” Hanna said. I argued that it was all in the name of research. She was unimpressed. I promised that I would stop the sperm bank before it could sell my sperm. She said she didn’t believe the bank would make such a deal. I swore that there was no chance they would use my sperm. I begged, which was not a pretty sight. She relented.
These days, all sperm banks recruit customers and donors through the Internet, so I cruised the Web and quickly found an application for the big local bank: Fairfax Cryobank, located in Washington, D.C.’s, Virginia suburbs. Fairfax Cryobank is to sperm banking what Citigroup is to real banking. It has branches in four states and Canada. The sperm bank itself is only one small division of a full-service fertility business, the Genetics & IVF Institute.
I completed Fairfax’s online application in a couple of minutes—it asked for the barest minimum of information, hardly more than my name and address. A week later, the mailman delivered a brown envelope with no name on the return address. Sperm banks, like pornographers, keep everything on the down low: mail invariably arrives in discreet envelopes. Bank staffers dislike leaving phone messages, but if they must, the message is almost incomprehensibly vague: “This is Mary, from Fairfax”—Fairfax what? I would ask myself—“We’d like to talk to you about your recent inquiry. Please call us at . . .”)
The brown package from Fairfax contained the full application, an eighteen-page slog. I trudged through the physical data: age, hair color, height, weight, blood type. Then I dragged my way through the biographical section: educational history, profession, musical talent (“None,” I wrote proudly), athletic abilities, hobbies. Then I labored through the medical questionnaire: alcohol use, tobacco use, drug use, tattooing history, how well I sleep, how well I eat, what medicines I take and why, what bones I have broken, whether I exchange sex for money, whether I had used intranasal cocaine in the preceding twelve months. I listed three generations of familial mental illness and felt my own ticker skip a beat when I wrote that all my male ancestors on both sides of the family had died young of heart disease. I declared that I wasn’t a carrier of Gaucher’s disease, Fanconi’s anemia, Niemann-Pick disease, Canavan disease, or thalassemia, although I had not the faintest idea what those illnesses were. I had to check off whether I suffered from any of an endless roster of symptoms—hoarseness, warts, blood in stool, goiter, tingling, dizziness, fainting, convulsions, seizures, fits, shaking, tremor, numbness. By the time I was done, I was suffering from several of them. I was asked sixteen way
s to Sunday if I inject drugs or have sex with other men. I agreed to submit to an HIV test. Finally, I reached page eighteen, which was the scariest of all: “I agree that I release all rights, privileges, and disposition of my semen specimens to Fairfax Cryobank.” Hanna is going to kill me, I thought, and then I signed it.
According to the application, if my written application made the cut, I would be invited for an interview, where I would “produce” a semen sample for analysis. If that were satisfactory, I would return for more semen analyses and a physical. Only if I passed those would I qualify as a donor.
I mailed my application to Fairfax and waited. And waited. And waited. After two months, I was furious. How dare they ignore my semen? That semen had produced two healthy children! That semen had graduated from an Ivy League college! That semen had run a marathon! Then my rage turned to worry: Did Fairfax know something I didn’t about my health? Was my future that bleak? Was all that heart disease really so bad? Suddenly I found myself desperate to be chosen.
I had finally given up on Fairfax and applied to a bank in New York when I received an e-mail from Amanda, who identified herself as Fairfax’s laboratories coordinator. She invited me for an interview. She noted, oh so casually, that I would have to furnish a sample on the premises.
I made an appointment for the following Monday. Fairfax Cryobank was located beyond the Washington Beltway in The Land of Wretched Office Parks. The cryobank was housed in the dreariest of all office developments. To call the building anonymous would insult anonymity. The ugliness may be intentional: a sperm bank doesn’t want to draw attention to itself or its visitors. I hunted through the first-floor corridors, past the mysterious “microsort” room and “egg donor” facility, searching for the sperm bank office. I saw an open door and peeked in. I had stumbled on the vault—the room that housed Fairfax’s liquid-nitrogen storage tanks. I ducked inside and found myself alone with the tanks. There were four of them. They were head high and looked like fat silver men. I knew that each tank held tens of thousands of vials, each vial filled with millions of spermatozoa. My skin got clammy: it felt like the scene in the science fiction movie when the hero accidentally discovers the warehouse where the “friendly” aliens are freezing the millions of humans they have secretly kidnapped for their terrible experiments.
