In our documentary film Breeders?, one of the fertility doctors commenting on the high likelihood of twins in surrogate pregnancies joked that everybody loves a sale—her way of downplaying the fact that many intended parents seeking one child via surrogacy end up with two (or more). Now, in the United Kingdom, a fertility clinic is offering free in vitro fertilization for couples that persuade their male friends to donate sperm.
The U.K. is now experiencing a shortage of donor sperm (a national tragedy, indeed!) due to the fact that a change in donation laws allows for donor conceived children to find out who their biological father is at age eighteen.
But as we here at the CBC have evidenced, both sperm donation and IVF are not without health risks and social consequences. Yet, the clinic in the U.K. is trying to incentivize more of both!
As one reader commented on the story in the Telegraph: “Free? No. Paid for by the taxpayer. Not ‘treatment’ but an unnatural intervention to create an illusion of normalcy. Not ‘donors’ but careless men who deliberately amputate themselves from their offspring.”
We couldn’t agree more.
But speaking of deals, be sure to check out our Merch Madness—a legitimate sale where you can get fifty percent off our reproductive technology film trilogy—which documents just how corrupt this entire enterprise really is and provides a voice to the women and children who are mere products in the selling of eggs, sperm, and wombs, something the U.K. is apparently trying to encourage.
Image by banky177 via flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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