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In memory of my mother

God created man in His own image... male and female created He them. And God blessed them; and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

Genesis 1:2223

Buying is much more American than thinking.

Andy Warhol

Do you want to be the father of my child? a friend, Abby, asked me a few years ago.

What do you mean? I asked, surprised.

Im looking for a sperm donor. She was now 37 years old and wanted to have a child. Four years earlier, she had broken up with her long-term boyfriend and since then had been single. Two years before she asked me this question, she had applied to an agency to adopt a child. I had written a reference letter for her, stating that she would be an excellent parentwarm, loving, and resourceful. She was a painter, with a large group of artistic friends who would be helpful and supportive. Unfortunately, the agency rejected her.

Her fatherhood question perplexed me. We were fond of each other but recently had seen each other only a few times a year and were less close than in the past.

Im serious! she said, sensing my hesitation. Ive thought of going to a sperm bank, but Id prefer to use someone I know. Youd be perfect!

The proposition was tempting. I do not have children. Here, perhaps, was my chance, my only opportunity to have one. Let me think about it, I stammered, uncertain and partly to buy time.

You wouldnt have to do anything other than donate the sperm, she added, matter-of-factly.

Over the next several days, I began to ponder her question. Giving my sperm to someone felt odd, unfamiliar. But, I thought, that alone should not determine my decision. Presumably, she would take the lead in raising the child. Yet I wondered how involved I would or should be in helping her raise our offspring. Creating a child who contained roughly half my genes and would, presumably, look and act like me in certain ways but who would belong to someone else felt weird. I would be the biological father, but would or should I also take on the social role of being one? What if she wanted me to have more, or less, of a role? A child of mine, my own flesh and blood, would also presumably be raised mostly by her. She was a bit disorganized, which could be endearing in a friend but not necessarily ideal in a parent. What if I disagreed with her about how to raise our child?

I wondered what to do and how other people made these decisions, and I began to investigate, asking others and searching the medical literature. Increasingly, I heard of other friends going to infertility clinics. Female friends had asked their sisters for eggs. Gay and lesbian friends were having children, buying other peoples eggs or sperm. Walter and John, a gay couple I knew in Los Angeles, deliberated for almost a year over whether to select an ambitious 6-foot, blond, blue-eyed Princeton pre-med tennis player or a laid-back UCLA folk-rock singer who worked as a volunteer, helping refugees. Individuals selling their eggs face potential medical risks from the medications and surgical procedures involved and generally proceed because they need or want the money.

We are entering a new world of mechanical reproduction and face myriad questions.

Little was known about the specifics of reproduction until 1674 when Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant in Delft, examined his own semen under a microscope and discovered sperm. For decades afterwards, sperm were each thought to contain a homunculusa little person. He and others assumed that sperm contained the future human being, and that the egg merely nourished it.

In 1780, Lazzaro Spallanzani, a remarkable Italian Catholic priest and biologist, discovered that reproduction among animals requires both sperm and eggs. He performed the first in vitro fertilization (IVF), with frogs, and the first artificial fertilization, in a dog.

He also discovered that microbes can move through air and were killed by boiling water and that bats fly at night due not to eyesight but to some other sense (as we now know: their hearing).