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DNA and Online Search Finds Birth Parent
stuyman writes "NewScientist is reporting that anonymous sperm donation is not so anonymous anymore. An enterprising 15 year old tracked down his biological father, an anonymous sperm donor, using an online genealogy service and an online information service."
This would be quite creepy if the (father) had never actually formally donated sperm. (ie. someone has picked up a condom or tissue, and impregnated themselves with the sperm.)
..an answer to the proverbial question, "Who's your daddy?"
18 years, 18 years,
She got one of yo kids got you for 18 years
I can just picture someone tracking down an anonymous sperm donor and trying to get child support out of them. Or is this subject covered in the contract you sign at the clinic?
I wonder now that Anonymous Sperm Donors can be tracked down, if Anonymous Cowards can also be tracked down?
Uh...
What exactly is wrong with donating to a sperm bank? It allows people to have kids that might otherwise not be able to.
And what exactly is wrong with using the money for beer? Beer is good.
And how exactly could the child become emotionally scarred? By finding out at least one of his genetic parents is not part of his family? Why exactly does that matter? He has (presumably) two parents who love him and wanted him enough to go to extraordinary measures to have him. Isn't that good enough?
And if he didn't know that he was a sperm bank baby, and it does scar him, isn't it the fault of his parents that actually take care of him, for not telling him before he found it out on the internet?
Could you please expound on what, exactly, is wrong with this situation in your view? I can't figure it out beyond the possibility that you want to whine about 'them damn college students!'
I've come for the woman, and your head.
As the article pointed out, this has greater ramifications than in paternity cases, though perhaps even they didn't carry it far enough.
"Police could perform similar searches [using crime scene evidence]to identify a criminal's surname, giving vital leads in a case."
Or someone who cared enough could do so with, say, a hair found in a library book (or in any number of other places where anonymity might ordinarily have been presumed).
Jeff
What I'm noticing here is that these records have had to be held since around 1980... which suggests that it never really was that anonymous. I mean, back in 1990 you could still get DNA testing done (for a price).
I'll subscribe to Slashdot when I see a month without a dupe, a typo, or an article the "editors" didn't read.
...Imagine a beowulf cluster of anonymous sperm donors.
You know, and I'm only speaking for myself here, if my biological offspring were with it enough to do this by themselve(s) then I would actually love to hear from them and see where it went from there. Seriously, the best complement a child can pay to a parent is being exceptionally competent within the age they live in. This kid is definately an Information Age personality. Cool kid.
Shh.
I read about this guy who heard that his uncle's former frat brother had uncovered a bequest from a distant relative including an encoded message that revealed the location of Atlantis, and of Jimmy Hoffa.
Fer real.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Y'know, I've been considering donating sperm, 'cause I fit a profile (I'm tall, pale and went to plenty of school). Where does one sign up to donate? Err, sell, rather. Beer money and all.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
A lot more apealing than giveing blood... Get paid to jack off? Just set up a nightly pick-up route in the freshman dormatories of any college!
A quick google search of the guys name after a google news search of the terms "sperm" "oral" and "child support"
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Come on! This was donated sperm, no adoptions took place, and who's to say what the doner spent the fee on? The beer suggestion was just speculation. Maybe the doner spent it on rent, a CD, dinner, any number of things.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Whats the deal with this, im young, tall, white, middle class, no major health conditions in my family history, 160 something IQ, enroled in college... I bet i could make some decent $. Need to buy an engagement ring, but wouldnt that be weird telling her how i got the money...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
And you know this how exactly?
I hear this bullshit from people all of the time. One of my friend's insists I'm a "rare case." My parents, my only set of parents before you come up with some stupid term for the people who had to fuck to make me, are unable to have children.
Outside of having weird questions (How do I know my medical history? How do I know my ancestry? Eventually I guess you give up and realize you don't know those things, and neither does anybody else), I'm no different than anyone else.
What I wonder about this situation is why does the kid want to know? I don't understand the urge to meet the particular people who have donated their genes to your parents. If I did meet my genetic "parents," if they must so be called, they would be no different from any other random SOB off the street. What this kid needs to learn to appreciate is that he has loving parents who he wasn't forced onto because of a drunken accident.
-----
jonathan barket
Beautiful DNA - is there anything it can't do?
You make it sound like someone went out and got someone pregnant for beer money. You don't actually fuck someone at a sperm bank. There's plenty of horrible parents in the worldI think people donating to sperm banks are somewhere at the end of the list of parenting problems.
How can someone donating to a sperm bank ever give his offspring a second thought? He never knows if or when or how many kids will be the result of that donation. At most he could perhaps claim to have been thinking about the potential parents and their plight of not being able to have children.
These kids aren't adopted. These people aren't selling babies for beer money. They're selling people the opportunity to have 'their own' children, merely with someone else's genetic material. These kids weren't abandoned by some 'original' parents. Their parents are the people who went to the sperm bank, and got pregnant, and so on, specifically because they wanted a child. These children are living with their real parents. The fact that the semen came from some other guy's penis, whatever the motivation, seems like an infinitesimal part of the equation, unless you're worried about genetic diseases or something.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Rare case my a$$. The adoption discussion, like so many of other discussions today, has been hijacked by the whiners.
Of the 7 people I know who were adopted (self, sibling, one highschool friend, two college friends, two coworkers), exactly 0 of us care to find our genetic donors. But because we don't care, we're not the ones out there bitching and moaning and demanding pity (and airtime) from those who write headlines.
And speaking as a female, the existence of said whining class is a hell of an incentive for me to prefer abortion to adoption as a solution on the off chance I get pregnant before I get around to getting myself spayed. The thought of having some person who feels that there's this void inside them that only I can fill track me down 18 years after I made a mistake, and start stalking me on the grounds that we're biologically related and therefore I must care, really, truly, deep down, I'm just in denial but if they try hard enough I'll realize the TRUTH (I've actually seen this happen to a friend of mine's mother), is just more unpleasantness than I really want to deal with, ever.
Maybe I'm a cold blooded bitch, but I think it's more likely that I'm a well-grounded, stable individual who realizes that the past is the past, and I make my future (thanks mom and dad, you did a good job), and the whiners just need to grown the fsck up already.
I listened to an interview with a guy that runs a sperm bank, and he said that until laws were changed to allow people to donate for money, most all sperm used for artificial insemination was either that of the physician or from one of the interns.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
In regards to Burens comment "I'm now going to have to ponder whether I want to do somemthing like this, or whether I should. I don't know yet because I have no idea whether they would want to be contacted."
Do it, or spend the rest of your life wondering. You will always regret not taking the action, to do something that you know you should have done.
Who cares if they want to know you? YOU WANT TO KNOW THEM!
Sig- http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?ayefly
for hacker of the year. tres cool.
Why is it so important to you that your submission is the one that gets accepted?
> and the whiners just need to grown the fsck up already.
Agreed, but hey in this case he is fifteen years old! Give him time..
I submitted to AskSlashdot a piece on what I saw as the future ability of police to use this type of extrapolation to DNA finger people who aren't actually in a DNA database directly and the privacy rights implications. . The rejected submission is in my February journal entry: "DNA Incrimination by Extrapolation"
Letter To Iran
You have to be white? (Well I dunno how it's here in Sweden, but i find it lil strange. Hmmm, two "white" parents and a "dark" child, kk maybe theres a point there. On the other hand a "colored" pair getting a "white" child from donation... Maybe the donations should be labeled.)
Another way to look at it is donors are helping someone who would otherwise not have their own child to love through a theraputic process that allows the reciever to conceive. Whether or not you agree with the ethical/legal concensus achieved so far is a different argument. Onwards, if the child feels a need to contact me in the first place because its a human and being human it may feel some qualitative feeling of comfort in meeting the next person up in it's lineage that goes back in an unbroken chain to algae give or take a billionish years ago. Your right, I would be a donor not a parent - but if the child wanted to see me I wouldn't be so callous as to not give it an audience.
Shh.
A case of too much Slashdot reading, methinks.
Stuck down a hole! In the middle of the night! With an owl!
How many people like me glanced quickly at that headline and saw "DNA and Online Search Finds Birth Patent"?
The scariest thing is if it really had said patent I wouldn't have found it that implausible.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
In these child support cases, the only thing concerning the judge is the interest of the child. Crime means nothing. So, the guy is doomed to lose in family court.
He should try a civil suit for damages though. Punitive damages would be neat. Every month he pays her, and every month she pays him. If triple damages are awarded, he could make out pretty well.
Just for revenge, criminal charges of fraud would be fun too. That's yet another court.
First something quite like original Babel fish, then these singing mice, and now tracking down anonymous fathers. Well, what Arthur Dent donated was just his DNA, but similiarity is striking, isn't it?
I don't totally agree with this, but by the same token I don't think it should go completly the other way eigther.
It should be possible for the 'birth parents' to deny thier identies being given without consent however.
My aunt gave birth to three children in her life, but gave the second one up for adoption. No one knew except (maybe, not a clear detail here) her best friend who she stayed with the last 5 months of the pregnancy and she claimed the child had been still-born.
Fast forward almost thirty years and she has hunted down her biological relatives. Unfortunately this was two years after my aunt had died of cancer.
She visited her two 'brothers' and met a few of her 'aunts' and 'cousins' and that's about it other than the occasional letter to her brothers(actually 1/2 brothers, even to each other).
Generally it was minor splash in peoples lives, but no big deal other than the sadness that she didn't find us before my aunt passed away.
How such a thing goese down really depends on the people involved. If they've all got a fairly healthy grip on themselves and thier lives it's likely to be o.k., if not drama may ensue.
In general I think the 'birth' parent should have say over thier own anonymity, as should the adoptee for that matter. Though I wouldn't take issue if certain medical data was made available to the adoptee, as long as it was done VERY carefully.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
I had to read the headline twice. The first time it didn't make much sense to me, as I read, "DNA and Online Search Finds Birth Planet" :P
I thought, uhm why? I, for one, am fairly sure I was born here on earth.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
To start using better encryption on your spooge.
The standard 46 character, trinary variable encoding is kinda weak....
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Read a little close:
He said he didn't find out about the child for nearly two years, when Irons filed a paternity lawsuit.
The man's name was Phillips.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
A more famous case is the former German tennis star Boris Becker.
Just google for "Boris Becker" "broom cupboard"
In short: after losing a match at Wimbledon he took comfort in a quick BJ from a Russian model who impregnated herself (BJ happened in a broom cupboard of a restaurant, hence the query terms) .
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
I read it as "Birth Patent" the first time too. That gives me an idea for Slashdot's next April 1st edition... Headlines and article text that change everytime you click on them/do a mouseover/etc.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Just as I suspected. No women on Slashdot - just guys who "speak as females".
It's a joke.
I'm glad I don't have to deal with the question of who I'm most genetically like. But that's, I think, what the question is all about. Yeah, you can't really call them "parents". The way I think about it is this: I have something in common with every person on Earth. More in common with some than others. (beliefs, experiences, color of skin, color of hair, preferences in hobbies, etc.)
If I ran into my "biological parents", it'd be purely a case of - "wow, I have something in common with these people" in the same way that if you run into someone who likes the same obscure movie as you. Interesting, yes. Life changing, no. (Unless it ended up being Bill Gates - then I'd go after some of that "beer money" that he got. Free as in Beer, my a$$, Dad.)
But, I'm fairly certain I know who my biological "parents" are - my real parents. So I can't really speak from experience.
The search for one's identity goes beyond reason and it can be maddening. Learning that one is adopted late in life is a severe blow to a person and I can imagine the feeling could even be worse if they find out its from sperm donation. That could be worse in fact because neither love nor lust was tied to ones conception. There was a TV movie on last year about an Indian teenager taking his grandfather on a roadtrip for what he thinks could be his last tribal meeting. The teenager of course is rebellious and self-centered (typical teenager iow) and along the way he picks up lessons from gramps. At one point they pick up your typical white kid who wants to tag along and the Indian boy pokes fun at him for wanting to become a wanna-be Indian. Grandfather scolds his grandson and it really makes him think with the line: "He wants to be connected to something. I for one commend him." That line for me sums up why the search for one's identity is important to people and is why issues of race, ethnicity, gender and class will never go away.
These children are living with their real parents. The fact that the semen came from some other guy's penis, whatever the motivation, seems like an infinitesimal part of the equation, unless you're worried about genetic diseases or something.
Not being in that situation, I can't say for sure. But a friend of mine recently tracked down her birth parents. Since she was adopted at birth, you'd think that it wouldn't matter a lot more. But it has meant a lot to her, and one multi-degreed friend of hers said, "Seeing them all together has really changed my views on the nature/nurture thing."
As I get older, I notice things about myself that would be completely mysterious had I not known my grandparents. One of them I never met, and I'll always wonder what things I'd gotten from his side of the family.
I am a reporter for the George Washington University Hatchet. In every issue we run several ads for sperm banks and egg donations. a recent article by a fellow writer addressed this. I know that some people may not want to meet their offspring in 15 years, after they've settled down with a spuse and started a family of their own.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
You don't actually fuck someone at a sperm bank.
Oh.
Whoa.
I guess I'll be canceling that appointment, then.
Women donate eggs to other women/couples. What if a child found out they were from a donated egg? Is the woman that gave up the egg also an evil person who, as some posters have implied, gave up a child for beer money?
I think in the case of egg and sperm donation, a background check should be done before the people dontate, once the donation is given, NO identifiable data should be linked to it. Keep record of the race of the person, their education, and maybe some other general points to help a person choose good seed, but no names and no birth dates.
A DNA-fingerprint isn't like a finger-fingerprint, since once databases get a good sample of the population DNA, they can get close to identifying anyone from DNA evidence alone. The fact that a kid tracked someone down who wasn't in the database suggests that, as these databases mature and become cheap, individuals will be able to track each other down from their DNA. Didn't get her phone number? Look for a strand of hair. And better not use the restroom at the car dealership if you don't want to start receiving targeted advertising...
You don't actually fuck someone at a sperm bank.
Oh...
I guess maybe that explains all the screaming and kicking and scratching yesterday.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Y'know, 'cause he wants to be "ready" if someone responds seriously to his comment.
If you want to count errors, the last sentence is a fragment, not a complete sentence.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Nobody here wants to adopt black children; they'd rather have white kids. When sperm-shopping, the same pressures apply. I exaggerate, of course, but the pressure is there. It's stupid and it's pointless, but it's there.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
I don't understand the urge to meet the particular people who have donated their genes to your parents.
You may not, but it doesn't seem that uncommon. I don't understand the urge to watch soccer games, but there you go.
If I did meet my genetic "parents," if they must so be called, they would be no different from any other random SOB off the street.
Well they would be different, in that they would be alike you in certain ways, at the very least I can understand a dispassionate semi-scientific interest in talking to them and finding out in what ways they differ or don't.
I think your point of view is entirely reasonable, but I think it is unreasonable for you to lay into this kid, just because he sees things differently.
What you are giving (egg, sperm) contains itself all the data needed to identfy you .....
*THINK* Before permitting these people to contact their biological parents! It destroys families.
How could a child born from a donated sperm destroy a family? From my point of view, there are much worse things that can destroy a family. Adultery, for example.
Actually, it's unlikely that the grandparent post was referring to a female sperm donor being tracked down by her offspring.
.... Who's your daddy?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I can see it now. A bunch of towels that I made sperm donations to will sue me for support.
This is bad. Real bad.
only if you have other DNA to compare to. Everyones DNA isn't on record somewhere.
I've got 20 bucks we see this on a CSI episode within a year.
Actually, according to the research presented in the book "Freakonomics" by Levitt and Dubner, chapter 5, it really only matters who your parents were, not really how they raised you.
So yeah, umm, handing out genetic material is more important than being there later. Sorry.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
It's not like these guys are going around spraying sperm all over the planet getting women pregnant who don't want to be, or who don't want to raise a child... the whole point is that the women want a baby.
You do realize that the fertility clinic is the one who profits from this, right? Where are they supposed to get the sperm? Ever think of that?
I've got news for you... in the US, people donate blood for beer money too, and they don't give a second thought where it goes. I see this as no different. The only people who go to sperm banks are women who are stable enough to provide a good home life to raise a child, but couldn't get pregnant otherwise. There's nothing wrong with that.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
(Yes, people who aren't identical twins or clones have unique DNA sequences, but the amount of DNA actually tested isn't an entire sequence but certain sets of markers.)
hmm. i'm in a similar situation as you, except *i'm* the adoptee who found his family... my half-brother and i great friends now and i've never been happier in my life.
so, yeah, i just LOVE your plan, "let's just revoke the civil rights of all adoptees because your truth-averse family can't cope with staring down its own lies..."
you have no idea why you love your parents because you weren't torn from them at birth and forced to live with strangers. you can't know for certain that you would have loved the strangers just as much because they were nice enough to raise you. everything is just speculation at this point.
i love how non-adoptees are alwyas so quick to tell us that their biology doesn't matter when they've never known what it's like to have no connection to their roots. how fucking dare you try to deny me something that you've been able to take for granted your whole life!
who my bio-parents ARE is central to WHO I AM. knowing that is not some special "privilege." and privacy fucking schmivacy! you can't enter into ANY legal agreement that can undo the biological truth that you ARE the parent. i feel sorry for people who get duped into believing the rhetoric of "just sign here and it'll be just like this never child ever happened..." but their naiveté is not something that i should be punished for. sorry.
why don't you try loving your brother for god's sake? what he's going thru right now is more difficult that anything you can possibly imagine. have some compassion. get some therapy.
I obviously don't know your situation fully and only have the contents of your post to go on, so if I'm out of line here I apologise in advance and will happily be corrected. What I'd like to say is try stepping back and look at your situation from your mothers perspective instead of your own. Your half-brother is her child just as much as you are - you both spent nine months being carried by her and that is a MASSIVE emotional attachment. However he was raised and whoever it was that raised him can not and will not change that. However you feel about it this is something that you have to accept hard though it is. Obviously your mother cares about him if she want's you to meet him. It's something that is going to be hard. It's also something you obviously don't want to have to deal with and didn't ask for, but it's here and it's happened and I'll bet she needs as much positive support as you can give her.
Try thinking about the other perspective too - how would you feel if you found out that actually you were adopted instead? Would you not want the right to at least track down your birth mother? Fair enough if you find her and she didn't want to have anything to do with you thats her perogative but you should have the right.
~Pev
Scarily enough I have a close friend that found her birth mother was in a situation that wasn't exactly 100 miles away from that cartoon and it nearly tore her apart, especially that her mother wanted nothing to do with her and she quite a few other siblings, all by different fathers. As with most good humor, it's often VERY close to the bone. I'm undecided whether to forward that link to her or not. 8 years later I'm still not sure if she's ready to laugh about it.
~Pev
I think there is a lot of value in knowing who your genetic ancestors are. For example my father has an uncommon genetic condition whereby he has poor speculation to his extremity's. But having lived like this most of his life he put little thought into keeping his extremity's worm and got a case of frost bite by working on his car for a few hours in the cold when not useing good foot protection. It then took him several years of somewhat ext ream pain and the removial of some toes to heal. Now knowing about this I have reason to be more cautious when it does not seem all that could out.
However, before this happened to him I used to walk around all winter in sandals because my feet never felt cold. I understand that while I don't feel cold my feet are vary cold when I do this so I can do a lot of damage by walking around like this even if it seems like everything is fine. Thus, by knowing about possible genetic issues you are better able to deal with them.
It's the same thing with hart conditions / diabetes ect. On a more personal level knowing you family's history for breast caner is a powerful tool which would help you manage risk. But, I agree with you that knowing you genetic ancestors as specific people is probably not all that important.
I agree with you. Was this a reply to the dude above me?
I've come for the woman, and your head.
Does-it really matter? What's the problem to be in love with your 'half sister'?
I remember having seen a TV program where a brother and a sister were raised in different family, when they met, not knowing that they were related, they fell in love. They learned after that they were related but they decided to go on nonetheless: they're still together, married with normal children.
So first the odds are very low, second even when it happens the real problem is more on the 'psychological' part than on any real problem: if the couple above hadn't learn that they were related they would have been no different than any other normal couples..
They may indeed not have problems with their degree of consanguinity, and I can imagine that it does happen (unbeknownst to anyone) from time to time. But even a 1/8 common genetic consanguinity (first cousins) can lead to some very serious recessives being expressed, which would be unlikely to pair up with two random people. Even among first cousin marriages, the risk is about double that of two distantly related or unrelated people (4-6%, as opposed to 2-3%). This is not unreasonable, but with a 1/4 commonality, the risk is going to go up considerably more than that -- not sure if it doubles, or squares, or what exactly, but it's going to be northward of 10%, and you just might want to be paying attention at that point. I'm not arguing that it just SHOULDN'T BE DONE, but it certainly should not be dismissed as completely irrelevant either.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Though his donor had been anonymous, his mother had been told the man's date and place of birth and his college degree. Using another online service, Omnitrace.com, he purchased the names of everyone that had been born in the same place on the same day. Only one man had the surname he was looking for, and within 10 days he had made contact.
Under the right circumstances, a small amount of seemingly insignificant information can be quite powerful. In this case it was a date of birth, a place of birth, and the existence of a college degree. Did anyone originally think that the donor could have been tracked down via that information? For more anonymity, the information provided about sperm donors might have to be reduced.