Teh One Who Knocks
06-12-2020, 01:28 PM
By Jinghua Qian - ABC.net.au
https://i.imgur.com/sU2e53Vl.jpg
I always pictured sperm banks as a vast database of donors vying for your attention with their supposedly hereditary talents.
In the US, some sperm banks allow you to search by appearance, heritage, education, clinical information and even their celebrity lookalikes.
But that's not exactly how it works in Australia. For starters, there's a lot less donor sperm available.
Though numbers vary, many fertility clinics offer prospective parents a handful of donors to choose from, rather than hundreds.
Then there's the fact that most donors in the clinic system are white — so if you're a person of colour hoping to find a donor who shares your ancestry, it can be a difficult process.
"We discovered early on that the clinics weren't interested in helping us find sperm that fit our needs," says Toowoomba resident Shona.
Shona is half-Indian; her wife Ange has Irish heritage.
"I couldn't quite imagine having a Caucasian baby because my heritage is really important to me.
"Being a person of colour has been such an integral part of my identity, the good and the bad, that I couldn't imagine not giving my kids that."
The couple never made it past an initial consult with a clinic.
"They said, 'Only 3 to 5 per cent of our donors are not Caucasian. You get what you get to pick from'," she says.
"Maybe they didn't understand why it would be important to us, but they didn't seem very interested in understanding that."
Sperm shortage
Australia's stocks of donor sperm are low, even relative to our population, due to tighter regulation of the fertility industry.
Donors aren't paid, they need to undergo counselling, and any offspring that result have the option to access the donor's details once they reach adulthood. Imported sperm still needs to meet Australia's strict guidelines and family limits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxT8qfCSHPw
With more and more people seeking reproductive assistance — particularly single women and lesbian couples — demand is outpacing supply.
Shona's experience is not a unique one as a rising number of Australians seek sperm donors of colour.
"As our community has changed, our need for donors of different ethnicities has grown," says Dr Lyndon Hale, medical director at a fertility clinic in Melbourne.
"Thirty years ago, when I started in this area, they were basically all Anglo-Saxon, but that's now changing because Australia as a society is changing."
https://i.imgur.com/Z85GMPR.jpg
Melanie wanted a donor to match her culture
For Melanie Saward, a Brisbane-based writer descended from the Bigambul and Wakka Wakka peoples, her experience at a fertility clinic left her in shock.
"After I'd paid to be a patient, they handed me a donor list with about 10 people on it," she says.
"I thought my choice would be easy because I'll just pick whoever the Indigenous donors are and choose from them — but there weren't any.
"I wanted someone who I felt could match my culture … It made me really upset because I didn't realise how important it was to me until I'd paid [over $500] to be part of the clinic."
Beyond race-matching
In the past, fertility clinics primarily served heterosexual couples who planned to conceal the use of reproductive assistance.
These days, most clients seeking donor sperm are lesbian couples and single women, and all parents are encouraged to be transparent with their children about their origins. But race can matter in other ways.
Deakin University's Dr Jaya Keaney is a cultural studies scholar whose research focuses on how queer Australian parents think about race.
"The fertility industry is one in which race is commodified," says Dr Keaney.
"But its understanding of race is quite reductive — it's talked about in terms of race matching and physical likeness."
She found that many of the couples she spoke to understood race less in terms of looks but more as a medium for cultural transmission or social solidarity.
One Lebanese and white couple, Mira and Isabelle*, wanted a donor of colour of any race, and eventually used a Taiwanese donor whom they met through an online donor network.
"Mira felt 'Lebaneseness' wasn't only one thing, it was more about being a minority race in a white-dominant culture," Dr Keaney explains.
"They talked about how they would equip their daughter for being Eurasian, and navigating that in Australia with challenges around fetishisation and exoticisation of Eurasian women in particular, and promoting Taiwanese culture as well."
For Melanie, the fixation on physical characteristics in online support groups for solo parents made them an uncomfortable place for her as an Aboriginal woman.
"There was a lot of gross designer baby talk about 'getting the right mix' with your complexion to make a baby that looks a certain way, which made me feel sick.
"That wasn't why I wanted an Indigenous baby, I wanted a baby that was strongly connected to who they were on both sides," she says.
Racial literacy
Melanie says she can understand why there are few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander donors given the legacy of the stolen generations.
"We still have children being taken from their people, and I imagine that a man would not want to donate if he couldn't be sure that children would be connected to culture and community," she says.
Dr Keaney says that Australia's stolen generations history has led to some important controls on domestic adoption, but that in turn has spurred the growth of the fertility industry — without the same considerations around race and culture carrying over.
In the fertility industry, she says, there is little consciousness of how race might matter beyond visible traits and donor selection.
Dr Keaney would like to see more racial literacy resources for clinicians involved in patient and donor intake, and for parents: not to tell them what to do in terms of racial selection but to encourage them to think more deeply about their own racial preferences.
It's also important to empower parents to have conversations with their children about race, especially if their children are a different race to them.
"There's very little information for how you navigate race in a family that's not all biologically related," Dr Keaney says.
"What happens going forward in a child's life in terms of forming a racial identity?"
Outside the clinic system
For Shona and Ange, their dissatisfying experience at the fertility clinic drove them to reconsider their approach.
"The more we thought about it, the more we realised we wanted our kids to have the opportunity to know where they came from," she says.
The couple decided to ask a close friend, whose background is Argentinian, to be a donor, and he was willing.
Ange carried their first child, now three, and Shona gave birth to their second daughter a year later, both using the same friend's sperm through home insemination.
"I think not wanting a Caucasian donor drove our decision to go with a known donor more than it drove our choice of donor," Shona says.
"We wanted someone who we knew and loved and who would be part of our lives."
*Names have been changed for privacy.
https://i.imgur.com/sU2e53Vl.jpg
I always pictured sperm banks as a vast database of donors vying for your attention with their supposedly hereditary talents.
In the US, some sperm banks allow you to search by appearance, heritage, education, clinical information and even their celebrity lookalikes.
But that's not exactly how it works in Australia. For starters, there's a lot less donor sperm available.
Though numbers vary, many fertility clinics offer prospective parents a handful of donors to choose from, rather than hundreds.
Then there's the fact that most donors in the clinic system are white — so if you're a person of colour hoping to find a donor who shares your ancestry, it can be a difficult process.
"We discovered early on that the clinics weren't interested in helping us find sperm that fit our needs," says Toowoomba resident Shona.
Shona is half-Indian; her wife Ange has Irish heritage.
"I couldn't quite imagine having a Caucasian baby because my heritage is really important to me.
"Being a person of colour has been such an integral part of my identity, the good and the bad, that I couldn't imagine not giving my kids that."
The couple never made it past an initial consult with a clinic.
"They said, 'Only 3 to 5 per cent of our donors are not Caucasian. You get what you get to pick from'," she says.
"Maybe they didn't understand why it would be important to us, but they didn't seem very interested in understanding that."
Sperm shortage
Australia's stocks of donor sperm are low, even relative to our population, due to tighter regulation of the fertility industry.
Donors aren't paid, they need to undergo counselling, and any offspring that result have the option to access the donor's details once they reach adulthood. Imported sperm still needs to meet Australia's strict guidelines and family limits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxT8qfCSHPw
With more and more people seeking reproductive assistance — particularly single women and lesbian couples — demand is outpacing supply.
Shona's experience is not a unique one as a rising number of Australians seek sperm donors of colour.
"As our community has changed, our need for donors of different ethnicities has grown," says Dr Lyndon Hale, medical director at a fertility clinic in Melbourne.
"Thirty years ago, when I started in this area, they were basically all Anglo-Saxon, but that's now changing because Australia as a society is changing."
https://i.imgur.com/Z85GMPR.jpg
Melanie wanted a donor to match her culture
For Melanie Saward, a Brisbane-based writer descended from the Bigambul and Wakka Wakka peoples, her experience at a fertility clinic left her in shock.
"After I'd paid to be a patient, they handed me a donor list with about 10 people on it," she says.
"I thought my choice would be easy because I'll just pick whoever the Indigenous donors are and choose from them — but there weren't any.
"I wanted someone who I felt could match my culture … It made me really upset because I didn't realise how important it was to me until I'd paid [over $500] to be part of the clinic."
Beyond race-matching
In the past, fertility clinics primarily served heterosexual couples who planned to conceal the use of reproductive assistance.
These days, most clients seeking donor sperm are lesbian couples and single women, and all parents are encouraged to be transparent with their children about their origins. But race can matter in other ways.
Deakin University's Dr Jaya Keaney is a cultural studies scholar whose research focuses on how queer Australian parents think about race.
"The fertility industry is one in which race is commodified," says Dr Keaney.
"But its understanding of race is quite reductive — it's talked about in terms of race matching and physical likeness."
She found that many of the couples she spoke to understood race less in terms of looks but more as a medium for cultural transmission or social solidarity.
One Lebanese and white couple, Mira and Isabelle*, wanted a donor of colour of any race, and eventually used a Taiwanese donor whom they met through an online donor network.
"Mira felt 'Lebaneseness' wasn't only one thing, it was more about being a minority race in a white-dominant culture," Dr Keaney explains.
"They talked about how they would equip their daughter for being Eurasian, and navigating that in Australia with challenges around fetishisation and exoticisation of Eurasian women in particular, and promoting Taiwanese culture as well."
For Melanie, the fixation on physical characteristics in online support groups for solo parents made them an uncomfortable place for her as an Aboriginal woman.
"There was a lot of gross designer baby talk about 'getting the right mix' with your complexion to make a baby that looks a certain way, which made me feel sick.
"That wasn't why I wanted an Indigenous baby, I wanted a baby that was strongly connected to who they were on both sides," she says.
Racial literacy
Melanie says she can understand why there are few Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander donors given the legacy of the stolen generations.
"We still have children being taken from their people, and I imagine that a man would not want to donate if he couldn't be sure that children would be connected to culture and community," she says.
Dr Keaney says that Australia's stolen generations history has led to some important controls on domestic adoption, but that in turn has spurred the growth of the fertility industry — without the same considerations around race and culture carrying over.
In the fertility industry, she says, there is little consciousness of how race might matter beyond visible traits and donor selection.
Dr Keaney would like to see more racial literacy resources for clinicians involved in patient and donor intake, and for parents: not to tell them what to do in terms of racial selection but to encourage them to think more deeply about their own racial preferences.
It's also important to empower parents to have conversations with their children about race, especially if their children are a different race to them.
"There's very little information for how you navigate race in a family that's not all biologically related," Dr Keaney says.
"What happens going forward in a child's life in terms of forming a racial identity?"
Outside the clinic system
For Shona and Ange, their dissatisfying experience at the fertility clinic drove them to reconsider their approach.
"The more we thought about it, the more we realised we wanted our kids to have the opportunity to know where they came from," she says.
The couple decided to ask a close friend, whose background is Argentinian, to be a donor, and he was willing.
Ange carried their first child, now three, and Shona gave birth to their second daughter a year later, both using the same friend's sperm through home insemination.
"I think not wanting a Caucasian donor drove our decision to go with a known donor more than it drove our choice of donor," Shona says.
"We wanted someone who we knew and loved and who would be part of our lives."
*Names have been changed for privacy.