Selling Jewish Sperm

In an “Aldous Huxley, call your office” story, the Forward explains 6 Things You Need to Know About Jewish Sperm. The quality has dropped even among what one purveyor calls the “A-team of sperm,” which means it’s worse for everyone else:

A 2012 study of Israeli sperm donors found a noticeable decline in sperm quality over a 15-year period. Sperm counts fell by over a third, from 106 million sperm per milliliter of semen to 68 million. . . . If current trends continue, Israeli sperm donors could drop to 20 million sperm per milliliter, the lower limit of levels considered normal, by 2030, according to the study.

One bank accepts only one in eighty applicants, the one with the loosest standards quoted in the story only one in three. Presumably their choices are directed not just by quality but by the giver’s attributes, because when people are buying a baby they want the best they can afford and businesses want to buy a product they know they can sell. And, if I read the story right, many non-Jews want a Jewish donor.

Sperm banks choose donors with high sperm quality and safe genes; other desirable traits include good health, a college education and height (at California Cryobank, Caucasian donors must be at least 5 feet 9 inches).

But beyond these parameters, the banks leave the decision up to the parents, and it’s hard to say which donor will catch their eye. “There’s no one characteristic that’s going to guarantee that a guy is going to be popular,” Brown of California Cryobank said.

Brown remembers a specific donor — an attractive, Jewish dental student — whose sperm flew off the shelves. Most of the buyers were Jews looking for a Jewish donor. “I kept getting call and after call. It was just remarkable,” he said. “Everybody just loved this guy.”

As a moral theologian might say: This is so gross. A man so morally insensible as to masturbate for money  to create children with  women with whom he has no relation, children he will never see, and the businesses that use him . . . words fail me. But moral sensibility requires a recognition of the connection between procreation and commitment most people have lost. Something has been broken, or perhaps never developed.

This applies, I should emphasize, to every ethnic, cultural, and religious group. The story quotes some rabbis objecting:

Jewish men are prohibited from donating sperm to begin with, since by doing so they would violate traditional Jewish law’s ban on masturbation. . . .  Many rabbinic authorities see any kind of artificial insemination from a donor as a form of adultery. “It’s a violation of the marital relationship. You’re introducing a third party who is not the woman’s husband,” Bleich [Rabbi J. David Bleich, a scholar of Jewish medical ethics at Yeshiva University] said. “If it’s not technically adultery, it’s quasi- adultery.”

But these rabbis are in their world, like Christian theologians in theirs, minorities with views on subjects like this one everyone else treats as eccentric or sectarian.

I’m just hoping some tv producer doesn’t see the phrase “masturbate for money” and decide that’s a great idea for the next reality tv show.