A fertility clinic in California famed for offering sperm from donors who look like celebrities is expanding to the East Coast, the New York Post announced this morning. This news is the latest of developments in the field of fertility treatment that seriously undermine the culture of Life—reducing parenthood to a fad and children to collector’s items.
The fertility clinic, California Cryobank, “offers would-be parents the chance to search for prospective donors based on which famous face the sperm donor most closely resembles.” So far the clinic says they have donors resembling famed soccer star David Beckham, Olympic champion swimmer Michael Phelps, and even Prince William of England, to name a few. Communications manager of the clinic, Scott Brown, told CNN earlier this month that from an ethics standpoint, there really isn’t anything to worry about because, “The goal was not to say you can have a baby that looks like Bob Saget...The goal was to say this donor happens to resemble this celebrity.”
The “goal” may have been to give prospective parents a better idea about what their donor looks like. However, the fact that the names most frequently searched for on the clinic’s website are some of the most popular and “hottest” celebrities (including Paul Walker, Ben Affleck, and Brett Farve) suggest that people are searching for a little something more. “Designer babies” are becoming a dangerous fad and are detracting from the limitless love that is supposed to exist between parents and their children.
Mark Rothstein, director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law at the University of Louisville School of Medicine in Kentucky, expressed this very concern to CNN:
“What would happen if the child [conceived from donated sperm] doesn't look like a celebrity or that look-alike? Would the child be treated like a failure?”
Beyond the individual children, what does this say about the direction in which our society is going? Bonnie Steinbock, professor of philosophy and bioethics at the University at Albany in New York emphasized the superficiality of the situation:
“There's something strange about a culture that has stratified rigid types of beauty where everyone looks alike. Now they're trying to create children through who the [actor] of the moment is.”
Reading about this fertility clinic is like watching a Dell lap top computer commercial. It emphasizes customization and you can choose everything from your hard drive to screen size to outside cover design, based on a whim or your “personal style”. It is scary to think that we have moved into this very same mindset with children. Kids are no longer considered “custom” to their parents just in their very biological nature—now parents can treat children as testaments to their youthful preference for a favorite sports team or the blockbuster that came out last summer.
