When I imagine sperm, something I've done quite enough to have a firm, mental picture, I see a million of them barreling toward their end, whether egg, dish or drain. In my mind's eye, there's nothing fragile about them, nothing too nuanced or distinct, just some bulbous heads and whipping tails without much history, besides the genetic stuff, since theirs is a supply that constantly refreshes itself.
Not so the female germ cell, the ovum. Women are born with a fixed, lifetime supply of eggs and every day, starting with a newborn baby girl's first, scores are lost. By the time a woman is in her 30s, the total has seriously dwindled, a fact many women who attempt pregnancies past their reproductive prime discover, forcing them to consider egg donation if they want to give birth to their own baby.
Peggy Orenstein, in this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine, wrote about in vitro fertilization (IVF) and egg donorship. While reading this excellent piece, it struck me that one of the fascinating aspects of donorship, and one of its least explored, is that we view biological contributors differently, depending upon the donor's gender. Most people tend to see sperm, and their fount, as somewhat expendable due to sheer numbers, the ease of donorship, and the fact that, in many cases, donors lack an interest in fostering any relationship with their specimen's recipient or any resulting child.
Sperm donation has long been viewed by both donor and society like any other no-strings-attached gift. In much the same way you can donate old clothes to charity or blood to a hospital without worry about future contact or a forced reunion with that hideous old corduroy jumper or the person who availed himself of your A Positive, a man can go to a sperm banking facility, produce his specimen, give a few choice pieces of information, and be on his way. Not that all donors or recipients seek such anonymity. There always have been some men open to future contact, but more and more, both parties are being asked to reconsider such closed relationships. In fact, recognizing the importance of genetic inheritance, Britain recently banned anonymous donation, whether sperm or ovum, which has seriously shrunken the donor roster.
But it is different for a female donor for whom this sort of compartmentalized conduct is physically impossible. It takes more than a second, or 60, and much more than a little sexy thinking to produce the female germ cell. In fact, it takes many months and medications and ultrasounds and medical procedures. And egg donation is still relatively new, only becoming widely available in the nineties while men have been donating sperm in this country since 1884 when the first recorded human donor insemination was performed at the Jefferson Medical College in Pennsylvania upon the Quaker wife of a sterile local merchant 15 years her senior.
And then there are all the social expectations about women and our relationship to childbearing. We are expected to care deeply, feel biological tugs, respond to a universal maternal instinct and put practicality aside, this when the nuts-and-bolts of assisted reproductive procedures, the drudgery of medical appointments and the precision of medicines overshadow the earthy symbol of "Mother." And even though female reproductive contributions -- the egg, the uterus -- fetch a higher price, being both rarer and harder to come by, particularly in their primed-for-pregnancy state, they don't lend themselves as easily to commodification, their contributors expected to look beyond pay days and toward charity.
An egg donor is expected to be young, a demand that has its roots in good science but which lends a sort of Sorority House or beauty pageant feel to egg donor registries. Sperm donors, as a group, are a little more diverse, both in terms of age and physical attributes, their eye or hair color, height and weight less important than, say, whether or not they ever played a professional sport or led a Model U.N. team to victory.
Women's main historical role, besides all that cooking and cleaning, has been to reproduce. We are expected, above all else, to be nurturing and selfless, willing to sacrifice our own selves for the sake of all children -- ours and other people's. For egg donors, this can mean exposure to possibly risky hormones and certainly mood-altering hormones and possibly a risk to one's own future fertility. For the women who need to rely on the donations, this can mean reconciling with the fact that history is most interesting in the throes of revolution.