When I was a student, on days that I didn't have the money even for a packet of 10 Park Drive, I occasionally thought about visiting a sperm clinic. Like stories about Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, there were a series of widely believed tales about sperm donation, and none of them (save the one involving an electrical current passed through the back passage) sounded too bad.
Like blood - more than blood, in fact - sperm was a renewable resource. Furthermore, it was a resource that (a) not that many other people seemed to want to fight over, and (b) that was going to waste in its billions (that was then; these days I can account for almost every single one).
What spurred me on, aside from money, was - I suppose - that certain genetic hubris that is reckoned an innate part of being a male animal. I quite liked the idea, the notion, of - in a few years' time - there being thousands of short-sighted semi-replicas of me running around the country. Which would be a good thing for everybody since, in my mind, at least, I was quite a catch for any lucky donee. A kind of benevolent version of the Boys from Brazil.
What stopped me was the fact that I couldn't get out of bed most days, let alone go to the trouble of finding an address of a clinic, pitching up there, sitting in a waiting room, filling in forms and then (by now thoroughly exhausted), performing on demand.
More successful donors may have other motives. A few weeks ago, 100 workers at a Romanian car plant in the town of Campulung decided to donate en masse. Their objective, as described by the local union official, Ion Cotescu, was to earn money to reduce their company's liabilities. A feasibility study, said Cotescu, showed that if a thousand workers were to donate their sperm for several months, then they could get enough dosh to pay off part of the plant's debts. You have to admire his, er, get up and go.
I don't know what happened in Campulung in the end. But I imagine that the last thing on the workers' minds (as it would have been the last on mine) was fatherhood - the idea that, at the far end of the tortuous zygotic production line might be a flesh-and-blood child who would want to call you daddy.
Those male students who were more energetic than I was, must now be worrying about their ancient emissions. This week sees the news that the British government is minded to allow the 1,100 children a year who are the progeny of donors the right to know the identity of their biological fathers. Apparently, the health secretary, Alan Milburn, has been advised that the rights of children to know their "true identity" should outweigh the rights of privacy of donors.
Of course, one consequence of this will be that the supply of donors dries up, so to speak. The Swedes have changed the law in favour of disclosure, and now their citizens have to travel to clinics in Denmark to top up on their sperm supply.
So why do it? There is, of course, the health argument, which says that you ought to know what diseases your donor dad had so you can take the necessary precautions. But fairly soon your own personal disease profile will emerge from the study of your genes, and you won't need any other information.
The answer, of course, is story. Story is the key to everything. We want to construct a tale for ourselves. Those who have been adopted, and who do not know their natural parents, will build great fantasies around who their parents were and who, therefore, they really are. Round Britain, right now, hundreds of thousands of people are emailing each other and meeting distant relatives in order to put together incredibly complex genealogies.
I was struck by the story of a Californian girl who, on her 18th birthday, got a package from the fertility clinic that contained her sperm father's name, address, phone number and photograph. She wanted to meet him, she said, because he was "half her heritage".
But he isn't. Not nearly. Not in any sense that makes any real difference. Except in a pedantic genetic way, her "natural" father was no part of her at all. He had not been bad or good to her, read to her, given her complexes or sheltered her from harm. He was in no way a part of her "true identity". Not like the poor sod who - for 18 years - she had been calling dad. One brought her up, the other wanked into a cup.
There is a more general point here, and it is one that those involved in the immigration debate should heed. There is nothing magic or immutable about identity.
