李慧兰唱太湖美在线:一个捐精者和他的N个后代

Raul Walters, whose name has been changed, represents the Cryobank’s ideal candidate. He is tall and good-looking, holds degrees from top schools, and enjoys a clean bill of health: no one in his immediate family has a history of cancer, early-onset heart disease, or mental illness. 

      劳尔·沃特斯(化名)是精子银行理想候选人的典型代表：高大英俊，拥有多所知名高校的文凭，无家族病史——亲属中从未有人罹患癌症、早发型心脏病或精神疾病。

Raul began donating sperm in 2004, to help finance a year off before law school. He was working on a novel while trolling for job opportunities on Craigs-list, and his wife was pregnant with their first child. “I had no real skills,” he said, “but I was six-three with a half-million-dollar education.” Like many of Cryobank’s target donors, Raul is goal-oriented, and he admitted that the selectivity was also part of the allure. 

    劳尔2004年开始捐献精子，那时他休了一年假准备次年去读法学院，正一边写小说一边在克雷格名录(注：社交网站，发布大量分类广告)上寻找工作机会，妻子还怀着他们的第一个孩子，他需要经济来源。他说：“我那时没什么技艺，又有一大笔学费要付。”劳尔像精子银行的很多目标捐献者一样，目的十分明确，但他还觉得对捐精者的筛选过程也是吸引他的因素之一。

Raul made about $10,000 total by donating a couple of times a week for a year and a half, at $70 a sample. He didn’t dwell on the outcome—the possible children, the various mothers. He went on with his plans for a legal career, his artistic pursuits, and his own family life. Last year, he mentioned to colleagues that he’d been a sperm donor during his time off. “Have you ever Googled your donor number?” one of the other lawyers asked.

    那一年半的时间里，劳尔每周都要去捐献几次，每个精样70美元，他一共得到了大概1万美元。他过去从未想过接下来会发生什么——孩子？妈妈？他只是继续向着法律事业努力，保持着艺术爱好，经营着自己的小家庭。去年，他向同事提到自己休假那一年曾去捐精子。一个律师问：“你试过在谷歌上搜搜自己的捐赠编号吗？”

Raul had not. But that morning at work he typed his donor number into the search engine. The first hit was a blog called Django Djournal, a mother’s chronicle of the baby, Django, she had conceived with Raul’s sperm. At the top of the page was a photo of a chubby 2-year-old in striped shorts, smiling halfheartedly—Raul himself as a toddler. “It was out of context,” he explained. “So it took me a minute to realize why it was familiar.” During the period he was donating, he’d sold the photograph to the bank for an extra $200, to give a sense of what a baby of his might look like. 

    劳尔从未这样做过。但那天早晨，在办公室里，劳尔将自己的捐赠编号输入了搜索引擎。首先找到的是一个名为Django Djournal的博客，关于Django的成长日记，而孩子的妈妈正是利用劳尔的精子成功受孕的。网页最上面，是一个胖乎乎的两岁的孩子，穿着条纹短裤，笑得有些不情愿——正是劳尔小时候的样子。”他说：“我毫无准备，所以好一会儿才意识到为什么这个孩子看起来如此熟悉。”捐献精子时，他将这张照片以200美元的价格出售给精子银行，以使客户知道他的孩子会是什么样子。

The next photo on the page was of 6-month-old Django, and the resemblance was indeed striking—the dark hair and eyes, the open face. Raul and his wife had two children of their own by this time, and Django resembled them, too. What made the blog entry even more transfixing, though, were the photographs of two other babies also conceived with Raul’s sperm. Their mothers had tracked down the blog, and the result was an impromptu online community of mothers who’d used Raul’s sperm. As Django’s mother, who goes by “Mama K” on the blog, wrote: 

    网页上第二张照片是六个月大的Django，长相跟劳尔惊人的相似——黑头发，黑眼睛，圆脸。现在劳尔和妻子已经有了两个孩子，Django跟他们很像。更让劳尔吃惊的是，博客上还有其他两个孩子的照片，他们的妈妈也是用劳尔的精子受孕的。这些妈妈找到这个博客，留言，最后这里成为了劳尔精子接受者的网上根据地。Django的妈妈，在博客上署名Mama K，写到：

I didn’t give much thought to the idea of other children by the donor I chose … You can imagine my surprise then, when, in one whirlwind of a weekend, I received emails from the moms of two other [babies by the same donor]. 

    我从未想到过捐精者的其他孩子……在一个混乱的周末，我收到了其他两个妈妈(受孕精子来自同一个捐赠者)的邮件时，你可以想象我有多么吃惊。

Raul struggles to describe how he felt when he saw these children. “You know how it feels to come out of the trees on the coast and suddenly see the ocean?” he asked. “It’s so vast and incomprehensible. You have that moment of awe.” 

    劳尔试图描述自己看到这些孩子时的感受。他说：“从岸边的树林里走出来，忽然看见大海，你知道那种感觉吗？那么广阔，那么不可思议！你的心里会充满敬畏感。”

Raul’s initial sperm donation had sold out quickly—so quickly, in fact, that in 2008 the bank asked Raul to come out of “retirement” to help a woman who had given birth to one child using his sperm conceive a full genetic sibling. (This time, because the donation required travel and time away from his job, he charged the bank his law firm’s daily rate. As he joked to me, “What part of people paying me for my sperm is 'donation’?”) 

    劳尔那年捐献的精子售出的很快——太快了，到2008年，精子银行就请劳尔从“退休”中复出，因为一个曾接受他的精子受孕的妈妈，希望再使用他的精子生一个孩子。(这一次捐赠，他得从公司请假远道前往，因此他要求精子银行支付他目前日薪的价格。他开玩笑说：“我这么做哪一点算得上'捐赠'呢？”)

Django Djournal (which Mama K recently made a private blog) is not the only site that praises Raul’s sperm and the “curly-haired, bright-eyed” babies it produces. Cryobank, which helps about 10,000 women each year to conceive, has its own bulletin-board community, where women can locate other mothers with the same donor, recommend good sperm (Raul’s gets a shout-out), and find emotional support. It’s not hard to imagine a day in the near future when Web sites will let mothers rate sperm the way diners rate restaurants on Yelp. And really, if sperm is a product for sale, why shouldn’t such sites exist? Women already risking a great deal by going this unconventional route could be reassured to know that a particular “brand” is working properly, creating healthy, bright babies. But is sperm a product? Should selecting it be like shopping for a washing machine? 

    称赞劳尔的精子和他“卷发、亮眼睛”孩子的网站，不只Django Djournal(Mama K最近将它设置为了私人博客)。加利福尼亚精子银行每年为大约1万名客户提供精子，它也有自己的网络社区，在那里妈妈们可以找到跟自己接受同一个捐赠者精子的人，相互推荐好的精子来源(劳尔知道时吃惊地叫了起来)，寻求情感支持。不难想象，在不久的将来，也许妈妈们会在网上给精子评分，就像食客们在Yelp网上为餐厅打分一样。认真地讲，如果精子能作为商品出售，为什么不能有这样的网站呢？这样冒险采取非传统方式受孕的女人，就能知道哪些“品牌”的精子更好，从而拥有更健康的孩子。但精子真的能被当做商品吗？挑选精子可以跟买洗衣机一样吗？

The Internet was not a concern when California Cryobank was founded, in 1977, but it figures heavily into the business model today. Aspiring mothers can fill out an online search form (for, say, a Catholic donor with blond hair and blue eyes) and instantly receive a list of options. For anonymity’s sake, no photos of the donors as adults are included; instead, each profile is footnoted with links to images of celebrities that the donor most resembles—a feature the bank says has been extremely popular. I did a quick search for brown-haired Caucasian donors, which gave me a list of men who, Cryobank assured me, resembled Justin Timberlake, James Franco, or Steve Carell. 

    1977年加利福尼亚精子银行成立时，并未考虑过网络，但如今它已是现在商业模式的重要组成部分。满怀希望的妈妈们在线填一份搜索表格(比如要求捐献者金发，蓝眼睛，信仰天主教)就能立刻获得候选名单。出于保密的考虑，精子银行不会提供捐赠者成年的照片；但每份简介脚注位置都会附一个链接，指向与捐赠者相像的名人的照片——据精子银行介绍，这一服务广受欢迎。我搜索了一下棕色头发、白种人捐赠者，加利福尼亚精子银行给出了候选人，分别与贾斯汀·汀布莱克、詹姆斯·弗兰科和斯蒂夫·卡雷尔相像。

As Django Djournal and the chat rooms demonstrate, though, the Internet also enables networking between mothers who share a donor. And as the donor children grow up, they too are likely to connect with one another online. Cryobank aims to make 25 to 30 women pregnant from each donor’s sperm, though it says the number is usually closer to 12 or 15. Some of those women will have more than one child using the sperm. And once women purchase their vials of a donor’s sperm—which they do up front, to guarantee the product won’t run out—they can do what they wish with any excess, even creating a secondary market for vials of unused sperm. I found at least one woman, unaffiliated with Cryobank, who expressed interest in purchasing another woman’s leftover vials of Raul’s sperm so she could conceive her own baby. The sperm of a popular donor like Raul could easily produce several dozen children. 

    博客Django Djournal和网络聊天室表明，网络能够让使用同一个捐赠者精子的妈妈们联系到彼此。那么当孩子们长大以后，也有可能通过网络认识。精子银行的目标是使每个精子捐赠者的受赠人数达到25~30，然而目前这个数字一般为12~15。一些妈妈会多次使用捐赠的精子受孕。一旦她们购买了精子——通常她们会预付款，以防精子售罄——她们能够随意处理多余的精子，甚至形成一个二手市场。我知道有不止一位妈妈，虽然还不是加利福利亚精子银行的客户，表示希望从其他妈妈那里购买剩余的劳尔的精子。一些像劳尔一样受欢迎的捐赠者，很容易就会有几十个孩子。

One mother who’d been compiling a list of the half-siblings of her own baby by Raul’s sperm wrote on Cryobank’s bulletin board that she had already found 22 “success stories” by networking online. When I e-mailed her, she replied, “I am not comfortable disclosing the exact number of siblings, but I will say there are more than I had initially hoped.” 

    一个妈妈一直在寻找与自己的孩子一样，有一半基因来自劳尔的孩子。她在精子银行的电子公告板上写到，通过网络，她已经找到22个“成功案例”。我给她写了一封邮件，她回复说：“我不想讨论具体的数字，但是我可以说这比我最初预想的要多。”

California Cryobank says that, by industry standards, it is conservative in the number of vials it will sell from a given donor. A recent documentary on the Style network featured a donor who knows of at least 70 offspring from his sperm donations and suspects that he may have as many as 140. One has to wonder at the implications of scores of biologically related children, especially in an age when they will be able to find one another online so easily—and when their anonymous fathers will be able to find them as well. 

    加利福尼亚精子银行表示，根据行业标准，一个精子捐献者的精样出售数不应太多。Style网发布的一份文件称，一个已知有70多个后代的精子捐献者，后代数量实则可能达到140个。人们会惊讶于这些有亲缘关系的孩子今后的状况，特别是在这个时代，他们能够通过网络找到彼此——他们匿名的父亲同样能做到这点。undefined

Describing the sensation of first seeing the biological children he’d never known, Raul told me, “It released a lot of brain chemicals. It felt bigger than me. It was not a benign feeling.” I asked Raul if he’d donate again, knowing how he feels now. He shrugged. “I probably would,” he said. “But then, I’m open to chaos.”