Dead Men Do
Give Sperm
Dead Men Don’t
Wear Plaid
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This calls for a sequel to the old classic Weekend at Bernie’s:
The extraction scene is going to be gently, tastefully done.
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You have your own hand available for that. Don’t you? 
PS: Proposed soundtrack for the electroejaculation process: Anything by the group Dead Can Dance.
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The grave’s a fine and private place
but none I think do there embrace.
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I did. It was shocking.
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ZING!
(ouch!)
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Dead men kiss and tell no tales.
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Never disappointed by a quotation from Andrew Marvell. Here’s a sottise inspired by you (and him)!
The grave is great, high does it rate,
but none do there ejaculate.
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The law was changed 15 years ago to remove anonymity from donors. Donation rates collapsed after that, and have not recovered.
In addition, the donors who thought they were anonymous before the law change, are now being identified through genetic testing, and are being “encouraged” to reveal their details.
The whole saga has left people not trusting the system.
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Another way to look at that is to consider that the human beings involved were not well served by a system that denied them the right to know half of their own identity and heritage, and technology improved to the point where they found a way around that problem.
The kind of sperm donor who can’t understand that they’re helping to create people who will have their own needs and desires that might run counter to their own probably shouldn’t be donating anyway.
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I can see that point of view and I understand the thinking behind it. My post was just to give the context as to why donation rates are currently so low over here that they are considering the dead as possible donors.
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I suspect that this aspect of the regulatory environment has a lot to do with it. At least for now, you can’t find yourself on the hook for child support; but having any of your descendants come knocking is an explicit feature; not just very likely in an era of cheap consumer genetic tests.
I’ve not been able to find a donors/year donations/year graph to see exactly what the trend looks like; but there are numerous articles related to concerns around supply connected to the change; and to the UK’s significant dependence on imported sperm to make up for a distinct lack of domestic supply.
That issue aside; it’s my understanding that (if the medicine is being practiced properly) standards are quite strict: given that sperm donation is easy, noninvasive, painless, can be done frequently, etc. it is considered deeply unsound to put a woman through a round of egg harvesting or IVF with anything but sperm most likely to be viable; because the downsides of a failed IVF cycle are considerably less pleasant than the downsides of tossing some QA-reject sperm.
Plus, at least in places where donors are easier to come by, the low cost of both donation and rejection encourages pickiness; whether by prospective parents looking for a donor that can produce a plausible imitation of their biological child by strongly resembling the would-be father; or one who ticks the boxes on desirable traits. You have to have a pretty strong abstract abhorrence for even the concept of eugenics to voluntarily choose to roll the dice on a genetic disease risk; or not go for your preferred phenotype or whatever when your choice merely involves which sperm will or won’t come out of cryo for your case.
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I guess I’m surprised that it is considered an issue. There could be an issue if for some reason they hate the dad they knew growing up and want to find a new father figure, but that would seem to be a pretty remote chance. Otherwise I’d think you should expect no more of a doner dad than maybe a visit once or twice for a chat and Christmas cards. Basically treat them like a distant uncle. Maybe this is one of those times where a couple of exceptional cases ruin the system for everybody else?
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Takes a bit of the juice out of this: “Ya want a baby? Over my dead body.”
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Is anyone else expecting the popular tendency to be squeamish about medical novelties and (explicitly or implicitly) embrace theories of ‘soul’ and assorted vitalist flavors to produce some wild, lurid, and probably cruelly-inflicted-on-children theories concerning the nature of the half-souled deathspawn produced from corpse gametes?
Sure, ‘science’ says that the sperm of the reasonably recently dead is functionally indistinguishable from that of the living; but given how well mere resounding scientific support is working out for things like ‘vaccination’ and ‘evolutionary theory’; I’m not sure that’s going to stop people who think of ‘parents’ as alive in a whole-human sense, rather than a ‘functional cell line’ sense from being vigorously and variously squicked by this option.
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Also used on large animals (Woo Hoo! you’ve never witnessed a gusher until you’ve seen a bull electroejaculated!)
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It’s a difficult intersection of medical privacy issues and the natural urge of many and perhaps most humans to know their biological parents. I can understand why donors prior to the change in the law might not be thrilled with a technological circumvention of their medical privacy, but at the same time it sounds like the donor in the article @Purplecat linked has handled it pretty well, essentially accepting the technological reality and making the best of it.
I can also see being concerned about potentially hundreds of effective strangers wanting to meet you, since genetics don’t determine character and there’s a small but non-zero possibility of being contacted by dangerous offspring.
In the balance I think the law allowing children to access that information on age of majority is probably the best compromise, provided the donors know that’s what they’re consenting to, but the technological reality is that even those who didn’t have to face the reality that they too may lose their anonymity. In that situation I can understand wanting to hold the companies accountable for any breaches of medical privacy they could have prevented.
I’m no geneticist so maybe the technology is such that someone could track down a donor even if the donor’s own medical information was never breached, simply by correlating it with recent genetic ancestors who did consent to their genetic and/or hereditary information being made public, much as even someone who eschews much of social media has a data shadow generated by the social media users with whom they interact (to say nothing of their commerce footprint and other databases).
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The kids are calling it Crusty Swimmers.
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