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This ran on Father's Day in the Washington Post, but I didn't become aware of it until I read a Joel Achenbach comment about it at his blog. Is it just me (and Joel Achenbach) or is there something particularly creepy about a man who enjoys fathering children he'll never meet? I understand the need for this service from the woman's point of view, but what makes a man willing to create an unknown number of children, knowing that the odds are against them all being raised without neglect or abuse? Achenbach says it sounds like someone who is "dabbling in fatherhood." In an underpopulated world suffering from a sperm shortage, that might be noble.
All of the benefits, no burdens. Sounds like fun.
Continued at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR2005061501885_4.html
Family Vacation
Why would Raechel McGhee fly her two beloved children across the country to stay with a man they had never met? Because he is their father
By Michael Leahy
Sunday, June 19, 2005; Page W12
His name is Mike Rubino, but until recently none of the women who bought his sperm to get pregnant had ever seen him or known him as anything other than Donor 929. Rubino left the sperm business for good a few years ago, thinking it would be another decade at least before any children found him. Now he is standing inside the Los Angeles International Airport, staring at an arrivals gate, awaiting the appearance of two children he has fathered but never met, along with their single mother, a Massachusetts psychotherapist named Raechel McGhee.
At that moment, 44-year-old McGhee and her children are descending toward him in blackness and rain. "It is kind of unbelievable that this is about to happen, but I'm relaxed," Rubino says, not looking so relaxed, fidgeting with his brown hair, anxiously surveying an airport monitor until he's found a status report on the McGhees' flight. "On approach," he reads, craning his head toward the arrivals door. "I think their mother said she'd have the kids in slickers," he says, "and she said that she would be in a raspberry slicker." He falls silent. "Maybe this is going to take a while," he says, but then he glimpses a sliver of a raspberry-colored garment moving amid a horde of travelers, spotting a tall woman. He mutters, "There she is -- there they are."
He hurries forward, calling out to the woman, "Hi, hi."
The woman changes direction, veering toward him, smiling. McGhee looks Rubino up and down as he gets close, hugging him casually. She turns to her kids, gesturing at Rubino, and says, "Look who's here."
The children -- a brown-haired boy one month shy of 7 named Aaron, and a 3 1/2-year-old blond girl named Leah -- stare up at him, mouths agape. Rubino turns to the boy, crouches, and hugs him gently. The boy's arms hang stiffly at his side. He tentatively wraps a thin arm around this man's neck, glancing up at his mother for some sign of approval. But she hasn't noticed his glance, open-mouthed herself, drinking in the 45-year-old Rubino, this slender, fair-skinned artist in jeans and a gray T-shirt. Rubino comes out of his crouch, simultaneously lifting the boy a few inches off the floor, then putting him down the way he would a fragile package. Everyone is smiling, the boy broadest of all. "Do it again," he mumbles. Rubino reaches out for little Leah, who jumps back as if his arms might swallow her up.
"What do you say to this guy?" McGhee asks her daughter. "Who is this man?"
"This is California," the little girl says, dancing away from him toward baggage claim.
Rubino watches her, thinking, This is my daughter -- the moment so extraordinary for him as to be slightly surreal. This all began for him a decade ago in a small locked room of the California Cryobank, where, amid soft-porn tapes and magazines, he produced semen that was sold around the world. Only in the late 1990s, about five years after he had made his first deposit, did he acquire any sense of his sperm's appeal, when he was lured out of donor retirement by the flattering news that at least two unidentified women had contacted the cryobank and requested that Donor 929 provide additional semen so that they could have more children by him. This was done successfully -- his final specimens enabling McGhee to bear her second child.
"She's cute," Rubino says, pointing at Leah.
"Well, thanks," McGhee responds brightly, "but those aren't my blue eyes she has."
There is silence for a few seconds before Rubino fills it, glancing sideways at her, looking at her hair, which is the color of wheat. "You're very pretty," he says.
He turns back, looking at the children. McGhee can't get out the words she wants to say, which are Thank you. She has self-esteem issues when it comes to her appearance, having been obese once -- and her hair is a dye job, and she can't remember whether she's mentioned that to Rubino. By contrast, she tells herself, he is beautiful. She unabashedly checks him out in profile, though she already knows his physical features without having to look -- 5-foot-11, 145 pounds, blue eyes with long lashes, a cleft in his chin that she likes, strong cheek and jawbone. "You're a good-looking guy," she says, and this hangs there. Her next words come in a rush: "And why should anybody be surprised. Look at the kids. They're gorgeous."
She has committed to spending a week at his home, which some of the single donor-inseminated mothers she knows have had no problem telling her is nuts, nuts. They hit her with questions: What if this guy is a jerk?
What if he wants custody rights? Are you crazy -- staying alone in his house?
Rubino grabs the heaviest of their luggage, simultaneously reaching for Aaron's hand, carefully guiding him through the rain. Pleased, McGhee walks alongside her daughter, who then skips ahead of everyone, turning around every few seconds to stare hard at this man, scrunching up her nose and giving him funny looks.
It is a short ride to the Rubino Gallery, where Rubino's living quarters -- one long room alongside a bathroom -- rest on the other side of a wall from his small gallery, separated by an opaque, sea-green glass door. Once inside, Rubino surprises the kids with gifts -- pillowcases with their favorite cartoon characters, special bathroom lights adorned with more cartoon characters and, a reflection of Rubino's hope that they might take an interest in one of his passions, two bags of fossils. "Some of these fossils came from 100 to 600 million years ago," he tells them. "There were no people on the planet then."
The boy yelps then, having just seen frogs moving near a wall, inside Rubino's glass terrarium. He runs over, rapping on the glass to get the frogs' attention. On the other side of the sea-green door, there are Mike's paintings. Aaron is an aspiring artist himself, having sent Rubino, before he left home, one of his crayoned drawings -- a serpent with a human head. Rubino telephoned to say it was good. Immediately, Aaron sent him another drawing, inscribed with a note: "You are cool."
McGhee calls out to everyone: "We have a present for Mike, don't we? Come here, Mike."
Leah hands him his gift -- a T-shirt inscribed "BEST BUDDIES." Beneath these words is a drawing of three stick-figures, accompanied by names: Aaron, Dad, Leah.
"Hold it up," McGhee tells him. "You can wear that when we go to Disneyland. The kids have shirts just like it."
"That's sweet of you," Rubino says, looking at all of them.
Aaron is screaming from the other side of the room. "Mommmm, can we watch TV?"
"You have to ask your Daddy."
"Is it all right, Mike?" Aaron asks Rubino.
Rubino looks at McGhee, who nods.
Rubino sits on a tan sofa, Aaron plopping alongside him. They watch a cartoon, and immediately Aaron gets sleepy. He rests his head on Rubino's shoulder, sidling closer, so that most of him lies splayed on Rubino's lap and chest. Enough for one night, decides McGhee, who calls out to the kids to get ready for bed.
Aaron is whispering to his mother, asking whether he can sleep between her and Mike. She tells him that Mike will be sleeping in his own bed across the room, with his dog and cat. She points. Mike's bed is about 25 feet away. In a few minutes, McGhee steps into the bathroom, where she changes into her sleeping garb, a pair of gym shorts and a black sleeveless T-shirt from Gold's Gym. She has spent only three hours with Rubino. But when he flicks off the lights, she is ecstatic: They are spending their first night together as a family.
Mike Rubino was married in 1985, and by the early '90s, he and his wife were frustrated over their inability to have a child, as he tells the story. "We'd been experiencing fertility problems," he says, "and she had had surgery, but nothing had changed."
A hard truth took hold. "We finally realized we wouldn't be able to have children of our own," he recalls. "It was hard, though probably not as hard on me."
He tried to console his wife, who bore most of their sorrow, he remembers. Rubino was disappointed but not heartbroken. For starters, he'd wanted only one child, and besides, he'd never been excited by the prospect of diapers, late-night feedings and crying jags. Still, he felt something missing over the next year. He and his wife were watching the news one night when a story appeared about sperm banks and their use of paid donors, who bore no financial or any other legal responsibilities, it was said, to the women who used their purchased sperm or to any children born as a result. The absence of obligation, however, was accompanied by a caveat: The donors enjoyed no rights to see any of the children conceived with their sperm. "We listened to the report, and I said, 'What the hell?'" Rubino remembers. "It was a chance, if nothing else, to be part of the gene pool. And we thought we could help some people. My wife was very encouraging."
He liked imagining himself as a 55-year-old man answering his doorbell someday to discover a charming, good-looking 18-year-old on his doorstep, a young adult whose long quest to find his biological father had brought him to Rubino. "I could imagine all of the advantages and see no burdens," he says.
In 1994, after tests and assessments, Rubino became a sperm donor at California Cryobank, regarded by many as the largest sperm bank in the country. It opened in 1977, an era when gynecologists generally contacted the cryobank on behalf of their patients, who typically had no idea of their anonymous donors' physical and academic characteristics. The cryobank relied then on a small siring stable, which included several medical students from nearby UCLA.
Much had changed by the time Rubino arrived. The small stable had given way to donors -- from 150 to 200 at various times -- who had walked into the cryobank to apply for donation work. The proliferation of sexually transmitted diseases had long since made the testing and screening of sperm routine. The "Cryo" in the company's name -- from the Greek kryo for "cold" or "frost" -- was suggestive of an industry built around freezing the donor sperm so that clients could become pregnant when they wished. It was a new world, and perhaps the most important advance was the advent of a computer-friendly, online culture in which California Cryo-bank's clients could learn about both the donor screening process and the intimate details of the donors themselves.
The cryobank purports to select only 3 to 5 percent of its applicants, based on sperm potency and an assessment of intellectual, physical and emotional characteristics. Each applicant must be from 19 to 39 years old and a college graduate or an enrolled student at a four-year university. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Rubino filled out a questionnaire detailing his educational background and appearance. His attributes meant that his semen would be regarded as prized sperm -- his 3.75 grade-point average as an art major and his blue eyes, slenderness and the cleft on his chin were all traits the cryobank's informal surveys indicated were attractive to would-be mothers.
Add to this his cryobank-produced audiotape -- on which he etched his artistic ambitions, mentioned his fluency in French, soulfully offered his hope of helping the infertile, and rhapsodized about his love of travel and Puccini -- and what the cryobank had in Rubino was an alluring bon vivant. Welcomed into the program, Rubino fell into the donor's standard routine. Receiving a plastic cup from a technician, he would enter one of the five small locked rooms that the cryobank's co-founder, Cappy Rothman, jokingly dubbed the "masturbatoriums." There Rubino became Donor 929. He generally produced semen twice a week for about a year at the cryobank's offices, where each acceptable specimen (anything that would yield a minimum of one vial of sperm for shipment) brought him $50 -- which translated to about $400 or so a month.
Abiding by instructions, he always walked into the cryobank the same way, off an alley and up a rear flight of stairs, so as to avoid crossing paths with the sperm-buyers. From the beginning, cryobank officials told Rubino and other sperm donors in the program that none of them would receive information about births attributable to their sperm. But, increasingly curious, Rubino tried coaxing them to hint how many children he may have fathered: 10? 20?
They'd smile but never answer.
All of the benefits, no burdens. Sounds like fun.
Continued at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/15/AR2005061501885_4.html
