Cynthia Daily and her partner used a sperm donor to conceive a baby seven years ago, and they hoped that one day their son would get to know some of his half siblings — an extended family of sorts for modern times.
So Ms. Daily searched a Web-based registry for other children fathered by the same donor and helped to create an online group to track them. Over the years, she watched the number of children in her son’s group grow.
And grow.
Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together — they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group. [...]
There is a halakha that a man is forbidden to have two wives in two different cities because the children from each marriage will not realize that they are related, and could come to marry each other, which would be incest and cause mamzerus.
ReplyDeleteIIRC R. Moshe Feinstein discusses this in the context of sperm donation. Such donation to an anonymous sperm bank has an even greater risk of half-siblings unwittingly marrying each other later in life.
I was thinking about this exact question recently. If someone had to donate sperm to a sperm bank in Israel (where the majority are Jews)and he has no way of knowing who the potential mother could be. What would the din be for his children, are they allowed to marry anyone? Would we follow the din of Rov and say that 99.9% of people would not be their brother/sister and therefore can marry anyone, or no they can marry no one because there is always a safek they could marry this brother/sister?
ReplyDeleteFor a link to a useful review by Rabbi Afred Cohen
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jofa.org/pdf/Batch%201/0092.pdf
Do they, in fact, have sperm banks in Eretz Yisroel? Are there any statistics available on how widely they are used?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3927274,00.html
ReplyDeletejust found this