“No, why?”
“No stakes.” Gary shrugged again. “Nobody cares. Nobody cries. Nobody does something wrong. Nobody does something right. You follow, ladies?”
“I’m following,” Christine answered. It wasn’t difficult.
“Me, too,” Lauren chimed in.
Gary continued, “Also, plumbers, they’re little guys. I come from a long line of little guys. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a little guy.” He gestured down at himself. “So I feel for the little guy. I get the little guy. I’m feisty, and I’m loyal, and so I fight for the little guy.” Gary gestured to the photographs of the lions on his wall. “I took those pictures. I go on safari every year. To Botswana, the Serengeti, I been all over Africa. I drag my wife Denise. I drag her best friend, since she’s divorced. It’s a whole thing. I don’t shoot anything. I would never kill a lion. I’m a vegetarian. I take pictures. I have memories.” Gary pointed to his head. “I remember the lions I take pictures of. The lion, he takes care of every member of his pride. You’re my cub, now.” Gary frowned. “You think you’re in Connecticut, but you’re in the jungle.”
Christine waited, sensed he was coming to some relevant point. Or she hoped he was.
“Let me tell you the facts about the sperm banking industry, and believe me, it is an industry. It is a big, big, business. And in my opinion, it is lawless. As lawless as the jungle.” Gary puckered his lips. “There are no laws governing the screening and testing performed by sperm banks in this country. The United States Food and Drug Administration has some requirements with respect to screening sperm donors, but they apply only to contagious or infectious diseases, like venereal diseases or HIV, which 3319 was screened for.”
Christine perked up at the mention of her donor, and she began to realize that Gary had read their file, probably given him by Marcus.
“There are only two professional associations, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the American Association of Tissue Banks, that have anything to do with the screening and testing provided by sperm banks. They make guidelines for additional screening, like genetic screening, but they are only recommendations. Guidelines, not laws. They’re not enforceable, they have no teeth.” Gary glowered. “As a practical matter, sperm banking is a multibillion-dollar business, and they make their own laws. They’re the boss. They’re the king of their jungle.”
Christine was starting to wonder if she had misjudged Gary. He might have been bombastic, but he was shrewd.
“To come specifically to the point”-Gary pointed directly at Christine-“there are absolutely no laws that require Homestead or any other bank to conduct psychological screening for sperm donors. And because it would cost them money to conduct such screening, they don’t do it. Nobody tells them they have to spend money, so they don’t. They’re a business. They want to maximize their profit margins. They don’t want to spend any money that they don’t have to.”
Christine swallowed hard.
“So they hire nice women to sit down and interview the donors. The interviewer is a college graduate. Is that enough? No. The interviewers don’t have degrees in psychology. They don’t even have a master’s in social work. They’re not a mental health professional, an MHP.” Gary scowled. “Is an interview enough? No. That is not a psychological screening. That is not psychological testing. That’s not the Personality Assessment Inventory Test, administered by a psychologist or other MHP, after an hour and a half of a clinical interview by a psychologist or other MHP.”
Christine understood what he was saying and couldn’t disagree.
“Some banks, like Homestead, administer a Myers-Briggs test. That’s not the equivalent of a psychological evaluation. That’s a test that reveals temperament or style, but it doesn’t tell you any of the psychopathology of the putative donor.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means a true psychological evaluation of the donor, exploring for disorders like depression or anxiety, to find out if the donor is hearing voices or the like, or manifests any issues regarding addictions or disorders like OCD and the rest. Some banks administer a phony-baloney test that somebody made up, which characterizes personality traits. You probably saw that online, with other banks. Did you?”
“Yes.” Christine remembered.
“None of these interviews or tests constitute psychological screening to any reasonable standard of care in psychology or psychiatry. No nice lady with a liberal arts degree will be able to identify, much less stop, a sociopath.”
Christine felt a chill run down her spine. Lauren looked over, but neither woman said anything.
“The other characteristic of a psychological test is that it has reliability and reproducibility. It’s called ‘test-retest reliability.’ In other words, the test will reveal whether the donor has anxiety issues and the same result will occur if he is retested. Egg donors are routinely given those tests, but sperm donors are not.”
“Why is that?”
“It began because egg donation is a more extensive, physically invasive process. Egg donors have to go through cycles of IVF, and they undergo the procedure by which the eggs are retrieved.”
Christine understood. “Egg donation seems like a bigger deal.”
“Yes, and, in the old days, you could donate sperm anonymously, or before the banking industry mushroomed, you could order the donations yourself. You could use a turkey baster, for real.”
Christine had heard that from the techs at Families First.
“They didn’t think about it downstream, in other words, no matter how differently the gamete-that is, the sperm or egg-is obtained, it’s the same as far as the donor recipient is concerned. There is simply no reason that sperm donors should not undergo the same psychological testing that has become the ordinary standard of care for egg donation.” Gary’s eyes burned with a new intensity. “Moreover, the industry’s record-keeping is also unregulated. Patients, or customers, like you are not required to report births or defects to the banks. The banks are not required to report births or defects to anyone above them, like the FDA. So if there’s a flaw with the sample, they may not know, and they keep selling it.” Gary shook his head. “To make matters worse, there’s no regulation on how many times they can sell the same sample. There’s no limit on the number of offspring produced by any single donor. That’s left up to the banks. Some banks limit the number of offspring to 60. I’ve heard numbers as high as 170.”
Christine shuddered.
“There’s no financial incentive to make banks limit the number of times they sell that sample. The incentive is to use it more, you see? The banks pay a fixed cost for the minimal testing they perform on the donor. Most banks try to recoup that cost by requiring the donor to donate for a year.”
Christine hadn’t known that. She’d thought the donors could just donate once. Her head was spinning, and she knew Lauren’s had to be, too.
“Because the banks rule their jungle, bad things happen to people like you, who just wanna be moms. You’re vulnerable, you’re weak. Some of you fight back. You sue. I can tell you about the case of the bank in Wyoming, who sold twenty-year-old sperm. The offspring was born with cystic fibrosis. Nobody tested for CF when the sperm was donated.”
Christine recoiled.
“Let me tell you a recent case that’s something like yours, involving Xytex. They’ve been in the business for forty years, a major bank. Do you know the name?”
“Yes, Families First uses it.”