Misleading Headline?

[sp1814]

Is the Mail on Sunday trying to stir up hatred against gay people (again)?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2714321/NHS-fund-sperm-bank-lesbians-New-generation-fatherless-families-paid-YOU.html

[anotheoldgit]

Forgot to erase that last piece.

[ummmm]

So many answers I can't read them all.

My sons have been brought up without a father. They are lovely people. You don't need two parents to bring up perfect human beings.

In an ideal world we'd have two loving parents and enough money to provide for all our needs.

[ummmm]

I actually take that back. They have a stepfather who loves them and they love him just as much.

[sp1814]

AOG

You wrote:

Yes, people of whatever colour who have children through IVF will prefer those children to resemble them, but the fact is, statistically, very few go down that route. The melting pot will remain because the vast majority of the population will continue to have their families by doing what comes naturally – as they always have – and amen to that. ;o)

"Statisically, very few go down that route"

Just prefixing an opinion with the word 'statistically' does not turn it into a fact.

Furthermore, you are introducing IVF into a discussion which has nothing to do with IVF.

[naomi24]

Sp, aog didn't write that - I did.

[Svejk]

I think IVF does come into it.

[Hypognosis]

I should add that, no matter how talented the individual donors were, the selection criteria thing means that the sperm bank represents a narrow gene pool. After sufficient generations, the 'nth' generation progeny of these donors will have no-one to procreate with other than people with at least part of their ancestry traceable back to a sperm bank that they share in common.

Then again, only having 6 great-grandparents didn't do Queen Victoria any harm…

[naomi24]

Sorry, I meant to say artificial insemination.

[naomi24]

And sp, I think it is a fact that the vast majority of pregnancies occur through the tried and tested method.

[Svejk]

we're all interbred, hypo, even me. ;o)

[Kromovaracun]

So long as the father is a good one, I don't think anyone could really disagree that having a mother & father figure is disadvantageous.

It's a bit of a leap to go from there, however, to saying that one might as well not bother if you can't have both. As disadvantages go, it is not a particularly serious one (especially compared with, say, poverty it is really quite minor). This argument really hinges on what you think the NHS is actually for.

Or it should do, anyway. :/

[Hypognosis]

Icelanders have taken to using a phone app to check their date isn't too closely related (if any country needs immigrants urgently, it's them!!) and ancestral research is getting popular, so the technology to ward off most of the relatedness difficulties already exists.

It is analagous to that thing where if you count back far enough the number of theoretical nth-great-grandparents eventually exceeds medieval Europe's population so, in theory, Charlemagne's genes will have mingled with just about everybody's family line by now. (Okay, it's a thought experiment only but you het my drift).

Of course if one donor's attributes are so popular that hundreds of women in a small geographical area select him, then there will be a cohort of children of a similar age who are at serious risk of pairing off with one another.

In this sense, parentage involving only having handfuls of progeny, who know they are related by means of shared upbringing, is a strategy which avoids inbreeding. An actual harem system (eg deer herds) or something which approaches it (sperm bank) contains the inherent risk of inbreeding over a very short timescale. Making donors traceable empowers the child to build
a proper family tree and thus avoid marrying siblings, cousins etc.

[naomi24]

divebuddy, //er, isn't artificial insemination a term usually applied to breeding animals. //

It is indeed - including the human kind.

http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Artificial-insemination/Pages/Introduction.aspx

[naomi24]

Krom, //It's a bit of a leap to go from there, however, to saying that one might as well not bother if you can't have both.//

Who said that?

[Hypognosis]

//Svejk
we're all interbred, hypo, even me. ;o) //

That's the name of the game. Keep shuffling the deck, to keep the pathogens guessing.

If you were actually Hungarian then you'd be a very distant cousin but a cousin all the same. :-)

[Svejk]

///Of course if one donor's attributes are so popular that hundreds of women in a small geographical area select him, then there will be a cohort of children of a similar age who are at serious risk of pairing off with one another///
Oh dear. ;-(

[sp1814]

divebuddy

I didn't introduce IVF into the debate. See the previous page on this thread.

[sp1814]

naomi24

All pregnancies occur through exactly the same method. The introduction of sperm to an egg. However,the circumstances of the execution may differ.