The article is from The Independent, and is about the shortage of sperm donors in the UK, following changes to the law that gives adult children the right to trace their father.
The figures are surprisingly high:
Compared to how many abortions per year?: around 194,000.The doctors said around 4,000 UK patients needed donor sperm each year.
Therefore, a minimum of 500 new donors were needed each year to meet demand, they argued.
One donor in Britain is allowed to father 10 children. Sounds high to me, but the doctors say this level is "very, very safe".
Even more surprising, however, is that the Dutch allow up to 25 children from one donor father (and that is in a population of only 16,000,000.) France, by comparison, allows only five, and it would appear that in one State of Australia it is 10.
Meanwhile, one "freelance" idiot in Australia is believed to have fathered 30 children (to lesbian mothers), and mostly in the one city.
I can't quickly find how many sperm donor births there would be overall in Australia, but the total number of "assisted conception" babies is now around 10,000 a year.
And in comparison, the number of babies put up for adoption in Australia last year: about 60. (Remarkably, you will see from page vii of that link that there were only 568 adoptions in total in Australia in 2006-07. Of these, 70% were from overseas.)
No one knows accurately how many abortions there are in Australia each year, but the guesstimate appears to be anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000.
Seems to me that it's about time some effort was put back in to suggesting adoption might be a preferred solution to the wild mismatch of reproductive desires that these figures indicate.
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