Uprooted - Peter J Boni

 Sub-title: Family trauma, unknown origins, and the secretive history of artificial insemination

This was a great read.  The author discovered in his 50's that he was conceived via artificial insemination, something that was being experimented with in the 1940s when he was born. He goes on a quest to find his birth father and in the process records the history of AI and its unregulated use over decades.  

Quotes:

"Year's before, I had taken a Myers-Briggs personality test...the leadership profile, ENTJ: Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging....only 2% of the population has this profile."

"Isabella [Queen of Spain] became one of the most powerful and influential European monarchs...During her reign, the International Federation of Chess, the governing authority of the game, restructured the rules.  While the king remained the most important, the queen (modeled after Queen Isabella), moved freely in any direction and became the most powerful piece on the board."

"Based on [June 1941 survey of 30,000 doctors] ...estimated that artificial insemination accounted for as many as 10,000 births, with approximately two-thirds resulting from artificial insemination by husband and one-third from an artificial insemination by donor."

"In England, in post-war 1945, Dr. Mary Bardon documented...successful artificial insemination by donor and later revealed as many as 1,500 donor-conceived children in the U.K. ...she subsequently disclosed that one anonymous donor, her husband and fellow fertility researcher Bertold Wiesner, accounted for six hundred of those children. (Wiesner occupies the number-one Wikipedia spot for having fathered the most children)." 

"The American Society for Reproductive Medicine...publishes Fertility and Sterility...recommends a series of practice standards to be followed by its fertility practitioners... "

"The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, drafted in 1968, and the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act have established standards for organ and tissue donation in the US.  Yet, there is no such governing body establishing laws and standards in the life-giving multi-billion-dollar reproduction industry.  ..[it is] totally unaddressed by US federal law."

" Professional fertility specialists generally belong to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART).  By 1988, the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment (CLIA) required all clinical laboratory testing on humans in the U.S. to adhere to stringent standards."  

"First, a guideline is not enforceable; a law is.  Second, the free market distribution of not only sperm but also egg and embryo enables a multitude of unknowing siblings to be conceived from the same donor." 

 

Published: 2022  Read: July 2022  Genre: Memoir