Advertisement
Help Keep Boards Alive. Support us by going ad free today. See here: https://subscriptions.boards.ie/.
https://www.boards.ie/group/1878-subscribers-forum

Private Group for paid up members of Boards.ie. Join the club.
Hi all, please see this major site announcement: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058427594/boards-ie-2026

Anyone ever donated sperm?

  • 29-06-2015 04:11PM
    #1
    Closed Accounts Posts: 667 ✭✭✭


    Hey lads. Just wondering if any of you have ever donated your swimmers? It's something I've an interest in doing. Don't plan to have kids myself, for various reasons. But there's a passage in the book 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson, that's always kinds stuck with me. Here it is below, great book btw, check it out if you're stuck for something to read.

    "To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

    The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. At various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.

    Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely—make that miraculously—fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result—eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly—in you. "


    So I just have this kind feeling like I sort of owe it to that marsupial back in the Jurassic period that dashed around dodging dinosaurs, and scraping by a living, and managed to survive long enough to find a lady marsupial and charm his way into her knickers and produce healthy offspring (I call him Pinchy, Pinchy the Jurassic Marsupial) to pass along the genes. Sperm donation seems like the best option for me.

    Apparently it's not done in Ireland. We import all our sperm, from the Danes mainly, I understand. So, I'll have to go international. I figure it'll be fun, make a trip out of it. Pop over to some country, take in the sights, soak up the culture, masturbate into a receptacle, take some photos (of the sights, not the receptacle), that kind of thing.

    Anyone ever done anything like this before?


Comments

  • Closed Accounts Posts: 47 squiggledash


    As far as I know the child has the right to find out who you are? You do know that right? Its not a decision I would take lightly. But having said that I think it is a good thing to do. There are a lot of childless couples where men have low sperm count or even childless women who just never got the chance to have a child that you would be helping out. But are you prepared for the psychological issues you may face. You may find yourself wondering did you do the right thing...is the child ok etc. Only do it if you think you can frame it positively in your mind and that your helping other people.


  • Site Banned Posts: 1,734 ✭✭✭Second Toughest in_the Freshers


    I came (heh) to give a smart reply to the topic, but then I read the OP.
    Love that book, but theres a fallacy in there somewhere, not sure the exact name of it, but its somewhat related to the Anthropic Principle, which basically says 'life is the way it is because it is, and if it was different, it would be different'


Advertisement
Advertisement