Donor Dads
Clay Aiken
Singer Clay Aiken rose to fame in 2003 as a finalist on American Idol. He narrowly lost to Ruben Studdard, but his first album, Measure of a Man, debuted on the U.S. Billboard charts at No. 1 just the same.
For years, tabloids speculated that he was gay, and for years he dodged the allegation. Finally, he confirmed it to People magazine in 2008, along with the revelation that he was the father of a baby boy, via artificial insemination. The mother, Jaymes Foster, was executive producer on Aiken’s 2008 album, On My Way Here.
Photo via People magazine
Trent Arsenault
Trent Arsenault is the father of 15 children through sperm donation. In The Huffington Post, he characterized what he does as “helping create families,” but the Food and Drug Administration didn’t see it that way.
In 2010 the FDA served him with an order to cease "manufacturing," on the grounds that he didn’t provide sufficient protections against the transmission of communicable disease. However, Arsenault claims to be a virgin, making the communication of sexually transmitted diseases impossible.
He insists that he does what he does for the right reasons, telling the San Jose Mercury News that couples looking for a donor “say the commercial sperm banks are impersonal or clinical or too expensive for them.”
Photos via Gawker
David Crosby
Musician Melissa Etheridge and film director Julie Cypher are each one half of what was one of the first high-profile lesbian power couples. Their union lasted a decade and produced two children, Bailey Jean and Beckett, via artificial insemination. For a while, they kept the identity of the donor a secret, but in 2000 they revealed that it was musician David Crosby.
The couple broke up not long after divulging the identity of the donor, and both women have since gone on to new relationships. However, in making their relationship and family public, they helped de-stigmatize artificial insemination as a method for other same-sex couples to have children.
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Monica Cruz
In May 2013, dancer and model Monica Cruz gave birth to a daughter conceived via artificial insemination from an anonymous donor. The younger sister of actress Penelope Cruz, she had undergone the procedure at age 35 out of fear that if she waited for the right guy to come along, it would become “too late for motherhood.”
Cruz went public about her treatments while she was still pregnant. “To become pregnant, I turned to artificial insemination,” she said in the U.K.’s Daily Mail. “I want to tell, also, so I can have the opportunity to show my thanks to all those anonymous men that help to give many women like me, the dream of their lives.”
Donor 7042
Some who choose anonymous donors worry that without knowing who the father is, they won’t know what disorders his sperm could potentially carry. In September 2012, the U.K.’s Telegraph reported that sperm from a man known only as “donor 7042” carried a tumor-producing nerve disorder that made its way to clients 43 times.
He had used the Nordisk Cryobank in Copenhagen, and the clinic was notified in 2009 that one of the children born to the donor had been diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type I. A spokesman for the clinic was quoted in the Telegraph as saying that its staff had "looked at the case but didn't consider there to be reason enough to suspect it was the donor and therefore no reason to stop the use of his sperm."
William Marotta
In 2009, a Kansas man named William Marotta answered a Craigslist ad for a donor that had been placed by a lesbian couple. After meeting them and signing a form releasing him from any responsibility, financial or otherwise, he donated his sperm to the couple. But in 2013, the Associated Press reported that the state of Kansas was attempting to get him to pay child support.
The case rests on the fact that a doctor wasn’t used for the insemination per state law. This leaves Marotta on the hook for approximately $6,000 worth of public assistance that the biological mother received, along with future child support payments.
