Do the media think only the wealthy have the right to reproduce?

On Saturday night I recorded an interview about my experiences as a sperm donor for the Stephen Nolan show on BBC Radio 5 Live, and it was broadcast a few hours ago.  It can be listened to on catch-up at this link from about 39 minutes onwards.  (I don't really sound like Darth Vader's sinister Scottish cousin, by the way - they heavily disguised my voice at my own request, just in case anyone I know in real life happened to be casually listening in.)  I think Stephen Nolan felt at a few points that I was becoming unreasonably impatient with him - he kept saying "this is not an aggressive interview!", although to a hardened political interrogator such as himself, a non-aggressive interview is probably just one from which the interviewee emerges alive.  Oddly enough, the question that slightly exasperated me was completely left-field - it wasn't about the ethics of natural insemination, or the risk of accidental incest, or any of the other all-too-familiar objections.  Instead, it was: "do you feel any love for the children you have helped to create?"  Even having had more than 24 hours to think about that, I'm still not entirely sure how I was supposed to answer.  Is "loving" or "not loving" someone you have no relationship with a meaningful concept?  In my opinion, it isn't.

But that's a minor quibble, because all in all I was a lot happier with this experience than with my previous brushes with the media.  My first impression on listening to the interview was that it appeared to be almost completely unedited, which was extremely refreshing.  When I thought about it some more, I realised that it had actually been trimmed a bit (probably for timing), but nothing of any great importance had been cut out.  Just for once, I had been allowed to genuinely speak in my own words, without distortions or selective editing.  Contrast that with the experience of the Facebook donor who was interviewed for the recent BBC North-east and Cumbria programme, and who was given all sorts of assurances in advance by a producer called Emma Wass that it would present a balanced picture and that the positives of online sperm donation would not be neglected.  Those assurances proved to be utterly worthless, and the whole thing was just yet another hatchet job.  I was actually contacted by Ms Wass a few months ago about the possibility of appearing on that programme, and I had several lengthy phone conversations with her.  I now feel like I had a very lucky escape.  The donor who did appear (a thoroughly decent and principled man who deserved a lot better) has had his photo plastered all over a number of news articles portraying what he is doing as somehow sordid or despicable.  One of those articles even referred to a "black market" in sperm donation - an absolutely jaw-dropping choice of words in light of the very recent ruling from the press regulator IPSO.

I think it's worth sometimes just taking a step back and trying to untangle the agenda that programmes and articles like that are actually pushing.  OK, so they reckon that it's awful that some men are using sperm donation groups on Facebook to manipulate women into sex, and that something should be done to stop that from happening.  But what is that something?  Presumably they must be angling for the outright banning of informal sperm donation, which yes, would protect vulnerable women from inappropriate messaging, but would also prevent women from connecting with the decent donors who offer sperm for free on Facebook groups or other websites.  In many cases, perhaps in most cases, it would leave them with a straight choice of not having children, or forking out thousands of pounds to go down the clinic route.  It's not at all hard to see how that would be a good outcome for the clinics (isn't it amazing how often the "experts" who rage most vociferously against informal sperm donations have a vested financial interest?), but it certainly wouldn't be in the interests of women of modest means who want to start a family.

If what the media are really getting at is that only the wealthy should be able to reproduce, they ought to have the intellectual honesty to make that case openly and directly.