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In an effort to try and find out more about the woman who gave birth to octuplets earlier this week, we went to the home she shares with her parents and six other children in Whittier, California. What we learned is that her whole neighborhood is buzzing about the possibility that the 33-year-old mother used the same sperm donor to conceive the octuplets AND her other six children.

NEW YORK — Eighteen-year-old Ryan and 14-year-old Anna found each other on the Internet. Both were conceived by artificial insemination technology. After they registered with the Donor Sibling Registry online, they discovered that they shared the same in vitro fertilization clinic and “donor number.” The same anonymous sperm donor was their genetic father. They are half brother and sister. On a long weekend in May, Ryan and his mother flew from Colorado to New York to meet Anna and her mother and non-genetic father. Coincidentally, Ryan and Anna were celebrating the same birthday. Perfect strangers, they bonded instantly, according to...

~~~snip~~~ Cryobank doesn't reveal the identities of donors but allows people to choose based on the traits they'd like their child to have. Jackaway decided on "Donor X" because he appeared philosophical and intelligent on paper. He liked music, loved to travel and had a high IQ and a degree in economics. What she couldn't know then is that her son would have autism. So she started to wonder whether Donor X might carry a gene that could have contributed... ~~~snip~~~ Researchers have found some genetic areas associated with autism, but it could take years before the gene or genes...

· Law change could help cancer victims · embryo bill fuels impassioned debate Mps are planning a change in the law to allow babies to be conceived from artificial sperm, a move described by opponents as playing God with human DNA. A furious debate is building over how far to leave the door open to its use in IVF treatment, ahead of a Commons vote due shortly on the government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology bill. The legislation currently allows ...#8239;so-called artificial gametes in research, but imposes a blanket ban on their use in creating a human pregnancy. The technique involves...

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- A woman who promised a sperm donor he would not have to pay child support cannot renege on the deal, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled. The 3-2 decision overturns lower court rulings under which Joel L. McKiernan had been paying up to $1,500 a month to support twin boys born in August 1994 to Ivonne V. Ferguson, his former girlfriend and co-worker. "This court takes very seriously the best interests of the children of this commonwealth, and we recognize that to rule in favor of (McKiernan) in this case denies a source of support to two children...

A man who was kind enough to donate his sperm to a lesbian couple has now--18 years later--been stabbed in the back and hit up for child support. According to the New York Post: "A sperm donor who sent gifts signed 'Dad' to his biological son has been slapped with a child-support order, 18 years after helping his friend get pregnant. "The Nassau County man donated his sperm to a work colleague, and included his name on the child's birth certificate, saying it would give the boy an identity, courts documents revealed. "He then blurred the lines between donor and...

WESTBURY, LI (1010 WINS) -- A sperm donor may have to pay child support after the mother's lawyer argued that the man has sent birthday cards and otherwise acted like a father to the teenage child, the donor's lawyer said. A Nassau County Family Court judge recently blocked the man from seeking a paternity test. The man's lawyer, Deborah Kelly, says the Nov. 16 ruling sets the stage for a magistrate to determine how much her client may owe in support. The parties in the case are listed anonymously. The man, a doctor, donated sperm to a hospital resident and...

Court says sperm donor liable for child support BY SOPHIA CHANG sophia.chang@newsday.com December 1, 2007 A Nassau County man who said he donated sperm to a female co-worker as a friendly gesture -- and then sent presents and cards to the child over the years -- is legally considered the father and may have to pay child support for the college-bound teenager, according to a judge's ruling. Still, he took the unusual step of allowing his name to appear on the child's birth certificate because he thought it was in the child's "best interests that he would have an identity...

GAINESVILLE, Fla. -- Thousands of sperm samples, some stored by men who feared they could become impotent, were destroyed when the temperature rose undetected in a refrigeration tank at the University of Florida. The problem at the university's Women's Health Center at Magnolia Parke began last October, when a faulty sensor on the liquid-nitrogen-filled tank apparently failed to alert anyone that the temperature had risen, said center spokesman Tom Fortner. The vast majority of the samples were from anonymous donors intended for use by couples with fertility problems. "Our anonymous donor sperm bank is essentially wiped out," Williams said.

NEDERLAND, Colo. - Michelle Jorgenson thought it was odd that her 8-year-old daughter Cheyenne — conceived with sperm from a mystery man known to Jorgenson only as Donor 3066 — was extremely sensitive to sound and walked on her toes. Jorgenson started checking on the Internet and soon learned of at least six other children around the country who were fathered by 3066. And of those seven, she discovered to her alarm, two have autism, and two others, Cheyenne included, show signs of a sensory disorder tied closely to autism. The children's mothers located one another beginning a year ago...

Oslo's Sperm Bank seeks to double its number of donors but is not interested in contributions from homosexuals. A legislative change in January 2005 gave the child of a sperm donation the right to know the identity of the donor when reaching age 18. The sperm bank at Rikshospitalet, Oslo has been trying various recruitment drives to make up for the resulting reluctance but the Bank is far from its goal of finding 30-40 new donors every year, newspaper Dagsavisen reports. Nevertheless, the Bank is unwilling to accept homosexual donors, despite the regulations not mentioning the exclusion of this group....

THE LAW of UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES You've probably heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences. It refers to the unanticipated later results of earlier decisions or actions. We saw a television report of an unintended consequence of "sperm banks"--organizations which sell male sperm to lesbians or other single women who want pregnancy "without a father," and couples who want to have children despite male infertility of the husband. You will be shocked, as we were, to discover an estimated 40,000 children are born each year using this repulsively modern means. Apparently, anonymous "profiles" of the sperm donor are used to market...

He was a millionaire who dreamed of saving humanity using the sperm of geniuses. But what became of Robert Klark Graham's master plan? In the late 1970s, in a underground bunker on his ranch near San Diego, American millionaire Robert Klark Graham set up the world's most controversial sperm bank known as the Repository for Germinal Choice. Already famous as the inventor of the shatterproof spectacle lens, 70-year-old Graham was set to turn his hand to a much more infamous career. He believed that "retrograde humans" were breeding unchecked. He wanted to reverse this trend by bringing thousands of geniuses...

THE white dad whose wife had Asian twins in an IVF blunder told yesterday how his son declared: “I want to be pink like you, Daddy.” He said he replied: “Well, I want to be brown like you — that’s why I sit out in the sun. He laughed at that.”The dad and his white wife, who we will call Mr and Mrs A, were speaking for the first time since The Sun’s world exclusive 2002 story about the test tube bungle.We told then how the twins, now six, were born after an Asian man’s sperm was wrongly used to...

(CBS) CHICAGO It's a trend that some fear may have long-term consequences. More unmarried women over the age of 25 are not waiting for Mr. Right. As CBS 2's Alita Guillen reports, these ladies are having children on their own. The fantasy father at their fingertips is a sperm donor with all the right stuff. Katherine Gehl and April Lashbrook had successful careers and dated, but they didn't have husbands. They heard their biological clocks ticking loudly. "It was like a time bomb," April said. "I need to go and have a baby and be a mother, and so I...

A sperm donor in Michigan passed a rare and serious genetic disease to five children born to four couples, doctors are reporting today. The doctor who discovered the cases said that all four couples were clients of the same sperm bank. That bank, the doctor added, assured him that it had discarded its remaining samples from the man and had told him he could no longer be a donor. It is not known how many children the donor had fathered, whether he knew he carried the disease before he donated sperm, or whether the bank had informed him of his...

By: Steve Patterson (Chicago Sun-Times Reporter) ... Michael Wilford says he was simply a sperm donor. Christin Harris says he was much more than that to her. Now, the Glenview woman wants him to provide child support and college fund and pay medical expenses for the 2-year-old twin daughters he fathered. But the Downers Grove man says it's a case of "involuntary parentage" as he had no intention of doing anything more than provide his ex-girlfriend with the semen she needed to conceive. "No good deed goes unpunished," his attorney Enrico Mirabelli, said in court Tuesday. 'I Just Want Your...

Michael Jackson's ex-wife Debbie Rowe has told an Irish newspaper the singer is not the biological father of their children, Prince Michael Jr. and Paris. Rowe, who was married to Jackson for three years between 1996 and 1999, claims her 8-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter were both conceived using anonymous semen brought from a sperm bank. She tells the Sunday World, "Michael knows the truth -- that he is not the natural father of Prince Michael Jr. and Paris. He has to come clean. "I have no information whatsoever about the identity of the donor

LATE last year, a 15-year-old boy rubbed a swab along the inside of his cheek, popped it into a vial and sent it off to an online genealogy DNA-testing service. But unlike most people who contact the service, he was not interested in sketching the far reaches of his family tree. His mother had conceived using donor sperm and he wanted to track down his genetic father.That the boy succeeded using only the DNA test, genealogical records and some internet searches has huge implications for the hundreds of thousands of people who were conceived using donor sperm. With the explosion...