One of the depressing consequences is that increasing numbers of women find their children at sperm banks. Some are women whose husbands are unable to procreate, but many (and they're not all lesbians) simply don't want to bother with a man in their lives. They think they can do it better alone. By some estimates, the number of single women seeking donor sperm has doubled in a decade. A customer with money confronts no social stigma. The celebrity magazines are awash with stories of women who are "single mothers by choice."
But these designer children suffer just like children without fathers have always suffered. Daughters lack that first male to measure men by, and they are more likely to engage in destructive sexual relations at earlier ages than girls raised with fathers. Sons lack a man to model themselves after, and often never learn the discipline to control male aggressiveness. Such sons and daughters never see how problems can be worked out within a loving marriage, and they descend into the psychological spiral that leads to a succession of failed relationships.
Americans overwhelmingly agree that good fathers are important for children, but you don't need the surveys conducted by the National Fatherhood Initiative to see that this is common sense. The first children of donor dads are young adults now, and many agonize over finding their fathers. It's not exactly inspiring to know that Daddy was a no-name number from the deep freeze, and there's another danger: Since such sperm is often contributed by anonymous young men, often working their way through college, the likelihood that a woman could fall in love and marry her half-brother without knowing their blood ties is hardly inconceivable (no pun intended).
Maybe, given the unhappy givens of the sexual revolution, Heidi Fleiss was inevitable. "I've heard from very wealthy, very beautiful women who say they'd be the first in line," she says. No doubt.