ABSTRACT
The setting is a large consulting room in Harley Street, the epicentre of London’s booming private health industry. ‘Welcome to our clinic. As single women you are here because you have chosen not to bring a child into a relationship that was unsatisfactory. We congratulate you for that. We recommend that you use our donors. The quality of our sperm is two times higher than the national average. With us you simply can’t get a dud! We’re not creating designer babies [here the salesperson casts a wary side glance at the researcher taking notes] but you want him to be educated and intelligent. You have to be altruistic to donate sperm. You have to be a creative thinker and have a certain level of intelligence. Our student donors are doing a master’s or a Ph.D. They come in and donate every week. We get to know them by the coffee machine. If we don’t like their personalities, if something doesn’t seem right about them – for example, if they don’t make eye contact – we don’t let them in. We know there are genetic causes of things like autism.’
