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(LifeSiteNews) — The CEO of social media giant Telegram, after already having fathered over 100 children in 12 countries through sperm donation, is now offering to provide in vitro fertilization (IVF) for free to women who agree to use his sperm to have babies.
Forty-year-old Pavel Durov, who has been called the “the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia,” is reportedly worth in excess of $15 billion.
The Moscow fertility clinic through which Durov has made his offer, AltraVita, announced on its website, “In our clinic you can undergo IVF for free, using Pavel Durov’s sperm-one of the most famous and successful entrepreneurs of our time. This opportunity is one of a kind and the number of slots is limited.”
“Pavel Durov is willing to finance all the IVF protocols that use his sperm,” continues the notice from AltraVita. “It is a very generous contribution to society from someone who wants to help those dreaming of becoming parents.”
Women who are interested in producing children with Durov’s sperm are advised that to qualify they will have to “undergo thorough medical examination” in order to determine if they are eligible for the protocol.
Only women younger than 37 years old and who are judged by the clinic to be in satisfactory health will be permitted to “use this opportunity.”
Journalist Nikita Mogutin, who, according to the UK’s Mirror, was the first to report that the clinic was promoting Durov’s offer, said, “It’s scary to imagine the volumes of material he donated. It was in the summer that he revealed he was the biological father of around 100 IVF children – he made his new offer around the time he turned 40 last month.”
Durov is reported to have said that he hopes “to help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it, so that families struggling to have kids can enjoy more options. Defy convention — redefine the norm!”
Despite Durov’s and the fertility industry’s enthusiasm for sperm and egg donations, and IVF, every step is fraught with misery for the children involved.
“Kids conceived via sperm and/or egg donation often share that their parents are of the opinion that biology doesn’t matter; what matters most in the eyes of the adult is how much the children were wanted, and the parent is the person who raises them,” Katy Faust and Stacy Manning note in their landmark book, Them Before Us: Why we need a global children’s rights movement.
Faust and Manning offer one of many brief testimonials from donor-conceived children who are now adults:
Mum told me when I was a child. All about how desperate she was for a baby, and how much I was wanted, and I was special. It doesn’t feel like that. I’m middle-aged now, and I went through a phase of kidding myself it doesn’t matter. But it does. It always has if I’m honest. I’ve felt disconnected for as long as I can remember. Like a fake. Artificial.?
“If being wanted is an adequate substitute for biology, kids conceived through gamete donation should fare just as well as kids raised by both biological parents, but they don’t,” Faust and Manning say. A study titled “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor” found that young adults who were conceived through sperm donation were more likely to:
- Experience profound struggles with their origins and identities.
- Have family relationships more often characterized by confusion, tension, and loss.
- Have experienced divorce and multiple family transitions in their families of origin.
- Struggle with serious negative outcomes, such as delinquency, substance abuse, and depression.
“‘Donating’ as much sperm as Durov causes concerns of future incest cases in which siblings who do not know about each other enter the same social circles and form intimate relationships,” Nancy Flanders wrote for LiveAction. She continued:
“We are seeing men who are donating hundreds and thousands of times. They’re doing it in small areas. They’re doing it within the same kind of years,” said Louise McLoughlin, who, at age 13, learned she was conceived using a sperm donor. “So you’re ending up with kids who are growing up knowing each other or meeting each other in later adulthood, which is just incredibly, incredibly dangerous.”
These are all examples of how unchecked the fertility industry is. “We regulate gasoline more comprehensively, driving more comprehensively. And yet, here we’re actually creating lives,” said Indiana law professor Jody Madeira, who is working for increased charges and criminal sentences in cases of fertility fraud.
“Our cultural orientation just prioritizes the market, and the industry, and the wishes of parents.”
Durov also reportedly has five children with two ex-girlfriends.
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