MovieChat Forums > Starbuck (2012) Discussion > Danger of incest

Danger of incest

posted 11 years ago by Pogo_76
5 replies | jump to latest

I wondered about this before but the movie made me wonder again and isn't really too far fetched.
I mean if someone donates sperm there actually IS the possibility of fathering 100 kids(maybe not 500). I don't know if there is a certain limit of pregnancies that can be produced by one donor that is legal. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/06/health/06donor.html?pagewanted=all

The possibility that two half-siblings meet as random strangers isn't really impossible. Of course this can also happen with adopted children after they grow up if they didn't know the have a sibling somewhere but the possibility is much higher if you have over 100 half-siblings.
It could easily happen that they have sex with the unknown sibling because there is no way they could ever know.

I wonder how this problem is handled and if it ever happens.

[–] munroe-9 11 years ago

I read about this once. There was a case in the US of a doctor who substituted his own sperm for that of donors and fathered a bunch of children (and got in big trouble for it). Sperm banks closely monitor geographic range of the sperm distribution and only sell so many samples per donor / region. I think they max out at 20-40 pregnancies or something. So no way is this realistic.

As for incest, I think there are just a couple known or suspected cases (where someone hooked up with a blood half-sibling, you mean?) but the probability is pretty low.

But I don't know how well sperm banks track pregnancies. I know you don't have to list that on the birth certificate of a child.

[–] Sweet_and_Lowdown77 11 years ago

The whole concept of the movie was that the clinic made a mistake.
So incest was definitely possible. Which I think was part of the reason the class action suit was made. Not just to find the donor, but of all the negligent acts of the clinic.

[–] timlin-4 11 years ago

I doubt one generation of partial inbreeding really matters that much. Many people having kids are defective or way too old, many even have known heritable diseases

[–] IMDB_Vits 11 years ago

It wouldn't matter. Incest is only wrong when the 2 people grew up together. It's part of our psychology to feel sexually repelled to our close family, biological or not. Having babies with problems is another issue, but like the other user say, it would be too rare.

[–] phantom_pixie 10 years ago

Yes, there is a risk of them meeting and having a relationship. (actually it's not uncommon among siblings that have grown up apart from each other) But unless you know that your parents haven't donated anything, and asking the person you are dateing if they are the result of a test tube. You will never know.

X ~We are the people our parents warned us about