Over the summer, two movies that both used sperm donors as plot devices sent the conservative “commentariat” into a conniption. After Jennifer Aniston, who plays a woman who uses a sperm donor to become pregnant in The Switch, advocated for a broad definition of family (“Love is love, and family is what is around you and who is in your immediate sphere”), Bill O’Reilly took to the airwaves to blast her attitude as “destructive to society.” And The Kids Are All Right (an indie confection about a lesbian couple, played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, raising two kids conceived with an anonymous sperm donor) drew the venom of New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, who dubbed it a “Hollywood … end run around morality.”
But behind the heated rhetoric, a much more serious campaign is underway. The opening salvo on this latest front in the culture wars came in May when a study, “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor,” found that donor offspring are more likely to “struggle with serious, negative outcomes such as delinquency, substance abuse, and depression,” and...