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          ‘Ethnic cleansing, American style"—that’s how Leland Traiman, executive director of Rainbow Flag
          Health Services and Sperm Bank, described the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s proposal to
          tighten regulations on sperm donation.

          Gay-rights advocates say the proposed regulations, which would make it illegal for sperm banks across
          the United States to accept anonymous sperm donations from gay men and restrict donations from
          known donors to willing recipients, are an unfair and unfounded violation against gay families; the FDA,
          however, says the proposals represent a long-overdue precaution that will make the sperm banking
          industry a little bit safer for women seeking artificial insemination.

          A proposal to regulate all cellular and tissue-based products was released by the FDA in February 1997.
          According to FDA spokeswoman Lenore Gelb, the agency does not have guidelines regulating the
          donation of reproductive tissue but has sought to impose them for several years. The FDA studied
          Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations from 1994 suggesting that a man who
          acknowledged sexual relations with another man in the last five years should be considered a high risk
          for HIV infection—regardless of whether or not he had tested negative for the virus—when donating
          human tissue, including organs, blood and semen.

          Based on this CDC recommendation, Gelb said, the agency created a draft approach advising that all
          men who have had sex with other men within a five-year period—even those in long-term, monogamous
          relationships who have repeatedly tested negative for AIDSbanned from anonymous donations of
          reproductive tissue. Further, the proposal states, semen from HIV-negative "directed donors" (men who
          have been specifically selected to donate sperm by recipient women) should be quarantined—kept on
          ice—for not less than six months after donation, after which the donors would be retested for HIV before
          their semen could be used for insemination.

          The proposal has advocates for gay men and women across the country up in arms. According to a
          letter written by Traiman and signed by representatives of the Amer-ican Civil Liberties Union, the
          National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Sperm Bank of California and the Gay and Lesbian Medical
          Association, the move is much too restrictive, as it would prevent roughly 84 percent of all gay men and
          their potential sperm recipients from successfully having children. As most women requesting gay men
          as sperm donors are lesbians, the letter continued, the regulations would unjustly interfere with the
          family planning of thousands of gay families.

          "The issue is this: Industry numbers vary, but usually . . . anywhere from one in six to one in four men’s
          sperm is able to successfully survive the freezing process," explained Jennifer Pittman, policy and
          program advocate for the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. "So if you take a man’s sperm and
          freeze it in one part of this protocol . . . the result is, you don’t get enough viable sperm to meet the
          World Health Organization’s standards for fertility. . . . So a woman wants to have a baby, she finds a
          man who’s had sex with other men as a donor . . . she may be older, her fertility may be declining
          rapidly. If he’s not one of the lucky ones whose sperm can survive the process, she’s out of luck."

          "The most alarming thing is that this would legally block any sort of fertility treatment available for gay
          men," added Traiman, "as it would for any lesbian who wants to have a child with a gay man in [this] sort
          of fashion—it would block fertility treatment for her."

          Further, FDA critics stated, the regulations are not based on sound science. Rather, they have been
          constructed around the advice of the CDC, which, Traiman said, has admitted that its conclusions were
          based simply on the advice of a consultant panel. Traiman, Pittman and others insisted that by failing to
          provide scientific evidence to back up their proposals, the FDA and the CDC are discriminating against
          gay families by basing their recommendations on the myth that AIDS is a "gay disease."

          "The guidelines themselves are bizarre and contradictory," Traiman asserted. "On the one hand they say
          you shouldn’t use a donor who has had sex with another man in the last five years. But on the other
          hand, if a woman has sex with a man who’s had sex with another man in the last five years, she only
          has to wait one year. What the heck are they talking about?"

          Gelb insisted that the FDA is not unfairly picking on gay men—rather, she said, it is simply pointing out
          a group that is known to be at high risk for HIV infection and exercising extra caution in allowing
          members of that group to donate tissues.

          "It’s not to exclude donors based on a particular group," she commented. "It’s intended to exclude
          donors based on risk factors. It’s based on what has been seen in terms of tracking."

          But Pittman pointed out that other high-risk groups—men who have had sex with prostitutes, intravenous
          drug users, people who admit to having had sex with HIV-infected partners and certain inner-city ethnic
          populations known to also be high-risk for HIV infection—are given more leeway than gay men. For
          example, she said, admitted IV drug users and men who have had sex with prostitutes would have to
          wait only one year after testing negative for HIV before they could donate sperm.

          Traiman said that should the FDA try to force the new regulations through, he and other advocacy
          groups plan to take the agency to court for violating the civil rights of gay men across the nation.
          Primarily, he said, it would prevent the FDA from enforcing its exclusionary policies. But a secondary
          outcome he said he’d like to see would be the repeal of similar regulatory laws that are already in effect
          in New York state.

          Since 1989, New York’s Public Health Law has permanently excluded sexually active gay men from
          anonymous semen donation. Recipients who choose to be inseminated using the semen of a gay man
          must first undergo risk counseling and sign a waiver acknowledging the risks involved.

          "New York is the only state in the union with explicitly anti-gay regulations," Traiman said. "The head of
          the New York program [has indicated] to me, in October of last year, that if the FDA backs off this
          proposal, New York will also change its regulations accordingly. . . . What they essentially are saying
          is, ‘You people are all pariahs’.

          "I had clients who were a hetero couple who were sterile. They asked [the man’s] brother to be his donor
          so that the father would be biologically related to their child. The brother was a gay man. The brother’s
          sperm did not survive the freezing process. Now, who the hell is the state or the FDA to say they can’t
          use him as a directed donor?"