Sending Sperm Abroad
— -- When I tell you the United States is sending a lot of semen abroad, I’m not talking about sailors.
There’s talk that America can’t make anything anymore. The rest of the world doesn’t respect our goods and services. The French bomb McDonald’s. Asia now controls vast sectors of the international high-tech business. Our foreign-trade deficit has ballooned to a record annual rate of $425 billion.
But whatever economic problems America may have, we can at least raise our fists and tell the world with pride that we are the No. 1 exporter of human sperm.
That’s right; the French may be the leading authorities on romance, and the Latin Americans may take pride in their machismo, but foreigners are nonetheless buying our semen. Four of the five largest sperm banks are based in the United States, and they control an estimated 65 percent of a burgeoning international business believed to be worth between $50 million to $100 million.
That’s chump change to a hard-core macroeconomist, and to be sure, I’m not suggesting sperm dollars will ever be able to correct the trade balance or make up for all the foreign-manufactured DVD players we’re importing. But this is a psychological boost that we Americans should savor.
Squiggling to Canada
While former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole has taken to the airways to talk about erectile dysfunction, and Hollywood stars are pumping up with steroids and human growth hormones, it’s nice to know this country can still produce in one area where it counts. And in great quantities.
Yes, American sperm is squiggling into Western Europe, Asia and the Middle East at record levels. In recent weeks, Canada has announced that it has a sperm shortage, and it will be turning primarily to the United States for help.
How’d that happen? An inspection of Canadian fertility clinics last year — ordered after a woman who received semen from a sperm bank became infected with chlamydia — uncovered widespread irregularities in the mandatory testing of semen samples.
