Sperm Donor

Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments. He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back. That's about half the price for in vitro fertilization at many other clinics, which do not include money-back guarantees. Typically, insurance coverage is limited and patients pay again and again until they give birth - or give up. Those patients use their own eggs and sperm - or carefully select donors when necessary - and the two are combined in a petri dish to create a batch of embryos.

Penelope Cruz is pregnant again, expecting her second baby with hubby Javier Bardem, according to a couple of reports out Friday. The "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" actress is about three months along, a source confirmed to E! News after the New York Post first reported the news. The new tyke will be a younger sibling to 38-year-old Cruz and 43-year-old Bardem's first born, Leo Encinas Bardem, who arrived in January 2011. "Skyfall" villain Bardem tied the knot with Cruz in July 2010.

The way Trent Arsenault touts himself, he's a tall, healthy and educated altruist who helps others by donating his sperm (sans sexual intercourse) on a fairly large scale. The way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sees it, he operates a sperm bank, albeit an informal and unpaid one, that fails to meet federal regulations. From our perspective, the FDA is overreaching. Arsenault, an electronics company engineer in the Bay Area, promotes his service through the Internet to women who want to get pregnant without paying the $400 to $600 fee that a commercial sperm bank would charge.

Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments. He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back. That's about half the price for in vitro fertilization at many other clinics, which do not include money-back guarantees. Typically, insurance coverage is limited and patients pay again and again until they give birth - or give up. Those patients use their own eggs and sperm - or carefully select donors when necessary - and the two are combined in a petri dish to create a batch of embryos.

"Donor Unknown" Met Film and Redbird Tribeca Film Festival, April 23 premiere The premise In this documentary, JoEllen Marsh is a 20-year-old woman who has never met her father. For most of her life, he was known only as sperm donor 150 from the California Cryobank, a large sperm bank based in Los Angeles. Marsh turns to a website called the Donor Sibling Registry and eventually discovers she has more than a dozen half-siblings with the same anonymous father.

The California Supreme Court has let stand a lower court ruling that anonymous sperm donors do not have an unlimited right to privacy and can be forced to testify in legal proceedings. Without comment, the high court Wednesday unanimously upheld a May appellate court decision demanding that a man, identified only as Donor 276, testify in a lawsuit against a Culver City sperm bank.

An anonymous sperm donor does not have an unlimited right to privacy and can be forced to testify in legal actions alleging that his donation resulted in genetic harm to a child he helped conceive, according to a California appellate court decision. An attorney for California Cryobank, one of the nation's largest and most well-established sperm banks, said Friday that the precedent-setting decision could discourage men from donating sperm to infertile couples.

The Premise Dr. Nicole Allgood (Annette Bening) and her partner, Jules (Julianne Moore), have taken a non-traditional route to family life. The couple met in the ER when Nic, who is now an attending gynecologist, was a resident at UCLA and Jules was a patient with facial numbness. They became lovers, and when they decided to have children they went to a sperm bank, and each gave birth to a child using the same sperm donor. Flash forward several years, and their son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson)

It makes perfect sense that "The Kids Are All Right" is opening the Los Angeles Film Festival. Director Lisa Cholodenko's movie, premiering at LAFF on Thursday night, unfolds around Venice and Echo Park. Its characters include a community gardener who runs a restaurant focused on locally grown organic ingredients, and Joni Mitchell's music figures prominently in the narrative. The film's central plot — a lesbian couple's interloping sperm donor upends their yuppie family life — could hardly be more Left Coast.

Into the seemingly idyllic, if nontraditional, two-mom family world of "The Kids Are All Right" saunters trouble in the form of Mark Ruffalo. His rakish Paul, the family's heretofore anonymous sperm donor of the now teen children, brings the swaggering fun you'd expect from any motorcycle-riding, organic-fare restaurateur. Costar Julianne Moore said after all this female energy on the set, when you showed up, you were "über-male" and "all hairy and beardy," and all this male stuff came through.

The way Trent Arsenault touts himself, he's a tall, healthy and educated altruist who helps others by donating his sperm (sans sexual intercourse) on a fairly large scale. The way the U.S. Food and Drug Administration sees it, he operates a sperm bank, albeit an informal and unpaid one, that fails to meet federal regulations. From our perspective, the FDA is overreaching. Arsenault, an electronics company engineer in the Bay Area, promotes his service through the Internet to women who want to get pregnant without paying the $400 to $600 fee that a commercial sperm bank would charge.

The family has always been a more elastic body than the defenders of its narrowest definition would like to admit, and as science changes the face of procreation, and the Internet increases the flow of information, that body is stretching in new and unexpected ways. "Donor Unknown," which plays locally Sunday on PBS SoCal (KOCE) as part of "Independent Lens," looks at a particular group of people in a particular time — the half siblings anonymously fathered by a single sperm donor — but it's also a story of the general future: "And it's the beginning" are the last words spoken here.

"Donor Unknown" Met Film and Redbird Tribeca Film Festival, April 23 premiere The premise In this documentary, JoEllen Marsh is a 20-year-old woman who has never met her father. For most of her life, he was known only as sperm donor 150 from the California Cryobank, a large sperm bank based in Los Angeles. Marsh turns to a website called the Donor Sibling Registry and eventually discovers she has more than a dozen half-siblings with the same anonymous father.

The Premise Dr. Nicole Allgood (Annette Bening) and her partner, Jules (Julianne Moore), have taken a non-traditional route to family life. The couple met in the ER when Nic, who is now an attending gynecologist, was a resident at UCLA and Jules was a patient with facial numbness. They became lovers, and when they decided to have children they went to a sperm bank, and each gave birth to a child using the same sperm donor. Flash forward several years, and their son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson)

Into the seemingly idyllic, if nontraditional, two-mom family world of "The Kids Are All Right" saunters trouble in the form of Mark Ruffalo. His rakish Paul, the family's heretofore anonymous sperm donor of the now teen children, brings the swaggering fun you'd expect from any motorcycle-riding, organic-fare restaurateur. Costar Julianne Moore said after all this female energy on the set, when you showed up, you were "über-male" and "all hairy and beardy," and all this male stuff came through.

"The Kids" aren't quite all right outside of the art house circuit. Focus Features expanded its indie hit "The Kids Are All Right" nationwide for the first time and found that while the Sundance Film Festival favorite continued to play well in large cities, it didn't fare so well in smaller cities and suburbs. Though the number of theaters playing "Kids" more than quadrupled to 847, ticket sales rose only 33%, to an estimated $3.5 million. Despite a change in marketing strategy by Focus to highlight the movie's more lighthearted comedic moments, more mainstream audiences apparently didn't take to the story about a family with two children and two mothers that meets its sperm donor.

An infertility specialist accused of using his own sperm to impregnate women may have fathered as many as 75 children, a prosecutor in Alexandria, Va., said. Assistant U.S. Atty. Randy Bellows said during a hearing that workers in the former Vienna, Va., clinic run by Cecil B. Jacobson never saw evidence of a sperm donor, and that he treated more than 75 women who were having problems becoming pregnant. At the hearing, U.S.

Penelope Cruz is pregnant again, expecting her second baby with hubby Javier Bardem, according to a couple of reports out Friday. The "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" actress is about three months along, a source confirmed to E! News after the New York Post first reported the news. The new tyke will be a younger sibling to 38-year-old Cruz and 43-year-old Bardem's first born, Leo Encinas Bardem, who arrived in January 2011. "Skyfall" villain Bardem tied the knot with Cruz in July 2010.

In a marriage of modern science and the culture of celebrity, a Los Angeles-based sperm bank is grouping donors according to which famous people they resemble. On its website, the California Cryobank asks: "Have you ever wondered if your favorite donor looks like anyone famous? You know how tall he is and his hair and eye color, but wouldn't it be great to have an idea of what he really LOOKS like? Now you can find out with a CLICK of your mouse!" Browsers are typically directed to pictures of two or three celebrity lookalikes.

It makes perfect sense that "The Kids Are All Right" is opening the Los Angeles Film Festival. Director Lisa Cholodenko's movie, premiering at LAFF on Thursday night, unfolds around Venice and Echo Park. Its characters include a community gardener who runs a restaurant focused on locally grown organic ingredients, and Joni Mitchell's music figures prominently in the narrative. The film's central plot — a lesbian couple's interloping sperm donor upends their yuppie family life — could hardly be more Left Coast.