The Missing Parents Bureau

Most sperm banks provide all sorts of information about their donors: Education level, medical background. They even have videotaped interviews and recorded answers to essay questions. But not all clients take advantage of this information. In fact, lots of women choose to avoid it. Reporter Alix Spiegel talks with single women who are planning to get pregnant with the help of a sperm bank and finds that they all wrestle with the question of how much they want to know about the fathers of their kids—and how much they want their kids to know. (20 minutes)

Alix's story was produced in part with a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Recorded at Chicago's Audi Home Juvenile Detention Facility, the song was part of a show put on by Chicago's Music Theatre Workshop.

When Starlee Kine was a kid, she wanted to be a child star so badly that she signed up for an acting class with a famous acting teacher named Kevin McDermott. One of the class's exercises was to develop a character with a troubled past, and a real psychologist would come in for a session of character group therapy. Starlee chose to take on the character of an orphan. In fact, Starlee remembers that everyone else in her class did too. Twenty years later, she visits her old acting teacher in Los Angeles and discovers that for some reason, kids today don't want to be orphans. (9 minutes)