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"LOTS OF 50's FAMILIES had dirty secrets," says Suzanne Ariel, shrugging. "Well, we had ours, too."

Ariel is 45, a legal assistant at a Los Angeles law firm. Her red hair is flecked with gray and gravity has pulled down the corners of her mouth, giving her a determined look. There are no family pictures on the walls of her apartment, no glimmers of the past -- she has even dropped Rubin, the surname she grew up with -- but Ariel has obliged me by digging out an old photo album. She flips past a photograph of herself as a teen-ager, looking winsome in a bubble hairdo, and stops at a picture of her mother, Ruth.

"You can see a little resemblance here," Ariel says thoughtfully, brushing a finger along her mother's mouth and chin. "Not the coloring, obviously: she was small and dark."

A few pages later, Ariel finds what she was looking for: a fading snapshot of Ted Rubin, standing in front of a house, grinning broadly. Rubin raised Ariel from birth. She says she called him Father for more than 30 years, until 1981, when she found out that, biologically, he wasn't.

BILL CORDRAY SITS in a car, tapping nervously on the steering wheel. We're just a few miles from his Salt Lake City home, but the houses in this neighborhood are far larger than his own, the lawns vast and fastidiously kept. Cordray, 49, is bearded, with shaggy brown hair and metal-rimmed glasses. He's soft-spoken but not shy, and there's an urgency in his voice as he explains how for nearly a decade he drove this route every few days, making a pilgrimage that even he admits was obsessive.

Cordray would park right where he is now, next to a lamppost. Through the windshield he had an unobstructed view of the street that crosses this one, of the house and well-tended garden that he believes belonged to his father. Not Albert William Cordray Sr. -- the man who raised him, whom Bill calls Dad -- but the man with whom he shares a genetic past. This is the man to whom Cordray attributes his own love of music, ballet and books: he is the man Cordray didn't even know existed until he was 37, when the deaths of his dad and a brother forced out the truth.

GABE, KEVIN AND ERIC Curtis -- ages 10, 7 and 4 -- stare at the television in their Northern California home. All three brothers have the same shiny, blond hair and clear, blue eyes. They share gestures and mannerisms: a particular way of holding their heads, an impish turn to their smiles. Naturally, they have the same mother as well as the same biological father: a man neither they, nor their mom, nor her husband -- their dad -- has ever seen.

Like Ariel and Cordray, the Curtis boys were conceived through donor insemination. But there will be no mystery about their genetic father. In eight years, when Gabe turns 18, they can go to the Sperm Bank of California in Berkeley and request the name, address and phone number of the man who got $40 for each contribution to their conceptions. Then, if they want to, they can meet him.

FOR ALL THE CHANGES in women's roles over the last few decades, there are still fundamental assumptions about motherhood. A woman bears a child. (Or, if she can't, she finds one to adopt.) She nurtures it. She raises it. How she does that, exactly, may be a source of controversy -- whether she works outside the home, whether she is supported by a man -- but the essence is understood. The relationship between a mother and child is still sacred. When that bond is questioned, when there is an attempt to separate its strands, all hell breaks loose: witness the furor caused by the Baby M. surrogacy case, in which two mothers claimed that primal relationship; the culture's uneasiness about the new practice of egg donation, or the wrenching debates over the extent of birth mothers' rights in adoption cases. Even the intensity of the national wrath against Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who is accused of drowning her two young children, speaks, for better or worse, to our expectations of mother love.

Fatherhood has been murkier, a matter of choice rather than imperative: a complicated stew of biology and cultural mores, of acknowledged duty mixed frequently with evaded responsibility. Despite the increasing recognition of fathers' rights by the courts, and the media hoopla over the new involved dads, more children than ever before -- nearly 25 percent -- live without biological Pop, in homes with stepfathers, in blended families or with single mothers. An unprecedented number of children are the offspring of deadbeat dads or adult men who impregnate, then abandon, teen-age girls. Yet those men are fathers, too.

The easy separation between siring and parenting, abetted by biology, is at the root of donor insemination: sperm donors, often recruited from elite college campuses, are encouraged to focus on fast money rather than the ethics of anonymous paternity. The unquestioned acceptance of that practice -- so unlike egg donation or surrogacy -- has allowed donor insemination to grow into a $160-million-plus industry, with an estimated one million babies conceived since World War II. (There are currently more than 400 sperm banks in America, with 11,000 private physicians and about 125 fertility clinics also practicing donor insemination.)

Until recently, any controversy over donor insemination has centered on quality control. Sperm banks screen semen for HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases -- New York State has among the strictest policies -- according to guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control. But private physicians practicing donor insemination are not obligated to do so. The United States does not have the kind of central registry that exists in England and Sweden to limit the number of children one donor can sire and to prevent abuses like those committed by Dr. Cecil Jacobson, who was convicted on 52 counts of fraud in 1992 after secretly using his own semen to impregnate dozens of women in Virginia.

In the concern over health and safety, however, some say the core ethical issue of donor insemination -- its effect on the children -- has been lost. Although the American Fertility Society says it can't predict the psychological consequences of hiding the truth from children, many heterosexual couples do so. Even among lesbian couples and single women, who tend to be more open about donor insemination, disclosure goes only so far: the child's potential right to know its biological father, for instance, has proved especially thorny, dismissed as a threat to the recipient's sovereignty and the donor's privacy.

Right from the start -- and even, to a certain extent, today -- secrecy was emphasized to protect men: to guard the donor against paternity claims and, equally important, shield infertile husbands from presumed feelings of emasculation. In the first recorded use of donor insemination with humans, in Philadelphia in 1884, not even the woman knew. She and her husband had consulted a physician about their infertility; she was inseminated with the sperm of the "best-looking member of the class" of medical students while anesthetized. Only her husband was told how she became pregnant, and luckily he was delighted by the news. He feared that an earlier case of syphilis had caused his sterility, and didn't want his wife to find out about it.

It was after World War II that donor insemination with fresh semen supplied by doctors or medical students became more common, and couples were advised simply to pretend that the resulting offspring were fully theirs. They were instructed to tell no one: not the legal system, not the child's pediatrician and especially not the child. Any records that could later identify donors were destroyed, a practice that is still widespread.

But a small, vocal group of adult donor offspring -- as well as ethicists and even some sperm banks -- have begun to protest such casual deception. They say it is time to take another look at the price of donor anonymity, at the cost to the child of treating sperm as if giving it were biologically as insignificant as giving blood. Perhaps parenting is made up of social acts -- of P.T.A. meetings and holidays, of bandaging scraped knees and sitting through the atonal squawk of a high-school band concert -- but genetics can be naggingly persistent. Biology may not be destiny, but as some studies of separated twins have shown, it's a contributing factor in determining personality and talent, as well as one's susceptibility to disease or alcoholism. There is, too, the undeniable sense of continuity in knowing one's genetic forebears, in recognizing that one has Aunt Milly's sense of humor or Grandpa Fred's nose. Those who choose donor insemination over adoption implicitly acknowledge the tug.

"Assisted reproduction is fueled by a desire for some genetic connection with children," says James L. Nelson, an ethicist with the Hastings Center in Westchester County, N.Y., who specializes in reproductive technology issues. "If we desire that connection, it's reasonable to assume the children will as well."

Grappling with the complexities of the new techno-families isn't easy, although at least one sperm bank -- the one where the Curtises "got" their boys -- has an open approach to identifying donors. Meanwhile, like many adoptees who harbor fantasies about their birth parents, a growing number of adult donor-inseminated offspring are undertaking intensive searches for their biological fathers.

Not every donor-inseminated child takes up the hunt. Among those who do, many are unhappy people, some from families where there was brutality or neglect. Their single-minded attempts to find their biological fathers can seem equally an effort to put other demons to rest, to hook into something larger: the all-American quest to reinvent the self.

Suzanne Ariel believes the impulse is much simpler than that. "Do you know your father?" she asks, tersely. "Well, why shouldn't I know mine?"

ALBERT WILLIAM CORDRAY Sr. was a stern, even a brutal, man, according to his son Bill. He never knew his own father and, at 15, ran away from his mother and a string of stepfathers to join the Navy. Snapshots show him glaring at the camera, a tattoo on one arm, his dark curly hair just barely tamed. He considered his infertility to be an affront to his manhood, a blow so hard it almost broke his marriage apart. It was his mother-in-law who convinced him, somewhat reluctantly, to try donor insemination.

"He felt inadequate and guilty and like it was his fault," says Bill. "D.I. adoptees often talk about their Dads being very macho. I think it's a replacement, a way to prove they're men."

All of this was kept secret from Bill Jr., who was blond, sensitive and physically awkward. All he knew was that his dad joined the Army six days after he was born, and was gone for nine months. Bill also knew something else, deep in his bones: he knew he wasn't his father's son. His brother, Mike, the oldest of the four Cordray boys, was adopted, and for a time Bill thought that he might be, too. But his mother insisted he was their natural child, and anyway, they were open about Mike's status in the family.

Still, Bill Cordray says he knew there was something amiss. After all, Albert Cordray treated Mike -- not Bill -- as his "real" son, the one with whom he spent time and encouraged in sports. "It seemed like he loved my older, adopted brother more than he loved me," Bill says, "and I was his firstborn. I thought, 'Why is this happening?' "

Cordray is sitting in his kitchen with his brother Jeff, 41. Jeff is eight years younger than Bill, and, although he was a donor-inseminated baby, too, he never suspected. "It would've explained a lot," Jeff says -- the severity of the beatings he sometimes got, for instance. "I felt really bad," he says, "like I didn't love him. I wished he wasn't my father. He didn't show a lot of emotion toward me when I was young. Maybe if I'd known...."

It's hard not to stare at the Cordray men, to compare the features they seem to share and to speculate about which ones must have come from their donors. In some ways both men have a generic look: they wear blue button-down shirts that strain a little over their midlife bellies. Both have soft features and blue eyes and wear wire-rimmed glasses. Both speak quietly, although Bill, who is more articulate, dominates the conversation. They certainly could be brothers. Then again, given their noses, their hair, the lines of their jaws -- they could just as easily be from two different worlds. But lots of siblings look dissimilar, and plenty of biological offspring clash with their dads.

"In a normal family, the dad may be distanced for other reasons," Cordray says, "because of personality or whatever. But this threw an extra element in that was pathological. Knowing my Dad's capacity for love, I feel things would have been better if everything had been open. At least there would have been a better chance."

By the time he was in his teens, Bill Cordray had developed a theory: his father had rejected him because he was the product of an affair. "It was the only explanation I could come up with," he says. "But because of the atmosphere of secrecy, I couldn't talk about it with my mother, and I was ashamed. I thought the marriage was a sham."

After a miserable stint in the Navy -- he'd joined to please his father -- Cordray went to college and got a master's degree in architecture. He married and had his own family, but his anger didn't fade. One day, during a therapy session, he found himself facing an empty chair that was supposed to represent his father. He realized that all he really wanted to say to the man was, "I love you."

Albert Cordray died of kidney failure in 1982, but it wasn't until a year later, when one of Bill's younger brothers died suddenly, that Bill began thinking again about his parentage. Believing that perhaps he'd been wrong in his suspicions, Bill went to his mother to confess and apologize. As soon as he brought up the subject, she interrupted him.

"She said, 'Well, since you suspect -- you were conceived by donor insemination.' My first reaction was, 'That's not possible, donor insemination didn't even exist then.' "

Cordray pressed his mother for details. She told him the name of the clinic where he was conceived, the date, the name of the doctor. All she knew about the donor himself was that he was a medical student at the University of Utah, class of 1945. Cordray went home and told his wife, Pauline, the news. In a fury, they changed their 6-year-old son's name, from Albert William Cordray 3d to William Edward Cordray. Bill also wrote to Jeff, against his mother's wishes.

"She thought Jeff was too young to know the truth -- he was 28 -- and I couldn't understand why she'd keep it a secret from him," Bill says. "Because it wasn't a shock to me to find out. The shock was that they'd waited so damn long, until after my brother and Dad had died. It was cruel. I had to tell him."

Two weeks later, Bill Cordray began searching for his biological father.

SUZANNE ARIEL'S RELATIONSHIP with her parents was never close. The only child of a librarian and a riveter at McDonnell Douglas, she used to rifle their drawers, searching for adoption papers she was certain she would find. How else, she thought, to explain why she looked like "someone beamed me down into this little Jewish couple's tract house in Reseda, Calif.?"

She isn't just a donor-inseminated child, Ariel explains. She's a "birth mother," who at 15 gave a baby up for adoption. "My parents treated it the way any middle-class couple would treat their pregnant daughter in 1966 -- 'Oh, my God, how could you do this to us.' And they bundled me up and sent me away to a maternity home for six months."

Ariel returned feeling numb. Her mother, Ruth, told her to forget about the baby, to resume her life as if the pregnancy had never happened; her father, Ted, avoided any mention of it. As far as they were concerned, this was just another family secret to add to the one that Suzanne didn't yet know about.

"I just cut off my feelings," Ariel says. "It was the only way I could get through it. The whole thing pretty much tore the bond with my parents." Ariel left home at 18, deferring college in favor of financial independence. She eventually moved to Chicago and didn't see her parents again for five years, not until she got a call saying her mother was terminally ill. Would Suzanne please come home?

Ruth's death in 1980 started Ariel thinking, not just about the loss of her mother, but about the loss of her own motherhood. By then, Ariel was fairly sure she would have no children of her own. But she did have a daughter somewhere, someone she considered "unfinished business," and it was time to find her.

"My concern was, is she alive, is she well, is she cared for, does somebody love her?" Ariel says. "That's all I wanted to know. I wasn't interested in destroying the privacy and sanctity of their family."

Ariel expected her daughter's adoptive parents to be unsettled when she suddenly turned up -- and they were -- but what she hadn't anticipated was her father's reaction to her search. She thought he'd be pleased to make a connection with his only grandchild. Instead he was livid.

"He'd tell me to let sleeping dogs lie," Ariel remembers. "He'd yell at me, 'How dare you!' and all this [expletive]. He was really furious -- it seemed totally out of whack."

Then, one afternoon, Ted Rubin burst into tears. "He said, 'I'm going to tell you something that's going to turn your life upside down,' " Ariel remembers. "I thought, 'I'm not so sure I want to hear this.' Then he told me. He said my mother had donor insemination."

Ariel slaps both hands on the table in front of her. "I thought, 'Goddamn it, I knew it!' And then I thought, 'What am I going to do about it?' "

Through her search for her daughter, Ariel had become adept at tracking down people who didn't want to be found. And she knew a few things: she knew her donor father was a medical student; she knew when he was in school; she knew that in those days, women were inseminated with fresh sperm and that the procedure had to take place within two hours of ejaculation. Given the location of the doctor's office, Ariel was pretty sure the donor must have attended the University of Southern California.

"That narrowed it down from all the men in the world, anyway," she says dryly.

Over the next three years, Ariel painstakingly assembled a list of possible donors. She looked through the U.S.C. archives for the names of all of the medical students in 1948 and 1949. Since the donor was presumed to be Jewish -- supposedly he resembled Ted Rubin -- she tossed out surnames that were obviously gentile. When she wasn't sure, she went to City Hall to look up marriage licenses and checked the affiliation of the officiating clergyman. She asked a geneticist to assemble a profile of the donor's probable physical characteristics. Finally, at 3 A.M. one night, Ariel sat at her best friend's dining-room table, staring down at 10 pictures. Nothing clicked.

"I'd talked to different doctors about my methodology," Ariel says. They'd told her, " 'If that's what you're doing and you're careful about it, you should be able to find him eventually.' But the older men who'd been in medical school at that time would wink and say, 'But you know something, take a good look at your mother's doctor.' I didn't pay attention because he wasn't Jewish. For him to be the donor he'd have had to lie to my parents, and that was not something I wanted to entertain."

But that night, when her friend gently asked her if she'd consider looking at her mother's doctor, Ariel agreed. The friend, who had done a little detective work of her own, placed a picture of the doctor on the table.

"It was like looking at a picture of myself," she says, her voice becoming strained with the memory. "The arrogance of that man! The deceit! My parents trusted him."

And once again, Suzanne Ariel had to decide what she was going to do.

BILL CORDRAY WAS in agony. He had called the clinic where he was conceived, trying to find his donor's medical records. That was all he wanted, he assured the receptionist. She asked his mother's name, then put him on hold, where it seemed he waited interminably. "That's private information," the woman snapped when she picked up the line again.

"She virtually assaulted me," Cordray says. "She said my mother had violated their contract by even telling me she'd come to this clinic. The message was, how dare I even ask."

For about a year after, Cordray felt that he didn't have the right to know who his donor was. He didn't know how to pursue the search any further, so he let it drop. Then one day, Cordray heard a radio interview with a doctor from the University of Utah Sperm Bank.

"This guy was talking about their marvelous policies on secrecy and how the donors will never meet the child," Cordray says. "It made me angry, and I hadn't felt that way before. This guy's arrogance blew me away. Suddenly I thought, 'What do you mean I have no rights?' "

Like Ariel, Cordray began scouring the university archives. He spent five years, off and on, poring over public records, combing newspaper files and ferreting out other sources of information he prefers not to mention. "I don't like to say too much about how I find things out," he says, "because some of the sources could disappear."

Although he narrowed his list to just 10 prospects, Cordray had a nagging suspicion: like Ariel, he came to believe his father could well be his mother's doctor. Perhaps such assumptions are natural, because the physician's role in donor insemination is both godlike -- creating an immaculate conception -- and, since he's impregnating their mother, oddly paternal. On the other hand, in the era when Cordray and Ariel were conceived, some doctors indeed did use their own semen if a donor's wasn't readily available.

"The day I was conceived it was snowing hard -- it was almost a blizzard -- and there was some confusion," Cordray explains. "The doctor had gone to another hospital instead of the clinic where my mother was, so he had to come across town in the snow. That would've taken time. He told her that he put the sperm inside his coat to keep it warm, but -- " Cordray shrugs. "That led me to believe he was the donor."

Driving by the doctor's house became a compulsion. From his post under the streetlight, Cordray watched the doctor puttering around his garden and imagined approaching him. At first he fantasized that the doctor would tell him which of the medical students on his list was the donor. Later, Cordray hoped the doctor would confess it was him.

"Often, I'd stop, get out of the car, start walking toward him and be overcome by panic," he remembers. "It was scary. I had a strong fear that he would reject me, that he wouldn't see me as being entitled to know."

Cordray wrestled with his apprehension for four years, until, on a spring day in 1987, he finally spoke to the man who might be his father. He strolled up, as if he just happened to be passing by, and began chatting with the doctor about the raspberries he was pruning. That's all they discussed. Then Cordray walked away. "I was trying to invent a ruse to make a contact and I felt angry that I had to do that," he says. "It should be my right to go up and ask. There shouldn't be fear like this."

Two months later he tried again. This time, Cordray introduced himself and told the doctor he had been conceived in his clinic and just wanted to say thank you. The doctor's response was confusing.

"He went through this routine," Cordray says. "He asked me where I came from and where I live. He asked me a few other questions that seemed like non sequiturs."

As it turned out, time had not been kind to the gynecologist. He wasn't able to tell Cordray a thing. "The irony is, he didn't even know what I was talking about," Cordray says. "I talked to him a couple of other times after that, but it was obvious he'd lost his mental capacities."

When the doctor died, Cordray saved the obituary. It describes him as an "unassuming and soft-spoken" man who loved to fish. Cordray has held on to a picture of him, too, a photocopy of a studio head shot. The doctor has kind eyes and a warm smile, but he looks nothing like Bill Cordray.

"I went to his funeral," Cordray says, remembering the way his children spoke about him. "I got this wonderful impression of what a great guy he was." Cordray's voice quavers ever so slightly. "A lot of people loved him."

From the back of the chapel, Cordray noticed that the man's sons spanned an age range of over 20 years and bore no resemblance to one another. It suddenly occurred to him that the doctor may have become involved in donor insemination because he and his wife were having difficulty conceiving. Maybe this man was not his father after all.

Cordray noticed something else at the funeral: a striking resemblance between himself and the man's second son, who is close to Cordray's age. "It hit me pretty hard," he says. "The way he talked, the way he moved his arms, even the jokes he told -- lots of puns, like mine.

"I thought, 'Maybe the gynecologist is my father and maybe he isn't -- I don't know if I'll ever find out the truth -- but I'm almost certain that this guy is my brother.' "

EVEN BEFORE SHE ever heard about cases like Bill Cordray's and Suzanne Ariel's, Barbara Raboy worried about what she believed was an elitism -- even a sexism -- in the way sperm banks do business.

"The industry has been dominated by male scientists serving physician-run -- usually male-run -- medical practices," she says. "And they have needs for control. So someone in a white coat would say to clients, 'You need to keep this secret, because the donors could be identifiable and your husband has been suffering from all this infertility -- and isn't that enough already without burdening him with this?' That's the stuff that was being told to people for years. It still is, sometimes."

Raboy, who is the executive director of the female-operated Sperm Bank of California, has the straightforward, easy manner of someone whose identity was forged in the early 1970's. Her graying hair is cut in a modified shag, she wears no makeup and she favors dangling earrings. She's not a scientist, she says, and when she started the sperm bank in Oakland in 1982 as an offshoot of a feminist health clinic, she wasn't an expert, either. She didn't know that sperm bank policies and practices were supposed to be hush-hush.

"We did what came naturally," she says. "We thought, 'What would the human, caring thing be to do for the woman and the kid?' "

So when the Sperm Bank of California opened its doors it welcomed single women and lesbian couples, who still make up the majority of its clients. It was the first sperm bank to teach women how to inseminate themselves. And, unintentionally, it became the first sperm bank in America to offer clients full access to donor records.

Women and couples could browse through in-depth, 12-page questionnaires to compare donors' semen analyses, medical workups, occupations and eating habits. They could choose among bone structures, religious affiliations, right- or left-handedness. They could find out whether a donor smoked, took illegal drugs or had a family history of colon cancer. They could even find out a donor's motivation: whether he was inspired by the $40 fee, or, as one man wrote, merely "wanted to help create a better world."

Immediately, Raboy ran into opposition from other sperm banks, which offered just the sketchiest physical description to clients.

"They were saying: 'Wait a minute -- you screen the donors, you give them code numbers -- then you give out the information? What about the need for secrecy? What about the donor's privacy?' They said we would lose all our donors, that the whole industry would lose donors because of us, this tiny little place. We were such a threat!"

The Sperm Bank didn't lose its donors. Instead, it helped spark a revolution in the industry. Increasingly in the 1980's -- in part because of worries about HIV, hepatitis and potential genetic defects -- consumers began demanding assurances that the semen they were buying was well screened. Sperm banks across the country were forced to disclose at least some of their medical records to attract clients.

Shortly after opening, the Sperm Bank of California again shook up the industry with a bold new policy called identity-release. The yes-donor program, as it's also known, allows donor-inseminated offspring, when they're 18, to find out the names, addresses and telephone numbers of their donors. They can also get Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers, as well as their donors' birth dates and hometowns.

"Women started asking me if it might be possible to meet 'their' donor," Raboy says. "They wanted to be able to describe him to their child, to be able to say more than who had glaucoma in his family. We said: 'Gee, we're so new at this and no sperm bank had set it up so that the donor and recipient would meet. But maybe there's some kind of compromise we can come up with.' So we came up with this idea of doing something pretty radical."

The yes-donor program is the first of its kind in this country. (Since 1989, Sweden has made open identification of donors mandatory.) It began as an added inducement for recipients, according to Raboy, something to help ease their minds about their decision. But now she views identity-release as a benefit to the children: the option of finding out their biological father's secret identity rests solely with them.

Nearly 80 percent of some 1,500 clients the sperm bank serves each year request a yes-donor. Donors have been less enthusiastic: about 40 percent of the 230 who have contributed since the program began have opted to have their identities known, so there isn't always enough identity-release semen to go around.

"Some of the donors say that identity-release sounds wonderful," Raboy says, "but the idea of 10 or 15 kids down the road -- they can't handle it. More men than five years ago are choosing it, but it's not this overwhelming, 'Oh, I love this.' I wouldn't expect that, ever."

Competing sperm banks, according to Raboy, initially accused her of opening a Pandora's box. "They say donors are not fathers, they're two different things," she says. "We're saying: Wait. What if the child is 23 when he contacts the donor? Maybe by then he's lost a brother or sister, or both his parents have died. And maybe the donor's life has changed. Maybe they become a family. We're saying that's O.K. Because otherwise we wouldn't have done this."

Raboy is clear that "becoming a family" should not be an option before the child reaches the age of majority. Anything else could be a potential legal quagmire.

"Our fear was that if the donor and kid meet earlier, and you have a single woman who doesn't have a husband, what if the woman dies? In spite of our contracts with our donors, what's to keep a judge from thinking that it's in the best interests of the child for the donor's role to change to father? Coming up with the age of 18 meant if the donor were to assert paternity claims, so what? It's not like the kid could be taken from the parents. End of discussion."

According to Elizabeth Bartholet, a professor of law at Harvard University and author of "Family Bonds: Adoption and the Politics of Parenting," existing statutes in most states that deny all paternal rights to men who donate semen through sperm banks or physicians ought to prevent any unforseen court battles. As far as she's concerned, identity-release is a step forward.

"I'd like to see this kind of thing move toward being general policy rather than the exception," she says, "because it's important to make the act of sperm donation a more responsible, thoughtful act, to think about the fact that these men -- who are really vendors, not donors -- are creating a human life and might want to make some connection in the future."

THE TYPICAL YES-DONOR, Raboy says, does it "for the child." Of course, some of the donors are little more than children themselves. College students, the traditional source of recruits, are the least likely to choose identity-release. Most yes-donors are at the older end of the spectrum, someone like James, 36, whose last name Raboy requested be withheld.

Like all donors, James passed the thorough screening. He provided a comprehensive medical history to prove that he was devoid of genetic defects. He was poked, prodded, tested for a host of sexually transmitted diseases and subjected to throat, rectal and urethral swabs. He has been donating to the Sperm Bank of California about once a week for the past year (for the standard fee of $40 a visit), but because donor semen is quarantined for six months pending a second HIV test, he has yet to father any children. He plans to continue donating until he has reached the clinic's limit: fathering children in five California families and five out-of-state. That number, set somewhat arbitrarily when the sperm bank opened to prevent inbreeding or the spread of unforeseen genetic defects, has since become an industry standard.

James has receding, curly hair, blue eyes and fresh-scrubbed skin. He's a landscaper by vocation, he says, a cyclist, photographer and musician by avocation. When he discusses his future, anonymous offspring, a paternal note creeps into his voice.

"I hope, as any parent would hope for their own family, that they grow up reasonably unscathed by the rigors of childhood and everything that's out there in the world," he says. "I certainly hope that. And I hope that they hook into something that makes life work for them, something they have a passion for."

James says he became a sperm donor because, although he's ambivalent about raising children himself, he believes that people of his intelligence have an obligation to procreate. He chose identity-release so his offspring could avoid the kind of trauma that Ariel and Cordray endured.

"I didn't really see the other option as being appropriate," James says. "It means something to me that there's a family out there someplace who's raising a child they couldn't have otherwise. And that there's this question mark off in the corner as to who this person is. In this day and age, with the level of understanding we have, I think that donor should be there for them."

James sometimes muses about the phone call -- or even the 20 phone calls -- he may get beginning around the year 2013. Occasionally he envisions the conversation as awkward, slightly tense. He would want to know the children's interests, he says, whether they were "into baseball or politics or stamp collecting." He wonders how they will have dealt with being donor offspring, with having an unknown biological father. He hopes they won't ask for help with their tuition to Harvard. (He would be under no legal obligation to give it.) And he worries that they'd want more emotional engagement from him than he'd be willing to provide.

"I see the potential for a relationship," he says, then pauses for a long time. "Not a very high potential, but it would certainly be there. I'm completely anonymous to this person. Their values may be quite different.

"I expect I'll field it O.K., though," he continues. "Life offers a lot of adventures and that would be one: to see the outcome."

SUZANNE ARIEL ADMITS that finding her donor was helpful in one respect: "At least now when I look in the mirror I know who's looking back at me."

Ariel never did meet the man she believes is her biological father, nor has she found any independent corroboration. She wrote him letters that he didn't answer, placed phone calls he wouldn't accept. "I finally realized the only way I'd see him face to face was to ambush him," she says. "And what did I want from him, anyway? I felt certain if he were confronted he'd deny paternity. At age 70 is he going to say, 'Oh, yes, I did this?' "

Ariel shakes her head and sighs. "I struggled with it for a while. He's a liar, he's immoral. So is there any way he can make this better for me at this point?" she shakes her head again, grimly. "No."

After Ted Rubin confessed the truth about how Ariel was conceived, her relationship with the man she now refers to as her "stepfather" or "social father" quickly deteriorated. She dropped her last name in favor of Ariel -- her maternal grandmother's Hebrew name -- because, she says: "I couldn't spend the rest of my life writing my name as it was. It felt like a lie every time."

She can't remember when exactly she and Ted Rubin stopped speaking, or which of their near-constant arguments triggered the final rift. But according to Ariel, the decision was mutual. She hadn't seen Rubin in more than a decade when he died in 1992. Despite the passage of time, her anger still seems raw.

"I mourn for the father I didn't have," Ariel says. "And that doesn't mean I mourn for my birth father. I mourn for the good father I didn't have. I mourn for the good family I did not have. If D.I. weren't a part of my background, would I have had a terrific family? No. But the D.I. made it worse. It put an element of secrecy into our family structure that warped it, that poisoned it beyond all repair."

BILL CORDRAY LEAVES the kitchen to fetch a photo of the man he thinks is his paternal half-brother. While he's away, Jeff Cordray admits that he's never felt much interest in tracking down his own donor father. "I don't know how to explain it," he says. "I'm curious, but not to the point of being obsessed with it."

As it turns out, Bill couldn't find the picture, but he has returned with something else instead: a photocopied page from a University of Utah Medical School yearbook of the 1950's. Among the stiffly posed head shots is the man he believes is Jeff Cordray's biological father. The resemblance is striking: the young man in the photograph has the same wavy hair as Jeff, the same full lips, the same jaw line.

Jeff has seen the picture before. "I don't really see that we look alike," he says, "but you see yourself differently than other people do, I guess, so I don't know." He picks up the page and takes it into the next room where his own son is watching the N.B.A. playoffs on television.

"Hey, Dan," Jeff says, "Do you think any of these people look like me?"

The boy doesn't hesitate. "Yeah," he says, pointing to the same picture. "This guy." He hands the photocopy to Jeff and swivels back toward the game.

Jeff blinks a few times. He's smiling, but his eyebrows are drawn together, as if he's unsure of the emotion he wants to express. Bill offers to track down the man's current address. The last time he checked, the man was a doctor in a military hospital in the Southwest. Jeff shakes his head. His brother has urged him to confront his putative donor-father before. Four years ago, when Jeff was in the Navy, he was sent to a California military hospital for examination of an irregular heartbeat. According to Bill, the doctor was stationed in the very same building at the time.

"It would've been nice to find out if that was him," Jeff says, "to find out if he'd accept it or not. But I guess I was shy, too shy to pursue it."

Jeff stares at the picture again. "Sometimes I think maybe someday I'll just go down there and go into that doctor's office and meet him," he muses. "But I never know exactly how to go about doing it."

"Well," says Bill, "you should. You're his son."

THE RESULTS OF the Sperm Bank of California's pioneering policy won't become clear until sometime around 2001, when the first identity-release children come of age.

"Not all the kids are going to start showing up to say, 'Hi, can I have the name of Donor No. 13,' " Barbara Raboy says. "They're not all going to necessarily want it. We'll just have to see."

She doesn't believe donor offspring become angry because of how they were conceived. "It's how they were told," she says. "Perhaps if a more gentle, positive approach is introduced -- which we're hoping is happening -- and the parents feel good about what they did, we'll end up with a generation of D.I. children that aren't traumatized. But we can't know that."

Of course, no one can know the outcome of any of the continuing experiments in social engineering and the family. Divorce, open adoption, gay and single parenthood, as well as a plethora of reproductive technologies, are fast making the conventional, two-parent household obsolete. One can imagine a scenario in the post-nuclear family age in which both partners in a couple are infertile. An egg donor here, a sperm donor there, nine months with a surrogate mom, and a bouncing miracle baby is born, ready to be raised by a nanny.

Who will be father then? And who will be mother? How will we define "parent"? The challenge may not be to stop such innovation, but to find ways to incorporate all those contributing individuals into a child's life.

Leslie and Paul Curtis of Tracy, Calif., can't know what will happen, either, but for now they are the very model of the next-wave donor insemination family. Their three sons know that Dad "couldn't make babies" and that, when they're older, they can meet the man who "helped" in their birth.

"It's better that it was me than Leslie," Paul Curtis says with new-male aplomb about his infertility. "It's a lot cheaper to have donor insemination than all that other stuff."

Thrilled with the technological fix to their problem -- it's why they agreed to be interviewed -- the Curtises, both 39, say it's incomprehensible to them that anyone would want to hide such a miracle, particularly from their own children. As soon as the boys could understand, their parents read them a children's book that explains donor insemination. When they were trying to conceive Kevin, the Curtises would take Gabe along to the sperm bank. "He used to like to play with the dry ice that the vials came in," Leslie remembers.

Leslie, a small woman with short, dark hair and a sprinkling of freckles across her upturned nose, is a secretary at nearby Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Paul works there, too, as a lab technician. She leads me toward the kitchen, which is decorated with children's drawings. The boys, who are watching a video, glance up briefly as we walk by. Blond, blue-eyed, they could easily pass as Paul's genetic sons.

Whenever possible, Paul is the one who talks to the boys about their conception. "I want it to come from me rather than someday have them find out because a member of the family blurted it out. I felt if they found out that way they'd feel betrayed, like I lied to them all their lives."

The Curtises initially went to the Sperm Bank of California because its location was convenient. They were more concerned with matching Paul's physical characteristics than whether the boys could someday meet their donor-father, or any half siblings that might exist. "But now that more time has gone by I'm thankful we used identity-release," says Leslie. "We wanted to be open, and this is one more way."

Paul says his only concern is that the boys may develop unrealistic expectations of their yes-donor, fantasies that he can't fulfill. "I wouldn't want them to think that they'd be immediately accepted if they suddenly show up at the door and say, 'Here I am, Dad!' " Paul says. "But I think it would be nice if they did meet him -- I'd like to meet him myself. Then," he shrugs, "whatever works out works out."

Later, while Kevin proudly shows off his ability to write his name in cursive, Gabe explains what he knows about the circumstances of his birth.

"We're from a sperm bank," the 10-year-old says, matter-of-factly. Before turning back to the TV, he adds that he'd like to meet the man someday: "It would be cool."

© Peggy Orenstein. All rights reserved.