Once Danielle Odom decided to have a child on her own three years ago, she had to grapple with the unusual logistics her situation posed. After deciding that a sperm donation from a close, married male friend did not feel right, the 33-year-old hospital administrator from Georgetown, Texas, began to imagine her ideal donor in the parlance of personal ads: "Single white female seeks intelligent, sensitive, funny man, preferably tall, with above-average IQ, for insemination--with no strings attached."
She wasn't far off base. A sperm bank in California was offering online "catalogs" of donors with such details as sat scores, college...