Life and that other thing by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR Not long ago Quebec parents thought nothing of having 20 kids. Big time shift, now we’ve got fewer babies and more suicides and abortions. Here are some recent developments in our ever-changing attitudes towards birth and death. * Before dying four years ago at age 19, a Ste-Thérèse resident fathered 200,000 daughters. So great was the demand for Ontario-born, Quebec-raised guy’s sperm that people anxious to produce young’uns would pay big money for frozen packets of it. They called him Starbuck, and he was Quebec’s greatest-ever bull. “He’s the best specimen I’ve ever seen, very large and perfectly developed,” says Yves Brindle, lab manager at the Artificial Insemination Centre of Quebec. “A great bull will make exceptional daughters, but Starbuck also fathered great sons as well.” Now Starbuck has returned from the dead, sort of. Last year scientists cloned the stud, creating Starbuck II, which Brindle describes as a “photocopy” of the first. “He looks 95 per cent like the original. You can see some difference in the spots, they’re not exactly the same.” So far governments have forbidden farmers to peddle Starbuck II’s sperm. But in spite of the jism embargo, the 54-year-old institution has been freezing Starbuck II’s juice. They worry others might lose interest in the clone semen. “The novelty factor might wear off. He risks being forgotten,” says Brindle. Meanwhile, one of Starbuck’s young grandsons has already become one of the world’s top 20 all-time leaders in sperm production, having already pumped out a million doses of love juice. The name of this ambling bovine sperm factory? Comestar Lee. * The prospect of giving birth to a human clone baby has supposedly gotten dozens of local Raëlian babes wetter’n’a single mama at a Kenny Rogers concert. But some might remember that the cloning fad was preceded by another practice that would supposedly allow us to escape the inevitable. Yep, we’re talkin’ cryonics, baby. Unlike bionics, this practice didn’t get a TV show, but it should have. Cryonics, briefly stated, allows you to put a recently dead human on ice and thaw ’em out when you could figure out how to fix ’em and bring ’em back. A Montrealer became the world’s first cryogenically-suspended child in January 1972, when Geneviève de la Poterie, 8, died of kidney cancer and her grieving parents had her put in a pod in California run by a guy named Bob Nelson, who headed the Cryonics Society of California. But Nelson complained that the girl’s parents didn’t have enough money, so he soon popped another dead child into the chamber to lower costs, according to a 1991 interview. The overcrowded chamber required more liquid nitrogen than Nelson was supplying, and the Montreal child’s body unfroze and decayed. Nelson was sued in 1981 and no longer practices that frosty science. Cryonics has never been authorized in Canada, but the dwindling few who still embrace the practice of turning corpses into human popsicles consider our far north an excellent cryonic burial ground. Indeed, at least one person, a New Jersey businessman, buried his father way up north a few years back. Hopefully he had a big headstone, as cryonics newsletters point out the drawback to the far north strategy is that it could become hard to remember where you buried the bodies under all that ice and snow. * Speaking of needing resuscitation, provincial Liberal leader Jean Charest’s recent nosedive has me hoping that he’s carrying a Political National Will Kit. Charest will undoubtedly spend the summer trying to figure out how to wriggle out of his reckless promise to allow the rich neighbourhoods to separate from our island city. Ever since his blunderous demerger vow, I’ve wondered whether Charest was one of those kids who wore a helmet on the school bus. It’s hard to go back on your word, and the Machiavellian lesson to this is that it’s never a bad idea to supersize your potential for plausible deniability. : Comments? kgravy@openface.ca.