Hari Berkabung Bangsa

Innalillahi wa inna ilaihi raji’un.
Telah meninggal, K.H. Abdurrahman Wahid pada tanggal 30 Desember 2009, pukul 18:45.
Seorang Kyai besar, mantan Presiden RI, tokoh yang humanis.
Secara pribadi saya sangat berduka, Indonesia telah kehilangan salah satu putra terbaiknya. Sangat besar jasa beliau. Saya sangat ingat terutama jasa-jasa beliau semasa menjadi Presiden RI. Cukup banyak jejak positif yang beliau torehkan.
Meski langkahnya mengundang banyak kontroversi, harus diakui sebagian besar keputusannya adalah benar. Saya sendiri terhadap beliau akhirnya lebih banyak bersikap: tidak ikut-ikutan. Artinya, nggak mau berdekatan atau mengikuti kontroversinya. Sikap ini bukan berarti saya memandang Gus Dur secara negativ, tetapi lebih ke keterbatasan ilmu saya. Saya tidak mampu memahami apa yang disampaikan Gus Dur.
Meskipun pada masa presidensinya saya pribadi termasuk banyak yang terlarut dalam kontroversi kebijakan beliau (karena keterbatasan ilmu saya), tapi saya termasuk yang marah ketika beliau dikudeta oleh MPR kemudian.
Hingga akhir hayatnya, Alhamdulillah Gus Dur terus membuat langkah positif.
Sejak kemarin mendengar kematian beliau, saya sudah berduka. Dan pagi ini membaca berbagai berita tentang beliau, tertetes air mata saya. Dan teriring Al Fatihah untuk beliau, semoga arwah beliau diterima di sisi-Nya, diampuni segala dosa-dosanya, dan diterima semua amal-ibadahnya, Amien ya Robbal alamin.

Tatanan masyarakat baru

Sangat menarik membaca berita ini :
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Sperm Donor Dad Has 400 Children Rachel Lehmann-Haupt
By Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

KOMPAS.com – It’s a crisp fall day in Northville, Mich., a small suburb of Ann Arbor, and Kirk Maxey, a soft-spoken, graying baby boomer with a classic square jaw, is watching his 12-year-old son chase a soccer ball toward the goal. Maxey is doing what he does every Saturday, along with hundreds of other family men and women across the country, but he’s not your average soccer dad. Maxey, 51, happens to be one of the most prolific sperm donors in the country. Between 1980 and 1994, he donated at a Michigan clinic twice a week.

He’s looked at the records of his donations, multiplied by the number of individual vials each donation produced, and estimated the success of each vial resulting in a pregnancy. By his own calculations, he concluded that he is the biological father of nearly 400 children, spread across the state and possibly the country.

When Maxey was a medical student at the University of Michigan, his first wife, a nurse at a fertility clinic, persuaded him to start donating sperm to infertile couples. Maxey became the go-to stud for the clinic because his sperm had a high success rate of making women pregnant, which brought in good money for the clinic. Maxey himself made about $20 a donation, but says he was motivated to donate more out of a strong paternal instinct and sense of altruism.

“I loved having kids, and to have these women doomed to wandering around with no family didn’t seem right, and it’s easy to come up with a semen donation,” he says. “You would get a personal phone call from a nurse saying, ‘The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?’ “

Maxey, now the CEO of Cayman Chemical, a 300-person global pharmaceutical company, says back then he just “didn’t think about it a lot.” He didn’t have to. When he began volunteering, he wasn’t asked to take any genetic tests and received no psychological screening or counseling.

He merely signed a waiver of anonymity, locked himself in a room with a cup and a sexy magazine, and didn’t consider the emotional or genetic consequences for another 30 years. Both his cavalier attitude and the clinic’s lax standards, Maxey says, explain why he may have so many offspring.

But now a fierce conscience is catching with his robust procreative drive. When he’s not running his company, Maxey has become a devoted advocate for better government regulation of the sperm-donor business. He is also making his genome public through Harvard’s Personal Genome Project, and hopes that the information collected there might one day help his offspring and their mothers.

“I think it was quite reckless that sperm banks created so many offspring without keeping track of their or my health status,” he says. “Since there could be [many families] that could have to know information about my health, this is my effort to correct the wrong.”

Maxey began donating before sperm banking became the big visible business it is today, where single women and couples can purchase STD-free, Ivy League, celebrity-look-alike sperm that has been quarantined and meets FDA mandates. But, in the ’70s and ’80s, the business operated behind a veil of secrecy.

A man could clandestinely make some extra cash by donating to an infertile couple, and more often than not the ob-gyn, not the prospective families, would choose the sperm—his favorite tennis partner, perhaps, or in the case of Kirk Maxey, the handsome, blue-eyed, Nordic husband of his nurse.

Now the confluence of genetic science and an increased awareness around the consequences of sperm donation is changing the game—and potentially the lives of Maxey’s offspring. Today sperm donation is no longer a shadow business, partially because infertility, single motherhood, and homosexual parenting have become more socially acceptable. (The California Cryobank alone now sells an average of 30,000 vials of sperm a year.)

At the same time, donors and offspring have begun to connect though genetic testing and Web sites like the Donor Sibling Registry. In 2007 two of Maxey’s offspring, Ashley and Caitlyn Swetland, who are now 21 and 18, used the site to find Maxey, who had been a registered user since 2005.

The sisters lived just 45 minutes away from Maxey, and soon began visiting a few times a year, going rock climbing with Maxey and his son or meeting up at an old-fashioned-style ice-cream parlor. No other children have come forward, but as Maxey’s relationship with Ashley and Caitlyn progressed, he began to think about the consequences of his earlier donations.

“I had this ‘Oh my God’ moment, thinking, how many kids have been produced?” he says. “I thought the doctors were keeping track of each birth, but when I realized they weren’t, I began to worry. What if they start dating one another?” He also began to worry about their genetic health. “I wanted to know if I have anything totally lethal or deranged or recessive in my genes that I may have passed along.”

These were questions that neither the sperm bank nor the government was asking. Several times Maxey tried to contact IVF Michigan, the bank where he made most of his donations, but it refused to release any information, noting that he signed a waiver to give up his rights to know who used his sperm.

That’s still common practice among sperm banks unless a donor has agreed to be an “identity release” donor, which gives his offspring the right to get in touch when they turn 18. Even today, sperm banking is not strictly regulated. Currently, there are only recommended guidelines put in place by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine that say a donor should be required to provide a complete medical history to rule out “genetic abnormalities” or a family history of inherited disease and should receive proper counseling.

Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is the author of In Her Own Sweet TIme: Unexpected Adventures in Finding, Love, Commitment and Motherhood (Basic Books, 2009)
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Sangat menarik pertanyaan diatas : bagaimana jika anak-anak hasil bank sperma dengan ayah yang sama kemudian menikah?
Sepertinya akan ada suatu tatanan masyarakat baru, dimana ayah legal adalah ayah yang mengasuh, dan ayah biologis adalah pemilik sperma yang digunakan (dan untuk menjaga anonimity, hanya menggunakan kode yang tidak bisa dilacak pemilik aslinya).

Note: ini aku belum membahas sisi agama ya..

Kemungkinan kejahatan di kasus Century

Melihat ramainya kasus century, jadi ingin ikut-ikutan nulis juga euy.

Disini aku cuman ingin menuliskan KEMUNGKINAN kejahatan yang terjadi pada kasus Century. Aku menuliskan ini karena melihat banyak omongan orang kok melenceng ke kiri dan kanan.

Mencermati kasus talangan dana century, aku mengidentifikasi KEMUNGKINAN kejahatan dalam bentuk :

1. Pemerasan kepada nasabah yang takut kehilangan uang.

Sebagai ilustrasi, misalkan seseorang memiliki simpanan di Century senilai Rp 200 milyar. Jika Century sampai ditutup, yang terjadi adalah duit Rp 200 milyar itu akan hilang, hanya diganti sebesar Rp 2 milyar. Jelas si orang ini akan keberatan kalau Century ditutup. Nah, misalkan orang ini kemudian diperas oleh seseorang yang memiliki kekuasaan: dia mesti setor Rp 50 milyar, maka duitnya dia balik. Dengan seperti ini maka orang ini akan terpaksa memberikan uang Rp 50 milyar sebagai setoran. Logika yang dia pegang: lebih baik kehilangan cuman 50 milyar deh daripada kehilangan 198 milyar.

Dalam kasus ini, bagaimana PPATK mendeteksi? Gampang: cukup cari pencairan (ataupun aktifitas transfer/ pemecahan rekening) yang secara kumulatif cukup besar dari satu rekening tertentu. Kemudian lacak pergerakan uang tersebut, lari ke mana saja. Kemungkinan akan ada yang lari ke rekening pihak tertentu. Hanya saja, sayang sekali, ternyata PPATK dibatasi hanya menelusuri sampai 7 lapis transaksi. Aku nggak tahu kenapa ada batasan ini, apakah teknis atau hukum. Cuman seandainya aku seorang penipu/ pemeras dan tahu batasan ini, dengan mudah aku bisa membuat 10 lapis transaksi dan transaksi uang pemerasannya pada transaksi ke-11, jadi tidak ketahuan.

2. Pencairan dana kepada yang tidak berhak.

Model kejahatan ini cara mudahnya adalah secara tiba-tiba muncul account di Century. Misalkan aku sebenarnya tidak pernah punya tabungan di Century. Tapi pas saat itu tiba-tiba saja aku jadi memiliki tabungan Rp 50 milyar (tentu saja ini tabungan palsu). Kemudian aku melakukan pengambilan uang tersebut.

Atau cara lain: Century disaat krisis tersebut malah memberikan kredit kepada perusahaan antah berantah dalam jumlah besar (misal: Rp 50 milyar). Perusahaan ini tidak jelas siapa pemilik, management maupun alamatnya. Dan kredit tidak melalui proses yang benar. Maka bocorlah uang dari bank Century ke perusahaan bodong tersebut.

Untuk mengetahui ini maka yang diperlukan adalah audit terhadap Bank Century. Adakah perilaku-perilaku menyimpang di dalamnya. Siapa yang bisa melakukan audit? Kemungkinan adalah KAP (Kantor Akuntan Publik) atau BPK.

3. Transaksi merugi

Misalkan Century ingin membocorkan duit, Century membuat transaksi jual beli valas sehingga posisi Century merugi. Transaksi ini bisa dalam waktu 1 hari ataupun 1 minggu, tetapi sudah diatur agar tujuannya Century merugi dan pihak lawan transaksinya beruntung. Proses ini tidak harus diwujudkan melalui 1 pihak lain, bisa saja melaui dua perusahaan, misal A dan B. Jadi century membeli valas ke A, kemudian jual valas ke B. Kemudian A dan B melakukan transaksi tersendiri.

Untuk mencermati kejadian ini, maka yang diperlukan adalah proses audit oleh KAP atau BPK. Cek apakah posisi transaksi valas merugi. Jika tidak ada kerugian, maka tidak perlu dilakukan cek (artinya tidak ada kejahatan melalui ini). Jika ternyata posisinya merugi, kemudian dilacak apakah proses transaksi telah dilakukan dengan benar. Perhatikan lawan transaksi Century siapa, kemudian pada saat dilakukan transaksi tersebut, kondisi pasar umumnya seperti apa.

Itulah beberapa KEMUNGKINAN kejahatan dalam kasus bailout Century senilai 6.7 trilyun ini. Sekali lagi, ini hanyalah suatu KEMUNGKINAN. Persisnya, ya harus dicek lagi. Dari tulisan ini terlihat, bahwa untuk membuka kejahatan-kejahatan di Century, PPATK hanya memungkinkan menelusuri kasus 1. Sementara kasus 2 dan 3 harus dengan bantuan BPK atau KAP. Jadi, memang tidak bisa terlalu berharap hanya pada PPATK.