The last two nights I posted our report’s recommendations to leaders in the law and to leaders in health policy and practice.
Tonight I post our recommendations to parents and would-be parents. All nineteen recommendations can be found on pages 77-81 of the report. Reactions welcomed.
To parents and would-be parents:
For parents: Tell the truth.
Parents who use donor sperm or eggs to conceive absolutely should tell their children the truth about their origins.
For would-be parents: Educate yourself fully and consider not conceiving a child with donated sperm or eggs.
We fully sympathize with the pain of infertility and the desire to have a child. We also ask that if you are considering having a child with donated sperm or eggs, you avail yourself of all the available information about the impact on children, young people, and their families of being conceived this way. Please consider adoption, or acceptance, or being a loving stepparent, foster parent, aunt or uncle, or community leader who works with children. There are many ways to be actively involved with raising the next generation without resorting to conceiving a child who is purposefully destined never to share a life with at least one of his or her biological parents. Â
Categories: My Daddy's Name is Donor
Elizabeth, seeing as you’re offering some advice based on your study, I’m wondering what you would say to an individual or individuals, say a single woman or a lesbian couple, who wanted to conceive with a known donor who would be known to the child? He wouldn’t play the role of a traditional father, but the child would know his or her biological father and have a relationship with him. I know your data doesn’t speak to this directly, but I’m interested in what you think.
Hi Fiona!
Actually earlier this evening in a different post I mentioned that I didn’t know what to think about anonymity until after we did our study — at which point I embraced ending anonymous donation in the US as a policy goal. I was persuaded to do so by our study finding that about two-thirds of donor offspring, depending on which question, supported the right to know identity of sperm donor bio father, number of half siblings, etc…
So why did I ever question this?
It goes back to my early interest in this question. I heard about “bothies” — lesbian moms and gay dads who have a baby together. Two couples, generally different homes, one beloved child revolving between them. I heard this and went, whoa, what? Because that sounded an awful lot to me like a “good” divorce scenario, something that I spent a lot of time thinking about for my book Between Two Worlds (Crown, 2005). In that book I argue that even in a so-called good divorce a child still has to grow up traveling between two worlds, making sense alone of the mother’s and father’s different beliefs, values, and ways of living, a job the parents are no longer required to do. Even if the child doesn’t see one of those parents/worlds very often (for example, most often, the father) that other world is still alive in the child’s mind and something to be reckoned with as the child tries to figure out who she is, what she believes, where she belongs.
So here’s the thing: I admire and respect that some parents using DI elect to use known donors, or even to have those “donors” involved in the child’s life in some way. But I worry too.
Here’s one thing I really, really don’t like: When people use a bunch of made-up words to tell the child what is going on, rather than using the real words. So when they tell the child that the known donor is their “uncle” or “special friend” or whatever else, I think that’s a bunch of headgames. He’s their biological father. Let’s call it what it is. Their half-siblings are their half-siblings (not cousins, as I’ve heard some DI moms suggest calling it, not special friends — they are half-siblings).
Over the years I’ve softened a bit on my concerns about having a known donor involved in the child’s life, only because I’ve heard so many stories of heartache from donor offspring who would give anything to have that scenario rather than the utter and complete absence of knowledge they live with.
But whether I would do this on purpose to a child not yet born? Let me put it this way: I join the 37 percent of donor offspring in our study who agree, “If I had a friend who wanted to have a baby with a sperm donor, I would encourage her not to do it.”
I appreciate hearing from you.