By Elizabeth Marquardt

COLAGE Donor Insemination (DI) Guide

by Jeff DeGroot

Published by COLAGE, June 2010

Donor offspring are a curious lot. At least, so it appears when reading the recent publication from COLAGE, titled the “COLAGE Donor Insemination (DI) Guide,” which examines the experience of families in which lesbian couples have conceived children through sperm donation.

For these young people, says the guide, “defining this relationship [with our sperm donor] is a matter of understanding our curiosity about a person we do not know….”[i] Those with anonymous sperm donors can be “extremely curious.”[ii] Some have “intense curiosity.”[iii] Some have “extreme curiosity.”[iv] Despite all this, a 24 year old in California assures the reader, “Although I am curious about the donor that my parents used, I don’t feel as if my life is incomplete or unhappy because I don’t have more information about him.”[v] Another 19 year old reports, “I haven’t been able to do anything about my curiosity” but “I think it does help to express [curiosity] to your parents.”[vi]

The section for those conceived with anonymous donors begins, “If you have an anonymous donor, you probably have curiosities both about your donor and why your parent chose to use a donor who you could not later meet.”[vii] The author, Jeff DeGroot, says that one donor conceived person recommends, “curious people should work to understand their parents’ point of view, even if they do not agree with it.” This person adds: “Don’t accuse them of wronging you.”[viii] If you do decide to approach your parents about your feelings, the guide suggests that when you do so “be clear that you are just curious because you want to know more about your origins.”[ix]

My Webster’s dictionary defines “curious” as “eager to learn or know; inquisitive.” To me, the word implies feelings ranging from abstract interest to enthusiasm. The word certainly does not suggest, for example, feelings of anger, loss, or pain.

So is that it? Are people conceived through sperm donation “just curious”? Or could something else be going on too? A careful reading of the guide reveals more.

One 17 year old says, “From when I learned to talk, I was constantly asking where I came from and who my father is.”[x] A mother says her daughter “feels ‘anger’ and ‘grief’ about not having her donor in her life.”[xi] Another donor conceived person says this: “Until I was about 13, I was still hoping to establish a father/daughter relationship” with her open identity donor (an “open identity donor” is someone the child can attempt to contact when she turns 18). Now, she says, she’s just trying to “let the relationship develop naturally” – and presumably the relationship does not resemble that of father and daughter.[xii] Another 17 year old, apparently with a known donor (that is, someone who is identified to the child and with whom the child might have contact or a relationship), says, “My donor doesn’t seem to be particularly into the whole father thing with me, and it caused me quite a bit of pain trying to get him to be.” She advises others, “You don’t have to make them (your donor) into a father, just because that’s what they are biologically.”[xiii] A young person from New York says, “I grew up having certain expectation of what roles my [sperm donor and other?] dad(s) would play in my life and when they didn’t fulfill those expectations, I was hurt.”[xiv] A young person with an open identity donor says she will seek contact with him when she turns 18 because “I think I deserve to know who my biological other half is.”[xv] An offspring who did locate her open identity donor shares this: “Before being able to contact my donor I thought I knew he was tall, a Catholic, of German descent, and liked to run.” But after finding him she learned that even some of the few details she had were wrong: “In fact my donor is not German and not a runner.”[xvi]

Some donor offspring raised as siblings have different sperm donors. The guide addresses how hard it can be for those donor offspring whose siblings have located their donor when they themselves have not located their own donor. One young person from Massachusetts says, “My sister, who I was raised with and who I share a bio-mom with, has a different donor and my process of meeting my donor and my two new sisters [who have the same sperm donor biological father] has been hard for her.”[xvii] Another from California says, “I sometimes feel guilty about having been able to meet [my donor] since my brother’s donor died before my brother got to meet him.”[xviii]

A young person raised with a known donor comments about the feelings of her peers with anonymous donors: “I have heard some children of anonymous donors say that they wondered if their dad/mom even wanted to make a life or if they just wanted the money that went along with it.” In her own case, “As the daughter of a known donor I have never doubted that my donor wanted to help my moms make a family.”[xix]

Some of these young people have serious medical concerns as well. One donor conceived person with Crohn’s Disease wonders if she got the disease from the donor.[xx] Another says, “My little sister [presumably also donor conceived] has mental illnesses and I’ve gone through periods of depression and I would like to know whether or not they are genetic and if I could possibly pass them on to my future kids.”[xxi] A 13 year old from Kentucky has “ ‘suffered from many auto-immune issues…and hyper-thyroidism’ but was never able to contact her donor to see if he had a genetic condition that would explain her disease.” [xxii]

At the end of the section for those conceived with anonymous sperm donors, there is a rare instance in which the guide does use the words “loss” and “anger.” “Talking with your parents may help, but it may not take away your feelings of loss or anger about not being able to meet your donor.”[xxiii] If you’re having these feelings, this is about all the recognition you’re going to get, at least from the COLAGE DI Guide.

However, if you’re feeling great about the whole thing, this guide’s for you. In fact, there’s a whole chapter for people like you. It’s called “I Love My Life!” A subsection of that chapter is titled, “Why being a DI COLAGEr is fantastic!” In the guide, we’re told that some offspring “embrace the mystery” of not knowing who their father is.[xxiv] One says it is “exciting” that he will “get” to find out who is father is when he turns 18.[xxv] An 18 years old says with a known donor “you get to know half of your genes.” She also likes that it was “a team effort” to conceive her.[xxvi] When the surveyors asked respondents to “share positive stories,” apparently these young people “often respond by talking about how happy they are that someone decided to create them.”[xxvii] One says, “Someone worked hard to make me, which is pretty cool.”[xxviii] A 32 year old says, “The parents who raised you went to a great deal of trouble to have you. Revel in that.”[xxix]

What is a DI COLAGEr? Who is this guide for?

First, what is COLAGE? Now celebrating its twentieth anniversary, COLAGE is an organization whose full name was originally “Children of Gays and Lesbians Everywhere.” They seem to have dropped the full name now in favor of using only the acronym (perhaps in part because it’s not sufficient anymore to talk only of gays and lesbians – the current moniker is lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender/queer, abbreviated as LGBTQ, the latter of which is found throughout the COLAGE DI guide). The organization was founded not long after the lesbian baby boom began. The boom originated, as most things do, in California, with the establishment in 1982 of the Sperm Bank of California which explicitly sought to offer sperm donation services to lesbian women, and thereby brought donor conception by lesbian women into the public eye. In its early days, COLAGE offered resources, support, social events, and opportunities like pen pals for the children of lesbian and gay people and their families. There are now COLAGE chapters all over the country and additional opportunities including online, private message boards (grouped by different ages of children and young people) and social networking sites. The organization defines itself as “the only national youth driven network of people with a lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer parent.”

“DI” stands for donor insemination, which is one way of talking about when a person is artificially inseminated with sperm.

In the guide’s glossary a DI COLAGEr is defined as, “A person who was born through donor insemination and has or had a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer parent.”[xxx] In at least two other places the term is also used synonymously with “donor conceived person with a LGBTQ parent.”[xxxi]

But wait. Isn’t COLAGE an organization? Do you get to choose to be a member? Or does COLAGE claim every person in the country (maybe even the world?) who falls into the category of donor conceived person with an LGBTQ parent? Maybe they do. In fact, on page 7 the guide claims that “COLAGErs” have “most likely been around for all of human history” but it’s “only been in the last 30 years that large numbers of out LGBTQ people started creating families.”[xxxii]

So who did they survey? For this guide, the author and his colleagues surveyed 76 young, donor conceived people (and 235 lesbian mothers) who responded to surveys that were “advertised on the COLAGE website and further distributed nationally by a number of LGBTQ advocacy and parenting organizations.”[xxxiii] Maybe all of those people have joined COLAGE, maybe not. But one thing is certain. With a convenience sample like this one (that is, with participants responding to word-of-mouth appeals and advertisements about a survey), one really cannot know how representative the survey results are of donor conceived persons with LGBTQ parents more generally. (The author obliquely notes this limitation of their method on page 6 – calling the responses “voluntary”– but dwells more on the issue that the respondents are disproportionate well-off economically – the median household income is $99,000-104,000 annually for the lesbian mothers! – and are mostly white.)

And who is this guide for? That’s not really clear, either. The author, Jeff DeGroot, says the intention is for the guide to build a community of DI COLAGErs. He says he feels “fortunate to be at the forefront of a movement of donor-conceived people who are coming of age and speaking out about our experiences.” (unnumbered page at beginning of guide, titled “My Story: A Note from the Author”) He speaks of the “coming of age of a generation” and DI COLAGErs and their parents as “pioneers.”[xxxiv] Yet the guide reads as if it was vetted by the mothers and the professionals who work with them. Don’t make your parents feel bad, it’s careful to say. Tell your parents that you are “just curious.” There are good reasons your lesbian moms might have chosen an anonymous donors – the law doesn’t protect them, and they fear that a man in the picture might get custody of their children. And, there are “people who are against our families.”[xxxv]

Yet these and other reminders that your parents are members of a sexual minority, discriminated against in our culture (and you should not make them feel bad!) are mixed in with other, more offspring-centered statements, such as “Even if you understand why an anonymous donor was chosen, that does not mean you have to be okay with having one,”[xxxvi] and “Remember that it is not your responsibility to protect your parents,”[xxxvii] and “Remember you are not to blame.”[xxxviii]

So who is this “guide” for? Is it a guide to help donor conceived persons with an LGBTQ parent make sense of their experience? Is it a guide to help lesbians who want to have children learn how to do it with donor insemination? Is it a guide for parents who have conceived this way to understand the impact on their children, or to help them deal with the legal issues, or to obtain resources for advocating for change in schools,[xxxix] health care settings,[xl] and sperm banks? (A subtle but surprisingly high pressure discussion of sperm banks is found at the bottom of page 16 and top of page 17 — high pressure because currently sperm banks are obligated to do nothing the author of this guide suggests.) Or is it all of this and more? It’s hard to say.

Sperm Donors: Anonymous, Identity Release, and Known

Another reason why it’s hard to tell who the audience is for the guide is this: the guide is structured primarily not around, say, the feelings and experiences of the offspring, but rather around the type of sperm donor the mothers chose when they decided to conceive the child. The three main categories are anonymous donors, identity release donors, and known donors. There can be a wide variety of experience for the offspring in each category, especially the latter two.

First, a brief explanation of the three broad categories of sperm donation.

An anonymous donor is someone who donates sperm with the condition that his identity will not be revealed, to the mother or the child, at any time now or forever into the future. This has been and remains the most common form of sperm donation.

Identity release donors were pioneered by the Sperm Bank of California in the 1980s and are an option increasingly – though still not widely – available at clinics in the U.S. and, in some other nations, required by law. Identity release means that the sperm donor agrees at the time of his donation that his contact information can be made available to the resulting child when the child reaches a certain age, typically 18 years old.

A known donor is, as it sounds, someone who is or can be known to the mother and child. These arrangements tend to be informal. A woman will ask a male friend, or her lesbian partner’s brother, or someone else to provide her with sperm which she may use to self-inseminate at home, or have a clinic use to inseminate her, or even sometimes, as the COLAGE DI Guide notes some lesbian mothers they surveyed said they did, she might have sex with him with the intention of becoming pregnant, but she nevertheless considers him a sperm donor. She and her partner will likely have a plan for what level of involvement (or not) they want him to have in the child’s life, and what the child will call him. The child may see him rarely if ever, or grow up spending a lot of time with him, or anything in between. The child might call him a special uncle, donor dad, dad, the man who gave my mothers the magic seed, or a variety of other terms that usually the mothers and the known donor settle on when they make this plan. Although the COLAGE DI Guide does not note this, usually it is in these kinds of informal arrangements – in which no clinic with its contracts is involved, and no termination of parental rights is signed — that judges (when disputes are brought to them) rule that the man whom the mothers or the donor himself called a “known donor” is actually a legal father with financial and other obligations to the child.

It turns out, as the guide reveals, that all three categories are rife with questions and ambiguity for the growing child.

For the child with an anonymous donor, the overriding, common questions seem to be: Who is he? How can I find him? And why did my mothers choose to conceive me someone I can never meet?

For the child with an identity release donor, the questions are: Should I contact him when I turn 18? And if I do, what should I say? How should I feel? How will my mothers feel about me finding him? What will he think about the fact that my mothers are gay? There are also haunting questions about whether he will actually be found. The sperm banks provide no guarantee of contacting the sperm donor, but rather tell the mothers when they obtain sperm that the most recent contact information they have on file for the donor can be made available to the child when the child reaches 18 years of age. If and when the now-grown child does make contact with him, there is a whole new set of questions, similar to those for known donors, see below.

For the child with a known donor, the questions are: Who is this person to me? What, if anything, can I expect of him? What if my moms disagree with me on who this person is?

The guide reveals quite a bit about the mothers’ motivations as well.

Those who chose an anonymous donor may do so for a variety of reasons. Depending on where and when they made the decision, an anonymous donor might have been the only choice. Or, as mentioned earlier, they worry about the legal ramifications of not having an anonymous donor. But there are other reasons as well. One mother says “we didn’t want to triangulate our parenting or form a life-long negotiated relationship with anyone else but ourselves.”[xli] Another couple says they went with an anonymous donor because they had a “fear that our child [would] at some point wish for a father and embrace a relationship with the donor seeking this, in ways that harm[ed] our child or displace[d] our parenting relationship.”[xlii] Another says, “we wanted [our children] to have 2 parents who were moms only.”[xliii]

For those who chose identity release donors, their statements and those from their children reveal anxiety about the child actually meeting the donor, even though the mothers chose this type of donor at the outset. The guide discusses the mothers’ fears that the grown child will meet the donor and then reject one or both of the lesbian mothers, in particular the non-biological lesbian mother.[xliv] If the sperm donor is heterosexual, they fear their child will embrace the “normal” heterosexual parent.[xlv] The guide explains that often the growing children “are scared because they do not want to hurt their parents’ feelings by deciding to meet their donor.”[xlvi] As one college student explained, “I wanted to make sure they did not get offended and think that there was something missing in my relationship to them.”[xlvii] And, as mentioned earlier, when children raised as siblings are conceived with different donors, there is anxiety and guilt when some can meet their donor and others cannot.

Finally, for those who chose known donors, there is surprising candor in the guide about what happens when the lesbian mothers and the known donor have falling outs. “My mother has many resentments against my father, so she is wary of me attempting to have a closer relationship to him and getting disappointed,” says a donor conceived person with a known donor in Los Angeles.[xlviii] Another said her lesbian mothers have a “bad relationship” with her known donor and “always talked about him in a negative way.”[xlix] As mentioned earlier, others talk about the relationship with their known donor not meeting their expectations, like the young woman who said, “My donor doesn’t seem to be particularly into the whole father thing with me, and it caused me quite a bit of pain trying to get him to be.”[l]

Little Adults

This ambiguity has not gone unnoticed by the author of this guide. Of the sperm donor, he says, “we must decide what this person means to us.”[li] He notes the “challenging task of defining the relationship with your known donor.”[lii] One who has “been there” offers this advice: “For those who are meeting their donors when they are older, I would advise to know the parameters of what you want from the relationships beforehand.”[liii] The author reassures the reader, “It is completely normal and okay to speak up about the kind of relationship you want with your donor.” (p. 31)

When the institution of something once called “fatherhood” falls apart, this is what happens. We leave each child to “define” the relationship of him or herself to the person who is his or her biological father. The children must “decide” what that person “means” to them. They should “think about the parameters” of what they want. They should “speak up.”

Probably some of them can manage this task quite well, at least on the outside. The 11 and 12 year olds quoted in the guide sound eerily mature, like people twice their age. The people in high school or college quoted in the guide sound like they are forty. Their parents make a lot of money (in this sample) and they’re impressively articulate and sound mature. Compared to the thick, complex negotiations of their childhood, the “real world” might not be so hard for them.

But what of the others? Two-thirds of the donor offspring in their sample are girls or women.[liv] Where are the boys? Where are the fumbling young people, the ones who are too confused to log onto a web survey, or too angry at their parents to take a survey their parents tell them to take? Where are the ones who got in trouble at school that day and are the last kids their moms would want to be studied by some researcher? Where are the ones who just aren’t gifted with emotional intelligence, who aren’t skilled at negotiating ambivalence and speaking up about their own needs in the face of their parents’ tender feelings, who have no clue how to explore and accept the limits of undefined relationships? When we ask children and young people to behave like little adults, what happens to the ones who can’t rise to the challenge? And what happens to the ones that do?

A Different Sample of Donor Conceived People with Lesbian Mothers

As it happens, my colleagues Norval Glenn at the University of Texas at Austin and Karen Clark, an author and donor conceived person, recently completed a study of young adults conceived through sperm donation.[lv] (The 140 page report is available free online.) Unlike the COLAGE survey (and also unlike still another recent study of the offspring of lesbian mothers, published in Pediatrics), our sample was not a convenience sample of offspring (or mothers) who replied to advertisements about a study.

We fielded a survey with a web-based panel of more than one million American households. These were people who had signed up to receive surveys on anything and who are mostly targeted by marketers. Of the 485 offspring ages 18-45 who said they were conceived through sperm donation, 262 were conceived to married heterosexual parents, 113 to single mothers, and 39 to lesbian couples. We also had comparison groups of 562 young adults adopted when they were infants and 563 raised by their biological parents.

While there are limitations to our study, as there are with any study (see pages 119-22 for a discussion of methodology and limitations), it does offer for the first time in the world a nearly-representative and large sample of young adults conceived through sperm donation. And while 39 offspring of lesbian mothers is not a large number, it is similar in size to other studies of offspring of lesbian mothers that have tried to use more nearly representative (and not convenience) samples (for example, Charlotte Patterson’s study of 44 of these young people drawn from Add Health data).[lvi]

By comparison, the recent study of the offspring of lesbian couples reported in Pediatrics employs a sample of 78 offspring of lesbian mothers who originally responded to ads about a study and signed up, agreeing to participate. The researchers conclude from their findings that offspring of lesbian couples are actually functioning better than other young people, but it is quite possible that mainly high-functioning couples would sign up to have their family lives studied in this way. The study also relies mainly on mother’s and other’s reports of how the still minor children are faring, rather than letting the offspring speak for themselves.[lvii]

So, in our study, what did we learn about these 39 young adults who were conceived through sperm donation to lesbian couples, people who may or may not think of themselves as “DI COLAGErs” or have even heard of the term? Some examples:

Well over a third agree, “It bothers me that money was exchanged in order to conceive me,” “It hurts when I hear other people talk about their genealogical background,” and “When I see friends with biological fathers and mothers, it makes me feel sad.”

More than forty percent agree, “I feel confused about who is a member of my family and who is not,” and “It is wrong for people to provide their sperm or eggs for a fee to others who wish to have children.”

About half say, “My sperm donor is half of who I am.”

More than half agree, “I don’t feel that anyone really understands me.”

Almost two-thirds agree, “I have experienced many losses in my life.”

Compared to those raised by their biological parents, and even with controls for socio-economic status, the donor conceived offspring born to lesbian couples in our study are more than twice as likely to report having struggled with substance abuse, and more than 1.5 times as likely to report mental health problems. See Figure 2 on page 115 of the report. There is also much more to be found in Table 2 of the report, which begins on page 109. Meanwhile, the major findings related to offspring of lesbian mothers are summarized in points 6 and 7 of the Fifteen Findings summary at the beginning of the report.

Among those, myself included, who have an interest in how donor conceived persons – including those conceived to lesbian couples – are faring, there might be at least one point of agreement: We have a lot more to learn. All the efforts are worthwhile. The efforts of COLAGE. Of Gartrell and Bos, Patterson, Golombok and more. Of the Donor Sibling Registry. Of Tangled Webs and Persons Conceived Via Artificial Insemination. Of Cordray and Rose and Walker and Whipp and all the rest.

No one has gotten it settled yet. Not me and my colleagues, not COLAGE, not Pediatrics.

We need to keep asking questions – the broadest possible questions, allowing for the broadest possible range of experiences and outcomes. We need to faithfully report what we find. We need to be sincere. I believe there are many sincere researchers and activists trying to get to the heart of the matter, right now. Let’s stay on it until we get it right.

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[i] p. 10

[ii] p. 10

[iii] p. 14

[iv] p. 54

[v] p. 14

[vi] p. 25, bracketed word added by author of the guide

[vii] p. 25, and again on p. 31

[viii] p. 25

[ix] p. 31, emphasis added by Marquardt in these two paragraphs

[x] p. 57

[xi] p. 15

[xii] p. 19

[xiii] p. 20, parenthesis added by author of guide

[xiv] p. 20, bracketed words added by Marquardt, letter in parenthesis added by author of the guide

[xv] p. 17

[xvi] p. 18

[xvii] p. 31, bracketed words added by Marquardt

[xviii] p. 31, bracketed words by author of the guide

[xix] p. 56

[xx] p. 16

[xxi] p. 16, bracketed words added by Marquardt

[xxii] p. 16

[xxiii] p. 28

[xxiv] p. 15

[xxv] p. 17

[xxvi] p. 19

[xxvii] p. 46

[xxviii] p. 46

[xxix] p. 46

[xxx] p. 11

[xxxi] For example, see p. 62

[xxxii] p. 7

[xxxiii] p. 4

[xxxiv] p. 7

[xxxv] p. 47

[xxxvi] p. 27

[xxxvii] p. 30

[xxxviii] p. 32

[xxxix] p. 62

[xl] p. 65

[xli] p. 26

[xlii] p. 26-27, bracketed letters and words added by author of guide

[xliii] p. 26

[xliv] p. 30

[xlv] p. 30

[xlvi] p. 29

[xlvii] p. 29

[xlviii] p. 32

[xlix] p. 32

[l] p. 30

[li] p. 10

[lii] p. 21

[liii] p. 19

[liv] see p. 5

[lv] Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval D. Glenn, and Karen Clark, My Daddy’s Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived Through Sperm Donation (New York: Institute for American Values, 2010

[lvi] Charlotte Patterson, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 5., 241-4.

[lvii] Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos, “US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study: Psychological Adjustment of 17-Year-Old Adolescents,” Pediatrics, published online June 7, 2010.

Categories: Marriage, My Daddy's Name is Donor

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