A response to “My Daddy’s Name is Donor: Read With Caution!” by Eric Blyth and Wendy Kramer, published by BioNews (U.K.), July 19, 2010
By Elizabeth Marquardt, co-investigator, My Daddy’s Name is Donor
Eric Blyth and Wendy Kramer respond to our report, My Daddy’s Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived Through Sperm Donation, in a BioNews Commentary titled: “My Daddy’s Name is Donor: Read With Caution!” Given that the educated readers of BioNews probably learned long ago that critical reading skills should be applied to anything that purports to be non-fiction, the subtitle would seem to be overkill, but apparently the editors at BioNews and the authors themselves believed otherwise.
The commentary by Blyth and Kramer contains at least one blatant error and appears mainly to reflect their anxiety that new researchers and new voices are entering a field and leading a debate that until now has been led by themselves and a familiar set of international colleagues. They should prepare themselves, because as the global fertility trade continues to explode, there will continue to be greater scrutiny by an ever-widening set of scholars who will bring their own questions and concerns to the debate.
Now, to deal directly with the error, charges, and concerns in their commentary.
First, Blyth and Kramer bizarrely call the Commission on Parenthood’s Future, which released My Daddy’s Name is Donor, “a New-York based Christian think tank.”
First, the commission is a commission, not a think tank. More importantly, it is not “Christian.” Rather, the commission is an independent, nonpartisan group of scholars and leaders who have come together to investigate the status of parenthood as a legal, ethical, social, and scientific category in contemporary societies and to make recommendations for the future. More information can be found on page ii of the report and at this website. The editors of BioNews have been alerted to this error and have been requested immediately to post a correction. (note from EM on 7/20/10 at 12:27 pm CST: a correction was posted by BioNews).
Perhaps Blyth and Kramer were trying to describe the Institute for American Values, of which I am vice president for family studies and direct our Center for Marriage and Families. Our Institute is based in New York and is a think tank, but again it is not a “Christian” organization. The Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit think tank that brings together scholars and opinion leaders to examine families and civil society, and the sources of competence, character, and citizenship. Readers can learn more about the Institute and its four centers for research and engagement by visiting www.americanvalues.org.
Having responded to that blatant error, let’s continue.
Nowhere do we claim, as Blyth and Kramer suggest, that our survey is representative of the U.S. population as a whole. Rather, we state that it is “representative of Americans who signed up for web-based survey panels, who may differ in unknown ways from Americans as a whole. We believe this bias is unlikely to be substantial.” (See page 121 in the extensive discussion of methodology and limitations available in report, the entirety of which is available free online at FamilyScholars.org.) To put it another way, as Blyth and Kramer themselves quote from page 20 of our report, the survey is representative of the “million-plus American households that had signed up to receive web surveys, on, well, anything.”
We fielded our survey with AbtSRBI, a well-respected survey research firm that abides by industry best practices, which used Survey Sampling International’s SurveySpot web panel. Blyth and Kramer curiously feel obliged to note that participants in the SurveySpot web panel are “offered cash and other rewards for their participation.” Perhaps they are not aware that it is not uncommon for researchers and survey research firms to offer modest incentives for participants to take part in studies. (Blyth must be the only academic in the world who does not routinely pass signs posted on campus in which faculty members in the psychology department plead with students to come take part in a study in exchange for cash.) As every other researcher knows, modest payments or incentives for participants to give some of their time is not a problem so long as participants are compensated on the basis of their participation alone, and not, for example, for their responses or based on which subgroup of the sample they fall into.
Would readers like to know what is a problem? Here is an example: Wendy Kramer is an activist who runs the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR). The DSR helps half-siblings conceived with the same sperm or egg donor – and sometimes the offspring and donors themselves – to find one another. It also maintains a lively message board made up of many women who have been or are considering conceiving children with donor insemination, as well as some offspring who were conceived this way, some sperm donors and egg donors, and some other recipient parents such as mothers who conceived through egg donation or fathers or lesbian co-mothers whose current or previous partners conceived through sperm donation. With a professor at Cambridge University, Kramer is conducting surveys –she refers to them collectively as “the Cambridge study” – of people who congregate at DSR. They are reporting the results in journals such as Human Reproduction. The participants are all persons who have heard of DSR, who have been motivated to join or actively follow DSR, and who have responded to personal appeals from Wendy Kramer herself to take the surveys posted at DSR. Meanwhile, Wendy Kramer’s own story of conceiving a son through sperm donation and her views on matters related to this topic are widely known to those who congregate at DSR, and Kramer herself is widely admired (with good reason) among many of them for her efforts to bring greater openness to the fertility industry. Kramer and her colleague at Cambridge then purport that their work tells us something about the experience or perspectives of donor offspring more generally (or about the mothers who use donor insemination) – when in fact all they are really telling us is about the offspring and mothers who congregate at the DSR, who may well bear little resemblance to the offspring and mothers in the broader population who have never heard of DSR. From a research point of view, this is a problem.
Moving on, Blyth and Kramer are offended that we cite existing work on this topic in a “cursory endnote” on page 123-124. Endnote 6, to which they refer, is more than 350 words long and refers to eleven scholars and authors, as well as two websites. We regret that this endnote is insufficient for their tastes. (Other academic or government studies are also cited in endnotes 58, 64, 82, 86, 89, and 114 of the report.)
They also claim that we lack “modesty” because we say, on page 5, that My Daddy’s Name is Donor is the “first effort to learn about the identity, kinship, wellbeing, and social justice experience of young adults who were conceived through sperm donation.” In fact, we should have clarified in that sentence, as we do in multiple other places in this report, that this is the first such effort to study this question with a sample that is not only large (485 donor conceived persons) and representative of a million plus households but also offers comparison groups of those who were adopted as infants (562 persons) or raised by biological parents (563 persons), as no other existing study in the world does (see pages 19 and 20 of our report for a fuller discussion about why this study is unique).
Further, they say our study lacks “competent peer review.” Our study was released by the Commission on Parenthood’s Future. The commission members are listed in the front of the report and at this website. They hail from America’s top universities including the University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, Princeton, Duke, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Emory, Rutgers, and more. There are no secrets about who were the peers who reviewed our work – they are all listed in the front of the report. In addition, unlike any other researcher on this topic of whom we are aware (indeed, unlike few if any researchers publishing today) we published the full “summary of the data” (in technical terms, the “marginal frequencies”) in the report. See Table 1 of the report, which is entirely available online, free, at FamilyScholars.org. Also see Tables 2-5 and Figures 1-4, also available in the report. Finally, see the response of my co-investigator Norval D. Glenn, the Ashbel Smith Professor of Sociology and Stiles Professor of American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin (and former editor of the journals Contemporary Sociology and Journal of Family Issues), to a previous critic at FamilyScholars.org, here, and my colleague David Blankenhorn’s discussion of peer review at this post at FamilyScholars.org.
Blyth and Kramer then move into what is apparently the heart of their critique. They say, “the major concern with the report is the authors’ extensive misrepresentation of their own data so as best to promote their message that donor conception is ‘bad,’ even when their own evidence doesn’t support it.”
Misrepresentation of data is a gravely serious charge. Let’s see how Blyth and Kramer back up their charge. They say:
1) The authors report the following findings: 65 per cent of donor-conceived participants agree that ‘My sperm donor is half of who I am’; 45 per cent agree that ‘The circumstances of my conception bother me’; 47 per cent report that they ‘think about donor conception at least a few times a week or more often’ – and draw from these the exaggerated claim that ‘donor offspring experience profound struggles with their origins and identities’ (p. 6 – our emphasis). The one statement that might suggest any sort of ‘struggle’ – ‘the circumstances of my conception bother me’- generated the following responses from donor-conceived participants: 19 per cent ‘strongly agreed’; 26 per cent ‘somewhat agreed’; 20 per cent ‘somewhat disagreed’; 30 per cent ‘strongly disagreed’ and five per cent ‘didn’t know’. In other words, more than half didn’t care.
What have Blyth and Kramer told the reader here? As far as I can see, they have informed us that in their opinion finding that between half to two-thirds of persons conceived through an elective procedure performed on their parents feel that their usually unknown biological father is half of who they are, that they are bothered about the circumstances of their conception, and that as adults they think about how they were conceived several times a week or more often – Blyth and Kramer have informed us they believe that none of this is much of a problem. We disagree.
They continue:
2) This strategy is repeated when discussing payment to donors. The authors assert that ‘nearly half [of donor-conceived people] are disturbed that money was involved in their conception’ (p.6) and ‘with donor conception… the growing child struggles with the dawning realization that his or her biological father or mother sold the goods to make the child without even a look back to say goodbye’ (p. 72). But what do their participants say? Twenty per cent ‘somewhat disagreed’ and 33 per cent ‘strongly disagreed’ with the statement ‘it is wrong for people to provide their sperm or eggs for a fee to others who wish to have children.’ Added to the six per cent who ‘don’t know’, then 59 per cent of donor-conceived participants had no strong concerns about ‘donor’ payment (p.84).
Here, Blyth and Kramer choose to highlight the issue of payments to donors. (I’m not sure why this issue merits such concern on their part – perhaps they are part of discussions in their respective nations about whether payments to donors should continue, a practice which facilitates the trade in sperm and eggs, which both of them support?) Here is what we found regarding the issue of money: Forty-five percent of donor offspring agree, “It bothers me that money was exchanged in order to conceive me.” Forty-two percent (about twice as many compared to those who were adopted or raised by their biological parents) agree, “It is wrong for people to provide their sperm or eggs for a fee to others who wish to have children.” The issue of money is a not-infrequent topic of concern among donor offspring, as I’m sure Blyth and Kramer are aware. In the last week I personally have seen references to it in two sources that are otherwise quite supportive of using donor conception for having children. The organization COLAGE published a guide about donor insemination. It quotes a young person conceived to lesbian mothers and raised with a known donor 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 the movie The Kids are Alright, which I saw yesterday, one of the pressing questions a 15 year old boy has when he meets his sperm donor is, “Why did you do it?” The sperm donor hesitates. The boy asks, “How much did you get paid?” The sperm donor responds, “I got paid 60 dollars a pop.” The boy winces. Blyth and Kramer apparently have a point of view about payments to donors. But others have different points of view.
Next up on the Blyth/Kramer critique:
3) They make a big deal of the ‘fact’ that donor-conceived people feel that ‘no one really understands me’ – repeating this on no less than three occasions (pp. 7, 39, 45). However, once again, the participants themselves tell a somewhat different story. As many ‘strongly disagreed’ with the statement ‘I don’t feel that anyone really understands me’ as ‘strongly agreed’ with it, although overall, slightly more agreed (either somewhat or strongly) as disagreed – 53 per cent vs 46 per cent (p. 104). Of course, this statement is pretty vague and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with donor conception. In contrast, when the study focused on very specific issues about donor conception itself, the level of support from donor-conceived participants is high. For example, 56 per cent disagreed with the statement ‘If I had a friend who wanted to use a sperm donor to have a baby, I would encourage her not to do it’ (p. 82). However, this does not sit easily with the authors’ agenda. Instead, in order to emphasise their anti-donor conception message, on two occasions (pp. 14 and 65) they focus on the observation that 37 per cent of the donor-conceived participants agreed with the statement.
As we say, 25 percent of donor offspring strongly agree, “I don’t feel that anyone really understands me,” compared to 13 percent of adopted persons and 9 percent of those raised by their biological parents (I am not sure why Blyth and Kramer chose to ignore the comparison groups on this and other points). This is one among dozens and dozens of items we report in this 140 page report. We believe it offers insight into the experience of donor offspring. Similarly, we think it is quite striking that 37 percent of donor offspring would discourage their friend from having a baby the way their mom had them. Blyth and Kramer disagree, which is certainly their right. And of course, they are able to dig into and challenge our view on our own data precisely because we provided all the data in the report.
Finally, they add:
4) The data are again misrepresented when reporting participants’ agreements with various ‘expert opinions’: 44 per cent agreed that ‘Donor conception is fine for children so long as parents tell children the truth about their conception from an early age’; 36 per cent agreed that ‘Donor conception can be hard for children, but telling children the truth early on makes it easier for the children’ (our emphasis), and 11 per cent agreed that ‘Donor conception is hard for children even if their parents tell them the truth’ (p. 100). These findings are distorted in the summary soundbite: ‘About half of donor offspring have concerns about or serious objections to donor conception itself, even when parents tell their children the truth’ (p. 57).
I’m sorry, but I am unable to see how adding 36 percent who feel donor conception can be hard for children, but telling children the truth earlier on makes it easier, and 11 percent who feel donor conception is hard for children even when parents tell their children the truth, to come up a summary point that 47 percent, or “about half,” of donor offspring have concerns about or serious objections to donor conception even when parents tell the truth, is a “distortion.” Perhaps Blyth and Kramer are sensitive to this point because they are among those who feel that donor conception is not a problem so long as it is handled the “right” way. Speaking personally, that is not my point of view. My point of view is this: An elective procedure used to treat one person’s medical or social issue, which has the most direct effects on another, entirely different person who is, at the time, unable to speak for him or herself or consent to treatment, should be held to the rigorous ethical test of asking “is anyone harmed at all”? In the case of donor conception, our study and ample other work is showing that indeed the resulting persons can be harmed by this practice. I am skeptical that we can sanitize the practice to the extent that it will prevent harm. Blyth and Kramer have a different point of view. Clearly, we disagree.
Blyth and Kramer conclude by saying they were “surprised” that we found that 20 percent of adults conceived through sperm donation said that, as adults, they themselves had donated their own sperm or eggs or been surrogate mothers. They say this issue “warrants investigation in future studies.” We too were surprised, and we invite and welcome other researchers to examine this question and, indeed, all other aspects of donor conception and its effects on the offspring.
Curiously, Blyth and Kramer nowhere addressed our findings about outcomes for donor offspring. For example, even with controls for socio-economic status, we found donor offspring and those who were adopted are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25. Donor offspring are about 1.5 times more likely than those raised by their biological parents to report mental health problems, with the adopted being closer to twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report the same thing. And donor offspring are more than twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report substance abuse problems. See Figure 1 on page 115 of the report. Did Blyth and Kramer have any reaction to these findings?
“Misrepresentation of findings” and “distortion” of data are gravely serious charges. Frankly, I see nothing in what Blyth and Kramer have written that justifies such charges. Rather, I see a researcher (Blyth) and an activist (Kramer) who have their own set of opinions that differs from those of myself and my co-investigators. Where they see a glass half full, we see a glass half empty. We are willing to ask why a good society would offer a half-empty glass (that is, the intentional, deliberate denial of one’s biological father) to so many children and young people.
Blyth and Kramer could well have written a thoughtful, rigorous critique of our interpretations of our findings without proffering grave charges of misrepresentation of data, and without giving educated readers a silly warning that they should “read with caution!” Sadly, they chose not to. It is a shame, because both of them, as a researcher and as an activist, have done much good in drawing attention to the legitimate needs of donor offspring to have knowledge about their origins.
Categories: My Daddy's Name is Donor
I am disturbed at the way you attack Kramer, describing her as an activist, while yourself being so sensitive to charges that you are less a scholar than an activist. Don’t you see the inconsistency?
Sorry Jay, is activist a bad word? Kramer is an activist. As we wrote in My Daddy’s Name is Donor:
“The most well-known registry in the U.S. is the Donor Sibling Registry, founded by a dynamic leader named Wendy Kramer. Kramer used donor insemination to conceive her now-grown son, Ryan, and was first motivated to turn to the internet to try and find his sperm donor father and half-siblings when he expressed a strong desire to know more about where he came from. Before long she had launched a service that has made more than 6,000 “matches” between half-siblings, or between children and their biological parents. (The number is always rising and will likely be still higher by the time this report appears.)
Wendy and Ryan Kramer and the Donor Sibling Registry are routinely featured in the major media and have drawn a lot of sorely-needed attention to the needs of donor conceived children and adults to know where they come from. Kramer is now an active leader in efforts to urge the U.S. sperm and egg bank industry to begin offering an industry-backed registry service. (She wants the registry to be mandatory; the industry wants it to be voluntary.) ”
Is any of that untrue?
As long as you don’t mind being called an activist, it seems there’s no harm in calling her one.
Elizabeth, activist is not a bad word, but you (or perhaps it was David) expressed some dismay at being labeled an activist instead of a scholar in other reviews of your book, feeling that it was a means of not taking your research seriously. Now you are guilty of doing the same thing. Surely, we can’t take Wendy Kramer’s scholarship seriously because she is really an activist and surely not objective. You seem to want it both ways: you want to be free from taking others seriously because they are biased; yet you don’t want anyone attacking for being biased.
Their critiques of the data analysis (once you get beyond the petty back-and-forth between both sides) are interesting. I guess it is a question of half-full versus half-empty and how broadly you define “a problem” when less than half of respondents identified something as a “concern.” One of the problems with the social science in the marriage field is that the “harms” are always about statistically significant differences, but rarely overwhelming statistical evidence.
So if less than half of people say they feel misunderstood–after reading a load of questions that telegraph the intent of the survey–is that a “problem” that justifies a major policy change as defined by activists who favor a policy change before the study was conducted?
Well done Elizabeth!!
Jay, I understand Elizabeth’s designation between an “activist” and a “scholar”. For Elizabeth, her educational training and career focus are in the research an analysis of family issues such as donor conception. In my eyes (as an academic myself) consider this to be scholarly.
She is also right in saying that Wendy is an activist. Wendy has a personal agenda and because of her personal experience with donor conception has chosen to make it and the DSR her campaign for change (or whatever her campaign actually is…) of donor conception.
I would consider myself to be an activist as well. My academic training is not in philosophy, ethics, or anything related to that – it’s actually in medical librarianship – however, with my Cryokid blog and my other advocacy within the donor conception community and the general public, I find myself as a respected source of information and other resources. But I’m not a donor conception scholar.
The term activist is not offensive to someone who truly is, and to call Wendy Kramer a scholar is downright wrong.
Lindsay
Lindsay, you seem to be saying that activists who work on causes you agree with are not activists but scholars, and activists who work on causes you disagree with are activists not scholars.
Kramer is working on a Cambridge University project and publishing in distinguished peer-reviewed journals, yet she is not a scholar? What about Blyth? He holds a professorship and a visiting professorship, but he is an adoptive father. Does that disqualify him as a scholar?
Jay-
Lindsay and I are involved on this matter because we are first-person afflicted and understand on an intimate, personal experience level the implications of donor conception.
Wendy Kramer too fits into this category. She is first-person-afflicted and set out to do something about the problems she saw in the fertility industry.
Elizabeth Marquardt and David Blankenhorn are NOT first-person-afflicted. They are scholars. They have focused their lives on studying family dynamics and felt compelled to research and speak on the topic of commercial conception.
that’s the difference between an activist and a scholar.
Sometimes the two blend. With Wendy, I think her scale tips toward activist.
Alana, would you consider Karen an activist?
You also don’t have to be first-person afflicted to be an activist. Elizabeth and David do activism with public policy implications based on the interests of their funders. If Elizabeth suddenly started being a “scholar” on topics or positions that ran counter to the interests and funding of IAV, she’d be fired. That makes her an activist, of sorts, especially when she writes op-eds and does speeches at the behest of the organization which has a specific policy goal funded by partisan, activist organizations and foundations.
Alana, using your “first-person afflicted” approach, then Elizabeth is definitely an activist for marriage and an activist on divorce, since she has been very vocal and candid about her personal self-interest in those topics. Would you agree?
Aside from the unseemly ad hominem attacks on the reviewers, the strangest thing to me in Elizabeth’s response is the big deal she makes out of the “blatant mistake” of identifying the Committee on Parenthood’s Future as a Christian organization. She spends about six paragraphs venting on this error, apparently finding it highly insulting to have the Commission on Parenthood’s Future misidentified as a Christian organization. I think that is a minor error and one easily corrected (as it has been). It is also an error easily made since a lot of people listed as being associated with the Commission seem to have religious affiliations of one kind or another.
Although the Institute for American Values is described as “nonpartisan,” it is shrouded in mystery. The people associated with it are identified, but there is almost no information about the source of funding, etc. Information that might be as helpful in identifying a point of view as religious affiliation.
In any case, the misidentifying of the Commission’s affiliation does not seem to warrant quite the reaction it receives.
In fact, the whole rebuttal seems to indicate a hypersensitivity to criticism. Surely, one of the purposes of scholarly publication is to encourage criticism from other specialists in a field. Since most scholarly books receive relatively few scholarly reviews (and this seems to be one of the first this book has received, as opposed to newspaper or magazine reviews), I would think the authors should welcome the attention rather than launch a pretty intemperate attack on the reviewers. Just saying . . .
For what it’s worth, I think it would be fair to call me a scholar and an activist (maybe other things too). But the way I think of myself, in my own self-identity, what’s important to me, what I strive for, what I hope I’m known for after I’m dead, is as a writer.
Jay, I am a big fan of the Christian faith. What I objected to was the sloppy labeling that was 1) just plain inaccurate and 2) reflected a tendency among some to slap a religious label on anything they don’t like or can’t understand.
Also, among the many people we bring together at the Institute, there are Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others (such as myself — I’m a Baha’i) as well as people who do not profess a faith, and plenty of people about whom I do not know their religious or spiritual beliefs or lack thereof.
Elizabeth, most of the postings here have seemed pretty “partisan” to me. What do you mean when you describe the Institute for American Values as “nonpartisan”?
It is usually referred to as conservative. Isn’t that accurate?
And isn’t being conservative being partisan?
I think the distinction might be when you use your work as an activist to recruit participants for your research. I think that’s where some concerns enter in…
Also, knowing that I have a bit of a dual role is why I teamed with other scholars, partnered with survey research firms, and reported the full data in the back of my book Between Two Worlds and in the report My Daddy’s Name is Donor.
All that said, it really is a challenge to study and address the topic of donor offspring experience — there aren’t that many of them in the general population, there’s not pots of money lying around to do it, and the interests who are against asking these questions are varied and strong — and all the efforts and leaders really are needed, especially bridge builders like Kramer who tries to keep a conversation going between the mothers, offspring, and industry.
Elizabeth,
Hope I‘m not jumping in where I don’t belong but anyone, educated in this particular field or not, can understand the ethical question that you raise…‘cause it sticks out like a sore thumb:
An elective procedure used to treat one person’s medical or social issue, which has the most direct effects on another, entirely different person who is, at the time, unable to speak for him or herself or consent to treatment, should be held to the rigorous ethical test of asking “is anyone harmed at all”?
It’s non essential and the people who are affected cannot advocate for themselves. It’s not by fate or accident, but deliberate.
Thank you and the other contributors to this blog for making me aware of this issue. You’ve got my attention.
Jay, we’re a non-partisan, non-profit organization. We don’t allign ourselves as an organization with political parties or partisan activities.
Nor are we a conservative organization. We don’t use those labels and we don’t work that way.
At http://www.americanvalues.org you can learn more about who we are and what we do.
Hi Anna –
You are most welcome here indeed
(thanks for the comment — so glad our work has been of use in your thinking…hope you’ll keep visiting
Jay,
I did not read Elizabeth Marquardt as making an attack on Wendy Kramer. She’s pointing to the ongoing problem of sample bias, which occurs when one is attempting to study small populations.
Wendy Kramer is attracting a certain circle of people around her, who share her concerns and views, and then studying them. That’s fine because she is open about what she is doing, and some information is better than no information. A large qualitative sample like that can generate new hypotheses to be tested.
But the method definitely limits the generalizability of the sample. Much more than Glenn, Marquardt and Clark’s method, which consists of finding 500 adults created by donor insemination who signed up to be part of a very large internet marketing pool, and then comparing them to others in the same pool raised by adopted or bio parents. Their sample is not nationally representative, and they may not be like all other adults created by donor insemination, but they are at least not a “convenience sample” recruited into a study in ways that make it impossible to know if they are representative at all.
This is not a criticism of Wendy Kramer, it is a fact about her reported study method.
I read Marquardt to be wondering how our fine scholars at BioNews could say nothing about the limitations of say Kramer’s sample, and yet devote a large warning note to Glenn, Marquardt and Clark’s research.
All researchers have opinions. It’s the method of the research and the honesty of the researchers’ disclosure of their methods and findings that count in social science.
It is perfectly possible to draw alternate conclusions from Glenn, Marquardt and Clark’s data, but they have been scientific in drawing up, reporting the sample, and explaining their conclusions. Let the debate continue.
Perhaps “our fine scholars at BioNews” said nothing about the limitations of Kramer’s sample, because they were not reviewing Kramer’s work; they were reviewing Glenn, Marquardt and Clark’s research.
I have spent years trying to get Elizabeth to be an activist, very frustrated by here desire to be a scholar and writer and report and study but not do too much lobbying or advocating for laws. I was thrilled that MDNID included many recommendations, but still I wish they were more “active” in pushing for their recommendations to be adopted, especially
I still don’t know if that means the same thing as saying “we should prohibit creating humans any other way than with identified, untampered-with sperm and egg, or what constitutes “tampering”, or if Elizabeth knows what she means there either, but that is perhaps the difference between an activist who pushes for laws and takes every opportunity to talk about the laws they want, and a scholar, who at most reluctantly offers careful and vague recommendations and then leaves it for other people to do the activity of working them out.
Hi all –
Due to some technical glitch on the blog, Eric Blyth’s comment did not appear in this thread, where he wished it to appear. I am posting the comment here.
This is Eric Blyth’s comment:
“Eric Blyth: I have read these comments with interest and especially Elizabeth Marquardt’s response to the original criticism of the report posted by Wendy Kramer and myself. Having carefully read what Elizabeth has written, she has done nothing to dispel our original concerns. As it happens, we did have other issues with the report and about which we did not write because of word length limitations. It is a pity that Elizabeth has descended to personal attack, speculation and unfounded assumptions concerning Wendy and myself; we did not do this in our original Commentary and I do not intend to do so now. There was a single error in our original piece – where we referred to the Commission on Parenthood’s Future as a Christian organization. It was certainly not our intention to cause offence in so doing. Indeed, as an active Christian myself, nothing could have been further from my mind. In any event, this error was corrected and apologized for as soon as it was drawn to our attention. Finally, I seem to have got off lightly in the “scholar” v “activist” debate. Since I campaigned with others for 15 years to secure the abolition of gamete donor anonymity in the UK, perhaps I should also declare my role as an “activist”.”
I have also, with his permission, posted his comment on the main page of FamilyScholars.org.
That’s quite possible, Jay. Just explaining why Marquardt’s response is not an attack on Wendy Kramer. A convenience sample from folks already gathered around an activist website if fundamentally different from a representative sample of a marketing pool of 1 million people.
I do not know if Glenn, Marquardt and Clark are planning to submit this research down the road to an academic journal but I hope so. Norval Glenn is a truly distinguished social scientist.
A bio of Prof. Norval Glenn, for those who are unaware of his scholarly bona fides is available here: http://www.prc.utexas.edu/biosketch/Glenn_N_bio.pdf
Elizabeth, below you desribe American Values Institute as ” a non-partisan, non-profit organization. We don’t allign ourselves as an organization with political parties or partisan activities.
Nor are we a conservative organization. We don’t use those labels and we don’t work that way.”
Why is it, then, that all the posts here seem to be conservative? I see a few people on your list of bloggers who might be seen as liberal (Dale Carpenter, for example). But none of them have actually blogged here.
A few of the commenters have been liberal, but the huge preponderance of them have been very conservative.
I would find it interesting to hear a few more varied perspectives.
Two points:
First, if you look at the Board of Directors of the Institute for American Values, you will see that a majority of the folks there are significant figures in the fight against same-sex marriage, a few of whom are highly polarizing figures in the national limelight. There’s nothing wrong with partisan organizations using their power to wield influence. But to call the organization “non-partisan” is untrue.
Second, “an elective procedure used to treat one person’s medical or social issue, which has the most direct effects on another, entirely different person who is, at the time, unable to speak for him or herself or consent to treatment” is an excellent, if slightly ham-handed, description of *pregnancy*. To propose that it “should be held to the rigorous ethical test of asking is anyone harmed at all” would be quite a burden on most heterosexual marriages.
I suppose that if I am going to continue to comment on this blog I should introduce myself. I am a gay man, civil-unioned (as we call it here in NJ), with two children born through gestational surrogacy.
Ralph, glad you here. But be warned, as I recently learned, some people here think adoption is human trafficking and artificial insemination is akin to murdering people for their organs. I doubt there is much support for surrogacy.
Re my question below about whether this is a conservative site: I looked at your board and selected Dale Carpenter as a token liberal. Some people would probably roll over laughing to hear Carpenter described as a liberal, since he is a Log Cabin Republican who identifies with the “gay Right.” But my point was, there are people on the Board who seem not to agree on everything that seems to be propagated here, especially same-sex marriage, and Carpenter was sought out to attest that David Blankenhorn, contra Frank Rich, is not a bigot. I’d like to hear his views on same-sex marriage.
Jay,
I am unsure why you mal-aligned me accused me of only saying that those who share my views are “scholars”. You obviously did not read what I wrote since I straight-forward state that I consider MYSELF to be an activist, not a scholar. And why would I not support my own views????
I am donor-conceived, so I have EVERY right to be involved in this discussion. Wendy and Eric are NOT donor conceived but rather a recipient mother and an adoptive father….they too are just as (or perhaps more) biased towards what the wish for the public to see and hear than us offspring.
Alana’s right….I think the best designation is that scholars are usually not “personally” and activists are. Wendy is an activist, as she is personally involved and has a personal stake (her own self-esteem) in how donor conception is viewed. Eric I would consider more a scholar than an activist, however he too is personally involved. Eric is a professor and his academics are intertwined with donor conception. Wendy has none of that, but only her organization and her voice.
I think politics has no bearing on moral right and wrong, and that’s why the Institute is considered “non-partisian”. If anything, political parties and politicians are all corrupt crooks and aligning oneself with them is unethical to begin with!!
I am donor-conceived, and I am opposed to donor-conception and ART 100%. I am not homophobic, and I believe that gays have a right to a civil union. I don’t believe that gives them a RIGHT to create a child through ART, but that’s my opposition to ART not to homosexuals. I also don’t believe that heterosexuals or single women/men should be entitled to children by such means that deny the child the rights to their identity and being raised by both their biological parents.
I’m also a liberal independent, so don’t assume that all those who are opposed to ART are so because they are conservatives. Both ideologies seem ignorant of the true nature of donor conception. Of course many liberals support ART because of reproductive choice, and no god-fearing liberal would ever want to be accused of trying to squelch reproductive or gay rights!!
Yet, there are also liberals who see donor conception for what it’s truly worth (and not the adult-centric view that most take) and realize that it’s not in the best interests of the child and disagree with it.
However, the conservatives also allow it to happen because it’s a multi-billion dollar industry, and heaven-forbid if we were to regulate anything in this wonderful country of ours!!
So as you can see, this is NOT a political ideology debate, and therefore any disagreement with the Institute and the study being “non-partisian” is simply wrong.
Dale Carpenter is a guest blogger at FamilyScholars.org. (He is not on the board at the Institute.)