This Chicago-based author who had children with her lesbian partner and their “known donor”/friend tells us, through experience, what I have long suspected: that we can’t contract away feelings through legalese.
Having kids with a known donor is not for the faint of heart. It requires multiple leaps of faith. The closest thing you get to security is some nimbleness at adjusting to the continual shifting of the ground beneath your feet. It’s a ridiculous idea, lesbians using a known donor to make themselves a baby. Sharing parenting—no matter what your carefully crafted language in the legally non-binding donor agreement you all signed asserts to the contrary—is just not the lesbian way. It’s not anybody’s way. It is at its essence unnatural to mix your friend’s sperm with your egg to make a baby that belongs solely to you and your partner. It’s ridiculous to think that your child’s donor can paint her bedroom and make her homemade marshmallows and assemble her IKEA bed—that he can babysit or take her for the occasional weekend—but that he must never, ever think of himself as dad, parent, or relative in any nuance or implication of the word.
It doesn’t work that way. Your donor will fall in love with your kids. His kids. This is a fact. Get used to it now. If your donor does not fall in love with your kids, congratulations: you just had children with a psychopath. Go ahead, sign that donor agreement where he agrees never to admit dad-like thoughts, whether he has them or not. Don’t think that words can prevent an occurrence of the heart, stop the natural flow of love, or litigate away any discomfort, ambiguity, pain, alienation, self-doubt, threat, or vague, bewildering feelings you might have about making a baby with your best friend. Never mind that it’s right there on paper as legal as it could be if any law recognized it. High-larious! Have your agreement notarized if you really want the gods to fall over laughing. Notarize it, and have your lawyer retain a copy. Maybe your lawyer, like ours, will tell you your agreement doesn’t carry the legal weight of the paper it’s printed on.
And, like every mom who has a child without the father on the scene, she is shocked, shocked, when the child starts asking, “Who is my daddy?” (I usually say kids start doing this around age three, her daughter started around age two.)
You probably didn’t know your two-year-old daughter would stand before you with the persistence of a waterfall and ask, over and over, “Who’s my daddy?” Her hair will be braided into two adorable braids, courtesy of —who else?—her donor, because he can braid better than both of you. She’ll sit there, so cute in those braids, asking who her daddy is. Digesting in her belly, nourishing the blood cells that feed the brain that thinks up these astonishing questions, is the pork loin her donor made for all of you for dinner. Now that’s a funny scene.
You thought you were going to tell your kids they didn’t have a daddy; rather, they had a special-donor-friend-uncle-unicorn-biological-tooth-fairy-neighbor or something. You thought this conversation would happen when they were oh, ten, and you’d calmly explain the concept of donor insemination. Too bad she’s two and insisting the postman is her daddy and if he’s not her daddy well then who is…
Categories: Childbearing, Fatherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood
Exactly the reason why I don’t support the practice (being normalized) for the general public. The goods in conflict are obvious. It takes a very special kind of adult relationship to balance everyone’s interests. Specifically, the offspring – whose interests should come first – but of course, I have a bias which will no doubt be written off as just that by the industry and parent (choice) advocacy groups whose bias trumps all others. For example: read/re-read Alana’s “Shark Tank” post.
It doesn’t sound like the writers’ parenting choices have worked out poorly, or that she’d do it a different way if she had the choice (except that she’d opt for full acknowledgment of the father from the start, instead of taking a couple of years to “mature” to that realization).
why is the donor even around? That doesn’t make any sense. OBIOVUSLY the donor is going to feel like that.
Besides that, I’ve read somewhere that kids from gay parents generally come out more well balanced than kids with heterosexual parents.
I just don’t understand this situation these people placed themselves in. Now the donor is going to have to natural parental instincts kick in. So sad.
Why assume it’s sad? Judging from what little information we have (clicking through to read the whole article), the father may well find his relationship with the girls very rewarding.
In this particular case it turned out well. but what if the they lived in a jurisdiction which would not recognize him as the father, and the lesbian couple were not so mature? That would be miserable.
I think I agree very much with the writer in her realization that ambiguity in family relationshiphs is unsustainable
Is heterosexuality a guarantee of maturity? Are there no miserable heterosexual couples?
And if the jurisdictional rules are the problem, the solution is to change the rules. (Although actually, it’s not clear from the article if the jurisdiction recognizes all the parents or not… at least, it wasn’t clear to me.)
did I say anything of the sort?
the difference is, that as immature as heterosexual folks may be, they are unlikely to obfuscate the family relationships in the aforementioned fashion that the article is talking about. They could have plenty of other craziness to be sure. stop projecting an anti gay slur where there isn’t any.
also, in many jurisdictions that differentiate between a sperm donor and a father who conceived a child via intercourse, the gay man’s (who sires children via manual or intrauterine insemination) rights are less protected than the heterosexual.
(which is why i find it odd to find this repeatedly framed as a GLBT right)
(or more protected, if you are coming from the perspective of those who would prefer to escape parental responsibility. but that’s not the case in this story)
At closer reading, it seems that the jurisdiction they are in would likely recognize the “donor” as dad if either he or the biological mother petitioned the courts to so, only he signed a legally unenforceable agreement not to do so.
However it seems that both sides have developed the maturity not to revert to quibbling about the agreement or the legalities and allow the relationships to flow.
However, one thing I don’t understand is that maturity aside, a custody/visitation agreement between two parents that stipulates that visitation should not include overnights, should be upheld by a court, shouldn’t it?
that is, if it was made after the child was born. which it seems that it wasn’t.
The statement below is false and dismissive
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And, like every mom who has a child without the father on the scene, she is shocked, shocked, when the child starts asking, “Who is my daddy?”