This is our latest from Anonymous Us: A story from a donor-conceived woman:
I found out about my “donor daddy” at age 10, in a trailer where my kid brother, my mother and I were effectively camping out with her then boyfriend. She was in the process of divorcing the abusive, alcoholic man I believed to be our father and had packed us up two weeks previously to join her love interest, a traveling lumberjack entertainer, on the road while we hid from her ex. She had gathered us around their bed and gently explained that she used “guppies” from a “donor daddy” to make us — that we weren’t her ex’s children. I couldn’t tell you in hindsight whether she spilled the beans at that moment to cushion the blow of losing for good the only father we’d ever known or to keep us from resenting her lover or both, but we took the news in stride and never brought it up again.
Until that point, I had been a daddy’s girl in every way. I had fond memories of cooking with my supposed father every night, sitting on his lap while he read to me and relishing the treats and gift from him that we couldn’t tell Mommy about. I wasn’t fazed when he engaged in more self-serving, hands-on bonding time that we also couldn’t tell Mommy about; I suppose I felt like I was reciprocating and was happy to make my Daddy feel good. When my mother packed us up and led us through a rat’s maze of court-ordered therapy and “show me on the doll where he touched you” sessions, assuring us time and again that Daddy just had to go away, I couldn’t help but resent her a bit. My Daddy was my world.
Ten years later, my mother has been divorced from her lumberjack, also an alcoholic, for six years, and my brother and I have emerged ostensibly well-rounded adults in spite of a series of “bad daddies” as my mother calls them. I’ve had enough time to put the pieces of my origins together to have an objective, if somewhat cynical view of my parentage. I’d learned in time that, at ages 39 and 62, my mother and her husband had opted to use a sperm donor after 10 years of infertility treatments, when it became clear that his 20-year-old vasectomy was not reversible enough to conceive. They had then selected the sperm of a 21-year-old architecture student from California with blond hair, blue eyes and a smart-ass personality off a Build-A-Baby Workshop catalog for my conception, later seeking the same donor out again when they went to conceive my brother. “For spare parts,” my mother said.
My mother urged me to seek out my donor’s information when I turned 18 — she was more curious than I was and had nothing to lose. I filed the paperwork with the sperm bank shortly after my 18th birthday to request as much information as possible about Donor 1127, only to have the bank respond that my donor did not wish to volunteer any further information. I don’t blame the guy — who wants to be haunted by their questionable tactics to make a quick buck in college?
I don’t speak of my parentage except in a joking sense. I’ve grown accustomed to life without a father and don’t like to admit to the dreaded “daddy issues.” I may be depressed, I may have had a phase where I bought the love of men with promiscuity, I may feel forced out of nature, I may dread having my own children and passing on my mystery genes and insert stereotype here, but I’m not consciously trying to fill a father shaped void.
I do, however, have a bone to pick with the market that creates these situations. Call me old fashioned, but I find donor conception an incredibly selfish practice on the part of the parents. It used to be that couples who couldn’t conceive the biblical way adopted one of the thousands of needy children in the world in order to fulfill their desire for a child. The couple got a bundle of joy, and the adopted child got a loving home it would not otherwise have. Donor conception carries the intrinsic, unspoken premise that engineering a half-you, half-stranger baby that is “yours” is preferable to raising an existing child, that your forced offspring is more worthy of your love than another child. Instead of making a child’s dream of a family come true, this system makes a family’s dream of a child come true. The only one who doesn’t get a say in the latter deal is the child. With adoption, you are making the best of the raw deal life dealt a child. With donor conception, you are creating that raw deal as the byproduct of a selfish desire to pass on your genes any way possible.
There is coldness surrounding my conception, when I bother to think about it. I was not the latent effect of mutual attraction and passion between two people, as most children are. I was not a mistake or an accident, happy or unhappy. I was carefully planned, my traits were picked out of a catalog, my conception was the result of an oversized turkey baster and prayer. My mother never fails to remind me how much time and money she spent to bring me into the world, as most any mother is wont to do to some degree. She doesn’t know it, but I feel deeply indebted to her, as though I owe it to her to live up to her expectations and vicarious whims because my life is not mine to lead as I please — she purchased it from the Build-A-Baby Workshop. It’s the same kind of loyalty and sense of indenture that Sally the Rag Doll must have felt towards Dr. Finklestein in Nightmare Before Christmas. Don’t get me wrong; I love my mother and don’t begrudge her desire to be a mother. I just wish she had gone about it differently. I wish other prospective parents would go about it differently. The same rules should apply to making children as they do to failing to spay or neuter animals: to breed more when so many are in need of good homes, all for the sake of pursuing that perfect personality or appearance, is irresponsible.
Categories: Childhood, Children of Divorce, Fatherhood, My Daddy's Name is Donor, Reproductive Technologies
What hits me is more of a what was she thinking, going out of her way to get pregnant when she was married to an abusive guy? (She here is the mom.)
What a heart-wrenching story in so many ways; where’s the moral/ethical thinking behind such a choice? Just because we can … do we?
I’m surprised at how the writer minimizes the sexual molestation and implies that the mother was somehow wrong for objecting this.
Amazing how mom gets all the brunt of the anger and dad gets off scot free as always. Whether its the step dad, or the donor himself. Just amazing.
I’m not saying that the mother made a good choice, but seriously mother blaming is just out of control in this culture.
Re: what what the mother thinking? Well, she appears to have internalized many toxic messages from the culture-at-large, including but not limited to:
A woman is nothing without a man. Having a child with a man bonds him to you. Having a child makes a bad marriage better. It is wrong for a woman to raise children on her own—she must get remarried in order to find a proper father-figure. The best way to escape an abusive husband is to find another man—only another man will protect a woman from an abuser. Any man is better than no man. “It’s just the alcohol, it’s not him. Having high standards is uppity and arrogant. I’m too old and/or not good-looking enough to have high standards.
Let’s be frank about the toxic messaging—including a great deal of so-called pro-marriage messaging—that is still out there. This woman followed the predominant script in the belief she was doing the right thing.
(If you want to spend your afternoon rinsing your eyes out with Clorox to cleanse them from reading misogynist messaging, google “Valdes” and “The Feminist and the Cowboy”; this is a true story of Valdes’ emotional and physical abuse—including rape–by her boyfriend (the “Cowboy”) whom she credits with showing her the true place of a woman. Inconveniently for the publisher who planned on marketing this as a love story, Valdes broke up with him—but has since found another (likely) abuser, one who wrote a letter thanking the Cowboy for “taming” her.)
Valdes wrote that he abused her; that she jumped from a car because he was afraid he would kill her, that she belatedly realized what she had written was an abuse manual. her post was then ttaken down at the request of her publisher.
donor conception here all lumped together with child molestation and alchoholism as if the latter two didn’t count…. donor conception did not create those situations
btw valdes is no feminist no matter what she says
the title is chosen because some elements of society get a real thrill out of seeing the feminist taken down
If the writer feels that being donor-conceived was the most important thing about her life, I’m not going to tell her that her feelings are “wrong”. But like ki sarita, I would be astonished at anyone who skipped past the long narrative of physical and emotional abuse to say that the Real Issue here is the mother’s reliance on a donor.
Re Valdes, she’s given conflicting stories about that blog post, conveniently timed with her book release and announcement of a sequel.
ki sarita:
Yes, ki sarita, I noticed how the author just blew past that whole issue, remarking:
Gosh, La Lubu, I always learn so much from your comments. I always look forward to your thoughts.
Kisarita her molester purchased her. He owned her. He still does she would have to do a name change to unmake him her legal father. The entire thing is due to the fact that her father abandoned her and allowed her step father to purchase legal fatherhood and her identity. sheesh its so obvious. She is not free she even says that.
I certainly don’t begrudge the writer her perspective but she idealizes adoption without mentioning the many, many pitfalls of it. First off, there’s an issue of supply and demand. There aren’t enough healthy infants or toddlers available for adoption to meet the demand. If you are willing to adopt a child over the age of 5, or a child with special needs it is easier but let’s not pretend that every infertile couple will have the financial resources to care for a child with a disability. Or the emotional resources to deal with a child who has spent many of his/her formative years in a crowded orphanage, bouncing from foster home to foster home, or being traumatized by neglectful and abusive biological relatives.
I realize this may sound harsh, but I will quote a blog post from a man who has four adopted children from an open adoption: “The essential problem with adoption is that it requires a trauma; something sad has happened so that the child requires a second family. It’s not a panacea for not having children biologically. People who think adoption is the easy solution are just passing the buck for their kids to deal with later.”
I also in general don’t think I should say people’s feelings are “wrong”, but in the case of child sexual abuse I’d make an exception and say the writer is probably not in touch with their feelings. That’s just too much for me.
When the replacement dad is so horrible I suppose people are likely to long more for their biological father. Although she denies both- both how horrible the replacement dad was and longing for the biological father. It’s perfectly ok that he didn’t want to give any information. She didn’t really want it, her bad mom who makes her feel indebted did. on and on.
Sometimes I think mom gets the most negativity because mom is actually the safest person to dump it all on. (I know mine is. She’ll still be there).
Mythago Ki Everyone – she’s not downplaying the abuse by her step father at all she’s being smart alec ey she’s mad and she should be. Her father wherever he is should be hit by a lightening bolt of guilt because he sold his kid to a child molester and she can’t ever fully get away from him she’ll always be that bad man’s legal child she’ll always have his name. She’s mad at her mother because her mother wanted her bio father to go away she paid him to go away and not take care of their children. Her mother actually wanted her children to experience this loss for her personal entertainment. She should be a whole lot more angry than she is. She should join FTDNA and find his relatives and introduce herself because most people want to know if they have a brother and a sister or 20 or 50 cousins or nieces or grandchildren. They won’t necessarily have the same hang ups as her father because, well, they did not sell her to a child molester.
Does it really matter who they sell their kids to? They are selling their children. Objectifying them. How Mythago can you say that being donor offspring is nothing to get worked up about? It means the people raising you believe they earned themselves a person all to themselves.
This country our laws about child custody are all property based instead of responsibility based. People go around saying stuff like “he does not deserve to be a father” or “this person raised the kid they are the real mother”. The kid has no say in these people earning a relationship with them. Its not like having no say in having a parent child relationship because they caused you to exist you are their problem and its proper they should deal with you. But the way adoption and donor conception work its like people think raising the kid makes them a parent. How would you feel if a suitor put in a lot of effort and thought he deserved to have you be his wife more than the guy you were in love with and you just had to go be his wife because he earned it by doing more for you. He deserved you to be his wife. Parenthood should not be looked at as a privlidge its not something you become if your good its something you become if you have offspring. It does not matter whether you suck at it or not its your job to take care of them and they deserve to have you keep doing as much as you can for as long as possible.
Did you read paragraph II Marilyn?
“donor conception here all lumped together with child molestation and alchoholism as if the latter two didn’t count…. donor conception did not create those situations”
Come on, if there was no donor conception, if it was as illegal as other forms of slavery and human trafficking are, then this situation wouldn’t have happened! It probably caused the alcoholism and led to the abuse too. How do you expect a man to handle having to pretend to be a father to some other man’s daughter with his wife, just because his wife suddenly decided she wants to have a baby? It’s like we put a gun in his hand and got him angry. If donor conception was illegal like it ought to be, she would have either accepted being childless and maybe they would have stayed happily married and not become alcoholics, or maybe she would have left him 10 years sooner and found a man that was still fertile and wanted kids (what was she thinking dating a man in his fifties if she still wanted to have kids?).
marilyn, that is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I did say.
hello, if being infertile or childless is a problem needing a solution, then we should be telling young people to be more careful with their choices so they don’t wind up infertile. But once a person is infertile, then they should just accept that and not worry about it. It is wrong to tell people that they still must acquire children somehow to be complete or worthy. We should just take away that terrible option so that people can stop being so neurotic and just be happy with what they have got.
What am I supposed to say? “Oh poor thing. Poor child molestor, driven to the bring by some scheming woman.” Ugh.
Ricardo wrote:
“It probably caused the alcoholism and led to the abuse too. How do you expect a man to handle having to pretend to be a father to some other man’s daughter with his wife, just because his wife suddenly decided she wants to have a baby? It’s like we put a gun in his hand and got him angry.”
Exactly my point. Men will have any excuse made for them, will be quickly absolved, even for something as heinous as child molestation. but the mother who conceives donor conception (with the participation of the same man btw) is unforgiveable, the cause of it all….
Number 1 the topic of the website this woman posted her story at is donor conception, not child molestation, alcoholism or various and sundry forms of psychological and physical abuse. Had she gone to a website on that topic and posted the same story, it might have been geared more towards those topics and how they impacted her life and were influenced by the other 10 tragic things going on simultaneously.
No duh raising a donors offspring did not turn her step father into an abusive a-hole or an alcoholic but it did turn her into his property, the property of a child molester.
We cannot choose our parents, they are who they are because they made us. They put us in this predicament and we are their problem to deal with until we can care for ourselves. If her father were a child molester their would be not a darn thing she could do about it because it would be her true identity. But she was sold to a child molester. She’s not his kid. She’s his step kid. If he had any prior brushes with the law for child molestation it would have been caught in the background check for an adoption where there is absolutely no attempt at all to protect the offspring of donors before permanently tying them to an unrelated individual as if they were really their child and their really was no choice in the matter.
It is so reckless of donors to do this to their offspring. They place their children in situations with total strangers and no background checks no court approval and all the records make it look like those people are the child’s parent.
So she’s focusing on donor conception because its the topic at hand and because of it she was exposed to and then permanently owned by an abusive jerk. She is complaining about her mom and her step dad, their personality problems are unrelated to donor conception but donor conception shows that they objectified children as property rather than thinking of a child as an obligation and responsibility. She served the needs of both people wound up in their own trip.
The whole practice rejects the idea of responsibility based parenthood and embraces property type parenthood that is earned either with effort or paid for by money. You get all kinds of people with whacked personalities buying sperm and eggs. They think its cool to pay a bio parent to split be absent pretend not to have kids. Your going to get some major narcissists.
To me this story highlights the reason why court approved adoption includes background checks before placing children in the permanent care of individuals that are not their parents or parent’s relatives. Where there is no opportunity to do that for children and their real parents, there is before placing them in the care of adoptive parents. That opportunity is a societal responsibility. Why is it societies responsibility to worry about? Because if we are not responsible for approving those transfers of responsibility through the court it means there is a private black market trade in human life. No biggie, it’s just child trafficking and black market adoption. You have people being raised by people who are not their genetic parents who did not adopt because they obtained the ability to claim that they were the child’s parents through an off line private contract drafted prior to the child’s birth. It’s all very clever and profitable and objectifying.
Donor conception is not driving people to be abusive guys, but it is unnecessarily exposing children to the possibility of being placed in the care of abusive people with no background checks and is forcing them to live out their lives identified as the child of those people when they really are not. It’s the roll of the dice they could wind up with loving owners or abusive ones. Almost like how it is the roll of the dice with people’s real parents only they are not their real parents and there is that societal obligation to protect children if they are not going to be raised by their real parents if we don’t want a thriving black market for buying and selling children and parental rights.
Slavery is being owned and not free. Some people will be owned and not free in very comfortable situations and others will be owned and not free in very uncomfortable situations but it’s all unfair. She has every right to be bent at her mom for thinking this was a swell idea. Her mom is the only responsible adult in the room, her dad is m.i.a because she wanted it that way. She’s holding the bag.
“It is so reckless of donors to do this to their offspring”
Father’s not “donors”. There is no such thing as a “donor”.
…in relation to the offspring…
ki sirita, I don’t blame the woman, I blame donor conception being legal. I would probably be a married father with a good job, giving my parents grandchildren, but instead every woman out there has had the old back up plan, and no desire to be any man’s wife when they could have their own children. But it’s not their fault, they are as much victims of it being legal as men are, they didn’t ask for it to be legal and they suffer even more, even if some of them become moms because of it and think they should be grateful advocates for it.
Who should we blame for donor conception being legal? How about Marilyn, she thinks it should be legal, so does ki sirita, so does pretty much everyone here, am I right?
Not me Ricardo but I’m beyond the law on these issues.
Karen you are right I should say that fathers who donated their sperm or mothers who donated their eggs.
You are spot on always
Look at how the language gets to me who tries to be so careful. It takes over its like new speak from 1984
Yes Ricardo you are correct. Only if I were king of the world and it were my choice I would not ban gamete donation – this is semantics but the principal of this is important to me – I would make all people equally accountable to and for their offspring so that all offspring had equal rights and expectations at birth and I would not recognize anyone as the ‘parent’ of another person’s offspring because if society cares to not have a black market for children and parental rights we have to have people go through the courts to relinquish their parental obligations and we have to have people go through the courts to assume responsibility for another person’s offspring as an adoptive parent or as a foster parent or as a guardian or custodian or what have you. False marital presumption should not be a path to parenthood for anyone ever. So as I would have it you could donate your genes all you want but it would not get you very far because you’d still be responsible for raising your own offspring and nobody would have a legal right to claim they were the parents of your offspring. It is important to me not to restrict people’s freedom – so donate, just don’t expect a special exemption from parental responsibility. I’m saying what you are saying only I think we need to focus on parental obligation in the law rather than be looking at all the distraction words like gamete donation and repro tech. The important thing is how people with offspring act when they are born.
Yes the fact that this is all legal and possible makes parental neglect something we buy and sell and there are casualties. We want to believe that its OK to do what we want even when we know it’s wrong. That is human. A woman wants a baby, does not want to wait for Mr. Right and loose her chance the law says it is OK then to pay the father off to ditch out so she runs with it. Can’t entirely blame her. Yes, wait sure I can…why not? Snap out of it and don’t sell your kid short so you can keep em all to yourself lady. There. Just blamed her. Felt good too.
But it does not mean I think people that make mistakes cant turn it around later and be an advocate for their kid’s rights. They can.
Sick thing is that in the back of this woman’s head might be a thought like “well at least it was just molestation and not ‘incest plus’, at least it was not my real father doing that to me.” He never should have had the opportunity to become the legal father of his wife’s child at all even absent gamete donation. Had she had this child from an affair the fact that her husband would be named father due to marital presumption laws is still unforgivable. As a society we ought to care about that and see marital presumption as one of our biggest violation of human rights for minors.
Waiting for someone to speak to THIS. But since no one has I think THIS is a necessary (and ugly, very ugly) part of the discussion.
“So as I would have it you could donate your genes all you want but it would not get you very far because you’d still be responsible for raising your own offspring and nobody would have a legal right to claim they were the parents of your offspring. It is important to me not to restrict people’s freedom – so donate, just don’t expect a special exemption from parental responsibility.”
How would that work when the mother doesn’t want the father’s support raising their kids, and wants to let him off the hook and raise them herself or with a partner? That’s the usual case, right? Even without gamete donation, often unwed mother’s prefer the dad to be out of the picture, because they believe it’s their baby alone and why should they have to deal with a man claiming responsibility?
Say I donated my genes all I want (newspeak alert), how would your scheme make me responsible if she doesn’t want me to be? Are you just talking about making is so that birth certificates record the genetic parent, perhaps even with mandatory testing so that husbands can’t claim fatherhood?
And I disagree with you about restricting people’s freedom. I think it is important to restrict people’s freedom. Perhaps the idea that we shouldn’t restrict people’s freedom is the whole problem. It’s plainly false, right? What we need are some good old prohibitions again, slapping us into reality.
Ricardo if you are bothered that you are unsuccessful at courting women you might want to re-examine your blame-women attitude. It might make your a more attractive person to date. In the very phrase in which you say “I’m not blaming women” you guess what? hold women responsible for your dating failures.
Most heterosexual women ideally want to have children with a man they love. Donor conception is a last ditch choice for most of them. If the woman you meet would rather a sperm donor than you, thats an extreme statement. Not about them, about you.
I agree with you Marilyn that stories such as these are instructive to would-be donors. Many donors believe they are doing an altruistic act by allowing other people to raise children who otherwise couldn’t.
But how altruistic can you really be when you have NO IDEA who is going to be raising the kid? If they might be people who shouldn’t be allowed to buy a pet never mind have a kid? Whom they might run if they actually saw them?
All donors should really think about this before they get taken in by this altruistic language and cute pictures.
As to the connection between donor conception and molestation, their are no studies that specifically address this issue. Studies taken from huge samples including all sorts of relationships can not be extrapolated to include this issue.
even if a slight increase was noted (and I doubt it would be much more than slight) it would be no reason to oppose donor conception any more than women getting remarried.
While a child abused by their social father would likely wish they had been raised by their biological father, a child abused by their biological father would just as likely wish they had been raised by someone else.
Really no connection.
Re: the Cinderella effect, the lowest incidence of child abuse is among adoptive parents, so….color me unconvinced by the biological determinism of “unrelated adults are more likely to abuse children”. Abuse, whether physical, emotional or sexual, has a constellation of behaviors associated with it, and we can learn to recognize the red flags (see: Gavin DeBecker’s “Gift of Fear” and “Protecting the Gift”) and minimize our risks. We can also get rid of harmful cultural narratives that deny red flags or encourage people to overlook red flags.
Question: what percentage of step-parents abuse children?
Ricardo, did you really just argue that the only reason you are not happily married with children is that sperm donation is not illegal?
marilyn, are you opposed to adoption?
Way back when I recall reading a study that examined abuse by stepfathers. It found that when the stepfather became part if the family when a child was very young (I believe this may have been defined as 2 or under) abuse rates were not much different than those of biological fathers, but were significantly higher when the children were older at the time of marriage.
“How would that work when the mother doesn’t want the father’s support raising their kids, and wants to let him off the hook and raise them herself or with a partner? That’s the usual case, right? Even without gamete donation, often unwed mother’s prefer the dad to be out of the picture, because they believe it’s their baby alone and why should they have to deal with a man claiming responsibility?”
Yes that is the BIG problem, not donor conception but the fact that people are treating their bio children as property. Mother’s thinking it’s THEIR baby when really its THEIR OBLIGATION TO TAKE CARE OF THE BABY IN CONCERT WITH THE OTHER PARENT. How would I manage that absent bio testing for every baby born? (Which is fine with me but not with most people) I’d make sworn statements of genetic maternity and paternity for every child stating that they know the names of the parents on the certificate will be relied upon as a medical record for the person it is issued for and as a source for vital statistical information that is the basis for government research in the area of hereditary disease and birth defects as well as managing the spread of disease in the general population and there is no right to claim to be the parent of a child that is not one’s own offspring and that subverting attempts to locate and name a person’s genetic parents is an obstruction of justice and government business. If at any point in the future it is discovered that parental authority and title was recorded based upon fraud or mistake in fact all records will be corrected and parental authority withdrawn and the subject of the child’s custody will be remanded to family court. Incidences of fraud will be handled in criminal court. So there. That is how I’d handle it. A right to have the incorrect info corrected when fraud or mistake is discovered is essential. No right to agree the other parent won’t do their part.
Ricardo,
RE: Making it illegal – it’s not going to happen. In fact, it’s getting even more industrial.
How low can we go? I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom yet:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2007/01/the_embryo_factory.html
The Embryo Factory
The business logic of made-to-order babies.
By William Saletan|Posted Monday, Jan. 15, 2007, at 8:32 AM ET
Ki that is not fair
If the women he meets already have kids from sperm donors it says that they have an objectifying property based view of parenthood. It says they think of their child as being their property that they get to grant or deny access to – the father has no independent obligation to their child unless she says he does. The child has no independent right to his involvement or support – she decides what rights the child has because the child is her object created for her enjoyment and if she wants the child to be sequestered from the other half of their family for her convenience and entertainment then so shall it be. The child must have no support from their father and must be disowned by their paternal family in order to better suit her need to have a child fill the void in her in her lonely sensible shoe wearing cotton underpants spinster life.
Can you make your point without sexist language? I’ve had enough of the women bashing here.
Are people seriously arguing that the primary, or even a statistically significant minority, of children being raised without their biological father present in their lives, are due to unpartnered women who have not found “Mr. Right” and thus visit the sperm bank in order to raise a child without the say-so of a father?
“While a child abused by their social father would likely wish they had been raised by their biological father, a child abused by their biological father would just as likely wish they had been raised by someone else.”
Ki sarita has it exactly right.
Unless we have data showing that donor conceived children are more likely to be abused, we shouldn’t make claims that insult so many parents and families.
However, again, ki sarita has it right – people donated should realize that there are no controls on who gets their children.
We don’t let people adopt children unless they meet certain criteria – they can’t be too old, they have to be able to support a child, they have to be stable. We shouldn’t let people “half-adopt”/use donor assisted reproduction if they can’t meet the same criteria we expect of other adoptive parents.
Wait, I thought the stereotype was “slutty selfish career woman who caroused, slept around and spent money on martinis, vacations, and Jimmy Choos until her biological clock almost ran out.”
i could have. That was tacky of me. I apologize. I’m going to my corner.
About 20 years ago, in my twenties, I was dating a woman in one of those 90′s style on-again-off-again see-other-people college relationships, way too young to propose marriage or children with anyone, and she claimed, like as a feminist test to see what my reaction would be, that if she got to be in her thirties and hadn’t found Mr Right (I think she may have even used that term) she would use a turkey baster (I definitely remember her using that, and gesturing with a sound effect for good measure). I don’t think she was challenging me to propose to her, we’d been over that, that was being needy and codependent (not that I ever actually proposed to her, of course, but just wanting to be her boyfriend was dicey enough, and heck, why should I have proposed to her, that would have been crazy). I think my reaction was amused disapproval. I was a kind of hippy libertarian Ayn Rand asshole in my 20′s, But also just stunned silence and resignation. Was she the only woman ever to say that to her then-boyfriend? I doubt it, right? Doesn’t every woman and every man have the thought occur to them, and don’t we all react in similar ways? It’s demoralizing. I don’t blame her (she was, incidentally, a child of divorce, unlike me), I blame donor conception being legal. That was the fact that screwed us both up.
And I’m not complaining at all! I didn’t say I would be “happily married with children” if donor conception were not legal, I said, “I would probably be a married father with a good job, giving my parents grandchildren.” I didn’t say I’m not happy now, with no responsibilities, a cute girlfriend, the Pats, Celtics, Bruins AND Red Sox all winning several championships, and I don’t miss being a dad, and certainly don’t miss being a wife, which is what husbands are these days.
La Lubu. No I’m not arguing that. People do it for lots of reasons. None of them warrant taking someone else’s family or rights away.
Ricardo, “certainly don’t miss being a wife, which is what husbands are these days.”
Wow you got cojones Ricardo, you are going to get massacred for that statement.
I doubt very much if my husband will appreciate being called, “a wife”, as in, not as good, or not equal to a man/husband. Husbands who really truly live in an egalitarian marriage are still very much husbands, they don’t feel emasculated because they share the housework and child rearing tasks.
Good luck turning that, “cute girlfriend” into a wife Ricardo.
I don’t think I buy into the whole Cinderella thing it gloms people together too much based on criteria that has nothing to do with their personalities, habits, background etc. Being married to someone who has kids by another person is just too broad for me to believe that alone would turn a person abusive. Nor do I think raising donor offspring makes people abusive. We are just skipping the part where we investigate the reason why someone else is raising the kid for the bio parent because “I created this child as a gift for this person” smacks of comodification and trafficking and should stop the adoption from moving forward. Though I admit many adoption proceedings ignore the info they vet like in surrogacy and let the adoption or step parent adoption go right ahead when clearly there was a private contract for control of the child. Tragic.
Mythago. I am in favor of the legal checks and balances required prior to approving placement in an adoptive home all minors not being raised by bio parents deserve that due process and deserve to have the adoption halted at the slightest indication that there might have been a private contract for parental control. Pretty much everything else about adoption I’d like to see changed so that the child never looses status as a full member of their own genetic family.
M wrote:
“I am in favor of the legal checks and balances required prior to approving placement in an adoptive home all minors not being raised by bio parents deserve that due process and deserve to have the adoption halted at the slightest indication that there might have been a private contract for parental control. Pretty much everything else about adoption I’d like to see changed so that the child never looses status as a full member of their own genetic family”
I agree, when “adoption” includes “donor conception”, but I don’t think (I’m actually pretty sure) that ‘approving placement’ can never happen when adoption is done pre-conception (via “donor”/”surrogate”). I linked to this article, not sure if anyone took a look at it but I highly recommend that you do. Read the whole thing:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2007/01/the_embryo_factory.html
The Embryo Factory
The business logic of made-to-order babies.
By William Saletan|Posted Monday, Jan. 15, 2007, at 8:32 AM ET