A new comedy, Seeds, debuts in Canada next week:
Toronto-native Adam Korson plays Harry, a 30ish bachelor bartender who doesn’t quite live up to the Princeton resume he submitted to the clinic where he’s a regular sperm donor.
Turns out Harry has sired many, many offspring and a few are already old enough to look up their DNA dad. This brings about awkward encounters with anonymous moms, none too wild about Harry.
While we’re all so busy laughing about sperm donation (see The Switch, The Backup Plan, Starbuck, and more), can we take a moment to learn more about the experience of persons actually conceived this way? One place to start is with our report, My Daddy’s Name is Donor.
Categories: Childhood, My Daddy's Name is Donor, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood
Fooey. They were not conceived in any special way. They were abandoned by their fathers plain and simple. Their mother’s wanted that way and its just so cruel
And new FS readers, another place to start is by listening to San Fransisco-based, way left, family reuniting Marilynn.
Well, it sounds like a funny premise for a show, but it also sounds like it makes light of any suffering for the kids or the negative consequences of lying and making too many kids. I wonder if it could end up bringing up any real issues if pushed?
I think I’m more comfortable with a couple raising a child that they want to raise, even if they’re biologically unrelated to that child, rather than two people biologically related to the child but who don’t want the child, and see it as a burden.
Marriage, I’m told, is designed to coerce sexually active straight people to take care of children, which they would otherwise be uninterested in, and neglect. Until I heard Maggie Gallagher actually articulate the lack of interest biological parents had in their own children, it never really occurred to me that biological parents don’t particularly care about their children simply as a matter of biology. But it helped me understand my own childhood, and why my own father was so distant and unengaged. I had unrealistic expectations of him, based on his biological connection to me.
When my father and my mother divorced, whatever obligation my father might have had in me dissolved because he became married to another woman, and he had new children. The Gallagher Principle would predict that my father would now be obligated to only the children of the woman he was married to. It all makes sense to me now!
I guess ultimately, all men are just sperm donors. Some are married to the sperm recipient, and even live in the same house as the children their sperm created. I guess wanting to be a parent is a different matter altogether.
Kevin – I think you’re being unfair putting the idea that men don’t stick around for their kids onto Maggie Gallagher. It’s not a theory she came up with.
Anyhow, it’s true that for many, many kids a few years after a divorce, they are barely seeing one parent, usually the father. For what it’s worth, some fathers argue that this is because of the mother not letting them.
Maybe it’s about logistics – if you all live together, you have time to stay connected to your kids.
Maybe it’s the new families getting in the way and needing time from the parent.
The bottom line is that a couple staying married does seem to keep both parents more connected to the child.
If I was donor conceived perhaps I would find this film offensive but on the positive side it brings something to light that is very true and that people should know about- that you really have no clue who is behind that profile.
“Kevin – I think you’re being unfair putting the idea that men don’t stick around for their kids onto Maggie Gallagher. It’s not a theory she came up with.”
I agree, she probably didn’t come up with it, but she articulated it and I hadn’t heard of it before. I don’t disagree with her (or whomever claims responsibility for the idea), and appreciate the insight: it helps me understand my own childhood, and my relationships with my father and stepmother. If biology really isn’t that important, then I can better understand my own father’s lack of interest in his children, and the greater bonding I had with my stepmother.
I think there’s an enormous opportunity to discuss who should be allowed to be a parent. We’ve operated so long under the assumption that biology matters; that biological parents are automatically good parents. I suspect that good parents would be good parents for biological and non-biological children alike, and bad parents would be bad parents for biological and non-biological children alike. Perhaps parenting should be subject to a licensing process.
I guess I have to question this longing that donor-conceived people have for their biological parents now. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, in light of the fact that biological parents don’t necessarily have an inherent interest in their children. If you were raised by a great parent, or a couple of great parents, maybe you got the best of what’s out there.
I don’t think anyone will claim that all parents are fit parents. That’s a misunderstanding of the argument for the importance of genetics.
I would agree that on the scale of things, having an abusive parent (or an abuse enabler) is worse than a sperm donor, definitely. Note that is not putting a sperm donor in flattering company.
However I also believe that only a minority of parents are abusers.
I also would say that while most fathers are invested in their children, they are less so in general (not every case) than mothers.
Without marriage, by which I mean a social system in which people are expected to form exclusive, ongoing, sexual pair bonds, it would be rather difficult for fathers to know who is their own offspring at all, which is sort of a prerequisite for bonding.
Kevin
I very much agree that it is better for a person to be raised by unrelated people who want to raise them, than to be raised by related people who don’t want to raise them or who do want to raise them but are incompetent. Did I come across like I think children are always better off with their biological parents even when their bio parents want nothing to do with them? If I did, I’m sorry. That is not at all how I feel.
Child protective services is full of examples of biological parents abusing and neglecting their children. I’m sure that there are far more bio parents convicted for neglect and abuse than there are adoptive parents convicted for neglect and abuse. I agree that licensing people to raise children is an interesting idea and many people would be found unfit to raise their own offspring out the gate if they had to go through the same rigorous background checks as adoptive parents are suppose to go through. But think about what that would mean. It would mean that the government would have control over every child born until they could do background checks on each child’s bio parents to approve them to take them home and raise them. The government could sieze every child at birth and place them with the next available person who was qualified to be licensed to raise a child, or they could put each child in foster care at the taxpayers expense while the childs bio parents and bio parents went throught the process of demonstrating their fitness and desire to raise their offspring. If both parents were married and wanted the child they might win out over a wealtheir couple who sounded like they wanted the child more and had been intending to raise a child for longer than the bio parents. A single impoverished bio mother with little to offer who had no idea who the father was because she was raped or something would stand little chance against people who were actually intending to become parents for 10 years. Anyway it would be an administrative nightmare for the state. It appears to be more efficient to just obligate people to take care of the young they create and then if they do a really bad job of it, remove the child from their custody, or if the parent just abandons the child look for others to raise the child for them. In any event, that process of placing a child with others when the parents fail the child does make a lot of sense. It puts responsibility with the people that caused the child to exist regardless of their desire or intentions in the matter and then protects the child by removing them from their parents care in the event of abuse or abandonment. The child does have that automatic right to expect care from their bio parent. If not them then who really.
My point is only that non-bio parents should have a higher level of scrutiny because they are not the childs actual parents and that transfer has to be examined to make sure that it was ethical and necessary and that nobody exchanged goods or services or money in fact even giving a child as a gift treats them as property so we should be looking very carefully at who the bio parents are and what reasons they have for not raising their child and look at whether or not the people who want to raise the child actually contracted for the creation of a child and contracted for custody because that is the height of objectification and is a human rights abuse. I’m not tripping off of people that are willing to take on children who have been abandoned I’m tripping off people that go out looking for abandoned kids who pay third party finder fees to shop for orphans or pay people to reproduce specifically so that they can take and keep their child and play the roll of parent. They make out like the child was so wanted by them but in order to be had by them had to be unwanted by their bio parent.
Granted in donor situations you have bio parents who supposedly agreed to not raise their offspring in exchange for something in return typically. Would it be better to be raised by these people who did not want them in the first place rather than by the people who really wanted them so bad they paid to have a child made and then abandoned? Well that’s tricky and they like it that way. The answer is that we need to hold all people accountable for their own offspring and apply the same requirements to relinquishing control of their offspring when they can’t or don’t want to raise them simply so that all offspring are equally situated with regard to their legal position as a member of their own biological families. Evey child should have a right to expect to be supported and cared for by their bio parents and have a right to expect them to follow certain rules for court approved adoption if they are not going to raise them. Part of court approved adoption is that the bio parent is not suppose to be profiting or being reimbursed for creating or giving up parental authority. Surrogacy and Gestational carrier agreements and Donor laws ignore that crucial ethical quagmire. What do you do when you find that someone has privately contracted to give their offspring to someone else for step parent adoption or something? You don’t let the people who wanted to adopt the child adopt the child. You don’t let people get away with trafficking human beings because your too lazy to think about alternatives. The parent either has to take care of their own child if they are not proven dangerous or if they want to consider the whole contract abuse and put the kid in foster care until good people who have not orchestrated a trafficking deal can be found to raise the child then so be it. There are ethical ways of giving people parental control over other people’s offspring and I think as a society we owe it to minors to challenge ourselves and our lawmakers to think critically about ethics and human rights and fairness when their families fall apart and their parents are not going to be raising them. We owe it to them not to place them in the hands of people that orchestrated their abandoment even paid for it. We owe it to them to find good people to raise them people who would never dream of hiring someone to make and abandon a child just so they could keep and raise that child as their own. We owe it to minors to protect their identities and record their existence accurately and not let people keep information that pertains to them under lock and key. We owe it to minors to make sure they have equal protection under the law.
The ethics of obtaining parental control over other people’s offspring is of paramount importance. We are too quick to skip to the love and care giving aspect of daily life. How did you get this kid? What was your roll in separating them from their bio family? Why was this exchange not court approved? Etc.
Please don’t think I think bio parents are better at raising kids, they just are the only ones with that automatic obligation and as such have to have their motives for relinquishing scrutinized and its hard to do that with laws that exempt them when they reproduce as “donors”. The result is a legally sanctioned second class of citizen with half the rights of peers whose fathers and mothers were not donors. They are not treated as human with human rights, they are donor offspring with donor offspring rights.
Kevin do you dig now that its about the ethics of obtaining another person’s child to raise not about how much better one would be at raising the kid than the other? There is a lot more than just a parent lost to a minor who is adopted legally and a an enormous amount more than just a parent lost to people who are quasi marital (stepped on where step parents are named as parents) especially when the stepped on person is also a donor’s child.
Why don’t donor offspring deserve to be named as their bio parent’s offspring when that is what they really are? Why do donors not have to be accountable to and for their offspring like anyone else with offspring? After all not being accountable means that their offspring’s medical records are at best incomplete and at worst falsified naming another person as their bio parent. The government does treat that record as a medical record and the parents as bio parents or they would not do medical research on heritable disease with the information collected on parents named on original birth records. It is a medical record, it is a vital record and it is accessible by every member of the bio parent’s family without the bio parents permission so long as they are named on the certificate and the relative requesting a copy can prove a connection to them by producing a birth record of their own. You can’t make families talk and tell one another about the existence of a brother or cousin but family members can take it upon themselves to seek out information for themselves and collect all the marriage certificates on their father for instance and then all the birth records where he is named as father to obtain the identity of a secret sibling from a marriage never discussed. People have the right to know who their family members are so they can avoid dating them or so they can share medical information or Christmas cards or whatever. People don’t have that ability when their parents are not named on their birth records or when their birth records are not accessible to them. Their family cannot find them either.
Privacy needs to be better defined in law. You should not have the right to control information that pertains to anyone other than yourself. If I have a child that child is someone else’s cousin and someone else’s niece and that information does not belong to me. Information on where I got my hair cut can be private the existence of a relative impacts other people than just me.
P.S. Elizabeth
I did not know that you knew me. Especially to call me a way left family reuniter that is so special. Thank you. I think that describes me very well. I have a middle ground opinion not for political correctness sake but because I want everyone to be treated fairly.
Marilyn, I learned so much for what you write
I would love to meet you in person sometime. I’m glad my “label “worked okay for you. That was probably risky of being to say that 
What Elizabeth said!
Picked up by Huffington Post:
Adam Korson On ‘Seed’ And Playing A Sperm Donor Dad
I wonder what cases of “random people” asking for money he is referring to?
The only cases of “random people” (that I can think of) needing financial support would be the children of the biological father…..(rather than the taxpayers paying the bill)…*THEY* are NOT “random people”.
I have met a whole lot of folks who are looking for their relatives and not one of them ever thought for a second about the financial support they should have been entitled to or the inheritance they should have been entitled to. Money is not the last thing on their minds – its not on their minds at all
I’m no psycho analyst but I think people just want it to be OK to be who they really are. I found my mom’s family; her father died 2 wks before her birth and his family was kept secret from her and at almost 70 I discovered she had a sister and cousins and all kinds of nieces and nephews grand nieces and nephews. Her dad had left his wife and 5 year old child in Canada, never divorced but met my grandmother got her pregnant and married her died before my mom was born. Her sister died right before I found the family and so did her cousins. Her nieces and her cousin’s kids welcomed her with open arms and introduced her to friends and family as their aunt. She said “I finally belong to somebody”. The first time I heard my cousin introduce me as her cousin I beamed inside because I was being acknowledged for who I truly was, her cousin. She was not embarrassed of me because of what our grandfather did to her grandmother – dirty dog. Not feeling like your existence is a source of shame to your relatives is kind of a big deal.
People go either way with it they’ll either say that they don’t care about people that don’t care about them or they’ll feel that by staying in hiding they are being a good child and will some day be rewarded for the respect they showed their parent by not wanting to intrude and destroy their lives by telling the family they exist. Either way the person has to go around feeling like their family would not want them around.
In the movie Anonymous Us there was that hot guy from England whose dad had like 600 kids and he was saying most people would want to know if they were working in the same factory with their brother or sister. Most people think that is significant information. Well sure because it impacts them, if they are someone’s brother of course that is their information and it is offensive that they would not be allowed to know that about themselves.
I’d like to see some clarity in our laws about privacy. Something simple, like, people don’t have the right to control information that pertains to people other than themselves. If information involves more than one person it is not the exclusive realm of only one of them to control and keep private.
“In the movie Anonymous Us…”
Anonymous Father’s Day
“…that hot guy from England …”
Barry Steven’s “Bio-Dad“
Barry was his name. The fact that he could find every last one of his siblings and the law would not legally recognize them as his siblings ticks me off. See because my grandfather was named on the birth certificates of both his children, I am legally his grandchild and as such was entitled to dig around and get copies of all his records and all his kids records and all his grand kids records.
People like to say that nobody has a right to know who their parents or relatives are but that is horse manure. Your family members can lie and try to conceal information about the existence of children they had but as long as the truth gets recorded on the birth records of all the people in the family, the entire family is able to get copies of birth marriage and death records on their relatives without their relatives permission just by virtue of who they are in relationship to the people they are looking for. If you want to know who your relatives are and you are willing to dig a little you can figure it out by getting copies of vital records but the truth has to be recorded for that to work. It does not work for a guy like Barry and his 600 siblings who have the wrong men named as father on their birth records. Think of all their cousins, aunts and uncles who should have the right to know about their brother’s 600 kids. If I was Aunt to 600 kids I’d be pissed that information was kept from me.
P.S. I’m super flattered K and E family finding homies.
I think the only way to “protect” a “donor” from financial responsibility – in most jurisdictions (along with emotional responsibility) is to have this procedure done through a licensed fertility specialist/clinic. But since they don’t (can’t) screen recipients for psychological or financial ability (like most laws require in adoption) perhaps requiring the fertility clinic to pick up the financial support of the offspring, if in need (instead of the taxpayers) would be something to consider. Gawd, how many different ways can we say “don’t do it”?
He did NOT and can NOT find every last one…that was part of his point.
K
Whoops, must have Alana on the brain
and
yeah that guy from England cutie.
When I said he could find them I should have clarified that I knew he had not found every last one of them but theoretically he could find them all and have the dna tests to prove it and the law would still regard them as total strangers if say one of them wanted to sponser a sibling for U.S. citizenship or something. Or if one of them wanted to take in a gravely ill sibling the law would not regard them as siblings for the sake of being a relative dependent on a tax return or taking time off for family leave or to attend the funeral.
This fact is a big deal to one donors offspring I helped find her brother who is handicapped and if some day she decides to bring him to live with her after his adoptive parents pass on in 20 years or whatever the law will treat her as a total stranger even though hes her full on brother. She’s double whammied because they are donor sibs and her brother was put up for adoption
I met him, very nice guy with a great accent…he does take after his father for certain
“…This fact is a big deal to one donors offspring I helped find her brother who is handicapped”
I met her too, one of the many reasons why you are our hero.
Karen – I love the idea of making fertility clinics financially responsible if things go wrong!
Going back to what Kevin said:
“I think there’s an enormous opportunity to discuss who should be allowed to be a parent.”
I think the main reason we let anybody parent is because the idea of government interference in ordinary reproduction would be so awful and invasive. What I think doesn’t make sense is that when you have assisted reproduction, people besides the parents are involved, Then I think there should be regulation that is at least as strong as regulation for full adoption.
I’m not sure if all good parents would be good parents for all kids. There is some value to having parents who understand things about you because they went through the same thing.
In the end, though, I support the idea that the biological parent isn’t always the best parent and sometimes should lose custody.
I don’t think that means that people won’t want to know their biological parents, though. In general, I think sometimes you just have to accept human emotions, even if they seem unreasonable. In the case of adoption, we already know that many adopted kids will want to know about or meet their biological parents and relatives.
Marilynn, you wrote a lot and I’m sure I won’t address everything in (what will be for me) a brief response.
I think it makes sense that any person have the information about who their biological father and mother are, even if they weren’t raised by those people. Certainly it might be good for medical reasons. There are sensible rules to protect the interests of everyone involved, I would think.
I guess I’m commenting from the point of view of having read the two Supreme Court same-sex marriage cases, where the anti-gay marriage supporters are arguing that biology is too weak a link between parent and child, and that marriage is required to create a bond and/or coerce child care, and therefore irrelevant to same-sex couples. Before now, I’ve ignored the facts in plain view, and chose to believe that biological parents automatically want and love their offspring.
While it makes me uncomfortable thinking that biological parents are really that naturally detached from their offspring, if it’s true, the implications are far-reaching. Do we really want children being raised by people who know how to have unprotected sex, but who don’t want to be a parent? It doesn’t seem like a formula for a happy childhood to impose an unwanted child on uninterested parents. No one would dream of imposing an adopted child on someone who didn’t want a child.
Your observation that what potential adoptive parents go through to get a child, compared to zero standards for biological parents, is instructive. It appears that it’s not nearly enough to WANT to raise a child, but it is evidently utterly enough to know how to create one. Do we as a society have it backwards? Should more scrutiny be imposed on a couple’s biological babies than on a couple’s non-biological babies?
NOM’s argument that marriage is necessary for child care, because biological connections are so weak doesn’t make a lot of sense to me (family law requires any identified biological parent to care for his or her offspring, lacking a suitable adult substitute, regardless of marital status; why do states require adoptive parents to be married, in order to adopt? Adoptive parents WANT to raise a child; they don’t have to be coerced into it, and they’re not biologically related). But it has struck a chord with me on a personal level that biological parents don’t necessarily want or love their children; that’s a Hollywood movie-type belief.
Knowing what we know now, about biology and procreation, I could envision a public service campaign to encourage more procreative couples to consider birth control and abortion, in order to avoid being forced to raise unwanted children.
@Karen – it’s interesting that the actor sees it as completely crazy to think that someone would go up to their donor parent.
Diane wrote:
“@Karen – it’s interesting that the actor sees it as completely crazy to think that someone would go up to their donor parent.”
I don’t think it’s about reaching out or needing to know their father that he thinks is “crazy” but rather the laws governing the practice….or maybe even the practice itself???
kevin writes:
“I could envision a public service campaign to encourage more procreative couples to consider birth control and abortion, in order to avoid being forced to raise unwanted children.”
And who exactly could you envision financing/orchestrating that campaign? Planned Parenthood perhaps? I think they are already doing that.
@Kevin – about adoptive parents and marriage. I support the requirement and here’s my take on it.
Children benefit from parents who stay together. Staying together is not all fun and games. Commitment is what keeps people together when times are hard. Being married shows that you have that level of commitment to each other, not just the child.
On top of that, raising children takes time and energy and often puts a stress on the parents’ relationship to each other. You want to be sure that the parents are planning to stay together anyway, again, because it’s better for the kid.
…and the problem with the practice of “donor gametes” is about pre-conception abandonment intention made all the worse without the ability to qualify intended parent(s), as a remedy to a social problem.
Not to mention the exploitation, commodification and debasement of human dignity issues. The list goes on—It’s crazy that this practice is even legal IMHO. It’s a Planned Parenthood dream world!
The Center for Bioethics and Culture is the ONLY group that gives me any sense of HOPE:
Why the CBC?
And why I support the National Organization for Marriage.
Kevin
Stating that the purpose of marriage is so that people will have a reason to take care of their children sounds like malarkey because it is malarkey. There is no logical reason for the opposite gender requirement. It has been amazingly easy to poke holes in there is no conceivable defense which is why State after State after State is changing its laws because when viewed from an equal protection standpoint it is very clearly discriminatory against the adults who want to get married. Children of gay people are at a disadvantage because their financial situations would be improved if their parents were allowed to marry – children of straight people get the benefit of having the added financial support of their step parent, ss death benefits of their step parents, medical insurance and the list goes on. Step parents qualify for family leave time to take care of step kids. There are really a lot of rights that go along with being step family because you are legally recognized kin during the marriage – even though the minor is the legal child of both their mother and father.
Instead of focusing on the real, true, benefits that children gain when their parents marry someone who is not their bio parent, the whole gay marriage movement has chosen to ignore the stuff that really is unfair to everyone. The real benefits and rights lost are like totally overlooked and instead the lame ones of the movement want to talk about how it is not fair that they don’t get to lie and pretend to be parents of their step children the way straight people do. Boo freaking hoo straight people have been sneaking around and lying and getting away with it so now gay people want their turn. The right thing to do is change the law so that nobody has a loophole to lie through. Nobody lets make it fair and just say straight or gay lying on government forms is illegal. Falsifying someone’s medical forms is just illegal whether you happen to sleep with men or women does not turn lies into truth.
I’m blown away that people could be fighting for their own equality with one breath and then right out the other side of their mouths be whining about how unfair it is that they don’t get to stomp all over someone else’s rights. Me first and the gimmie gimmies. Thankfully there are enough people who are logical in this world that it has not cost gays and lesbians another 20 years of unequal treatment.
Someone needs to start arguing based on facts of actual tangible loss of benefits based on the fact that two people are not allowed to get married. Someone stand up and say
“if my partner and I could get married my child would have dental insurance through my spouses work as her step child”
“if my late partner and I had been married I’d be receiving his social security death benefits for the rest of my life and my child would be receiving death benefits until she reaches 18 because as his step child she was his relative dependent.”
“My partner’s child got double pneumonia and was out of school for two months last year. It cost us a fortune in home care. If I had been married to him I could have qualified for family leave act time off to care for a sick step child”.
The list goes on and on and on – yet the same lamoid argument about gay people’s kids deserving married parents and having the name of their parent’s same sex spouse on their birth record is just such drivel. Trifling drivel. There are real harms by not allowing gay people to get married but not getting to abuse the human rights of donor offspring is not one of them!
Dang it.