I have so many thoughts but one in particular I wanted to share, right now, was in reaction to Stephanie Blessing when she said that with anonymous conception you “don’t know where half your family is.”

That phrase leapt out at me. I have often heard donor conceived persons speak of the loss of not knowing who their father is, or not know who half of their family is. But Stephanie’s use of the word “where” struck me especially deeply. It made me think of the aftermath of wars and natural disasters when the Red Cross and international aid organizations arrive to help. I’m no disaster relief expert but my understanding is that after attending to the most subsistence level needs of the survivors — food, clean water, shelter, medical care — one of the immediate next steps is to help survivors reunite with their families. When a wave has swept away your town or rebels have set fire to your village and you find that, somehow, you are among the living, it appears as a human being one of your very next questions is… Where is my father? Where is my mother? Where is my husband, my wife, my sister, my brother, my child? Where is my family?

We are embodied social beings. Our bodies come from and connect to one another. We cannot feel soothed and settled until we know where our families are.

Are you in the NYC area? Go see it on January 29th at the Soho Digital Art Gallery. Screening times and information here. More screenings to follow at the same location that week, and more to come around the country.

You can also order the DVD.

Congratulations, Jennifer!

Before I got in the game, made a change, and got rich./ I didn’t think hard about using the word b*tch./ I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it./ Now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it.

No man will degrade her, or call her name. I’m so focused on your future, the degradation has passed./ I wish you wealth, health and insight. Forever young you may pass.

[The child] was born in July 2009 to unmarried parents who had been living together for about four years. Breit’s name was on the birth certificate, of course. Before the baby arrived, the couple signed a custody and visitation agreement in case they someday split.

After the baby was born, they even signed an acknowledgment of paternity proclaiming Breit to be the father. Plenty of documentation to hit him up for child support, if that had been in the cards.

It wasn’t.

And it wasn’t enough to let him see his daughter once the mother decided she wanted to raise the child alone.

The couple separated when Lily was about 4 months old. Breit said they had an amicable arrangement that lasted for months, allowing him regular visits with his daughter. But in August 2010, the mother decided she wanted Breit out of their lives.

…Breit headed to court, asking for visitation, but lawyers for the baby’s mother dusted off a Virginia law that said that donors of sperm have no rights unless they’re married to the mother. A judge ruled that Breit was nothing but a sperm donor…

Of course, the child has a third biological parent as well, the man the mothers and the court refers to as the sperm donor. A story by Susan Donaldson James at ABC News:

Tina’s biological daughter turned 8 this week, but she has not seen the girl since Dec. 22, 2008, because of a custody fight with her former lesbian partner. The partner is unrelated to the child, but gave birth to her.

“I thought I’d have her back on her birthday,” said Tina, a law enforcement officer, whose name was never on the birth certificate and who has been denied parenting rights under Florida state law.

For 11 years, the Brevard County couple forged a committed relationship, living together, sharing their finances and raising a daughter. Tina’s egg was fertilized with donor sperm and implanted in her partner’s womb.

But when their romance fell apart when the child was 2, the Florida courts had to decide, who is the legal parent, the biological mother or the birth mother who carried the child for nine months in her womb?

A trial court summarily sided with Tina’s ex-partner, citing Florida statute.  “The judge said, ‘It breaks my heart, but this is the law,’” according to the birth mother’s lawyer, Robert J. Wheelock of Orlando.

But on Dec. 23, a state appeals court rejected the law as antiquated and recognized both women as legal parents.

Ling covers much statistical and economic common ground that continues to startle. She begins with depressing statistics like “African-American men make up 6% of the total American population but 1/3 of the incarcerated.”  She reminded me of the Pew Charitable Trust funded report “1 in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008.”

“Three decades of growth in America’s prison population has quietly nudged the nation across a sobering threshold: for the first time, more than one in every 100 adults is now confined in an American jail or prison. According to figures gathered and analyzed by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project, the number of people behind bars in the United States continued to climb in 2007, saddling cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill afford and failing to have a clear impact either on recidivism or overall crime.

For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling. While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine. Gender adds another dimension to the picture. Men still are roughly 10 times more likely to be in jail or prison, but the female population is burgeoning at a far brisker pace. For black women in their mid- to late-30s, the incarceration rate also has hit the 1-in-100 mark. Growing older, meanwhile, continues to have a dramatic chilling effect on criminal behavior. While one in every 53 people in their 20s is behind bars, the rate for those over 55 falls to one in 837.”

Each man faced difficulties economically growing up, which in part spurred their involvement in crime. But prison has devastating effects on their hope of changing their economic outlook legally after prison as well.  She follows each man as they try to figure out how to get a job when every job application asks if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony.  As Royal’s stepfather says, “Once you’ve done time on the inside, you face a life sentence on the outside…No one will have you.”

Although the stats and the economic roots and impact of prison are humbling and eye-opening, I was struck by how the title “Incarceration Generation” could easily have been changed to “Fathers Matter and Prison is Terrible for Fatherhood.”  Ling spends a good deal of time with Nick’s girlfriend and two young sons who anticipate his release from prison soon.  One of his sons has not yet met him.   Ling asks the girlfriend what she wants when he gets home:

“I want a 2 parent, 2 income household.  If he can’t give me that, then I’m gone.”

But she is worried about male role models.  Every male in her life (dad, brother and boyfriend) is in prison.  What chance do her young sons have?  Nick seems pretty hopeless as well: he has a 9^th grade education, admits he doesn’t know how to use a computer, and with being in and out of prison for the last 8 years, has no job experience.

Royal, on the other hand, is spending his days at the public library taking computer classes and filling out resumes.  His family of origin is supportive, especially his stepfather, Carl, who as an ex-convict started a non-profit organization that supports previous prisoners.  They highlight a program he leads in a Georgia school that offers training to teen dads on parenting skills.  They film him in a full cafeteria of teen boys who are already fathers.  He asks how many of them grew up with their dads.  Two raise their hands.  “Two,” he says, “Boys can make babies, but it takes a man to raise one.  Who wants to be a man?”

Overall, the negative impact of incarceration on the individual, the family, and the community as a whole is staggering, and Ling covers just a part of Georgia and she stops at description.  As I turned off the television, I realized again that description only goes so far and that it’s up to us to highlight the prescriptions that are working and to start thinking and trying more.

…A mother in Vancouver (her name is not appearing here to protect her toddler’s privacy), complained that her ex-husband, who video chats three times a week with their 23-month-old daughter, seemed to believe that such interactions were an adequate form of being a parent. It has “given him an excuse to be an absent father.”

If we fathers want children who are expert marksmen when they are 30, we should model for them good hunting habits now.  If we want them to grow to be excellent athletes, we should hit the gym every time the doors open.  And if we want them to be believers when they are adults – committed to a faith community and enjoying all of the incredible gifts that come from it – we need to set the example of being active in a religious community with them now.

True power, as Joseph shows us, is choosing not to do something, even though we may be fully capable and justified in doing it, because it’s not what’s called for at the moment.  When Jesus was arrested the night before his death, he said to the arresting soldiers, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 16:53)  He could have saved himself.  He didn’t “deserve” to die.  He would have been justified in retaliating.  But it wasn’t called for at the moment.  And because Jesus didn’t do what he could have done, he exercised a power so great that it offered salvation to the whole world.  Who knows?  Maybe he learned this from Joseph, who set a similar example as his father years earlier.”

But alas, that evening the married daughter (Elizabeth Taylor) and her husband have all the parents over and announce their joyful news — they’re having a baby. Everyone bursts with surprise and joy, hugging, exclaiming — all except for the Spencer Tracy character who sits shell-shocked. “Congratulations, Grandpa!” someone says as they clap him on the back. “Grandpa?!” Spencer Tracy says to himself. “Grandpa??!!” The next day he hits the gym, only to wake the following morning with a pulled back and a wife already in high gear preparing for the great day still months away.

This movie, sixty years old, struck me as incredibly contemporary. From the new Grandpa’s reactions to aging, to his stumbling attempt to reassure his son-in-law that the new baby will not replace him as top dog in his young wife’s heart (well, not for long anyway, well, not much) — echoing themes explored in our recent report, “When Baby Makes Three” — to the Elizabeth Taylor character happily telling her increasingly alarmed father that (paraphrasing here) her doctor has “new ideas, that when a woman is in labor she should really feel the labor, and Dr So-and-so thinks that when the baby is born the mother and the baby should not be separated, not ever, and when Dr So-and-so was practising medicine in Polynesia, why, the mothers there would wear their babies on their backs and when they were hungry, well, they would just flip them around, feed them, and then flip them onto their backs again…,” foreshadowing all the debates about natural childbirth, attachment parenting, baby-wearing, and nursing that got going approximately two decades after this movie appeared and still rage today.

Maybe it’s true that there is nothing new under the sun. We just re-tell ourselves the same stories for our own time, but the story stays the same.

Sperm donation is another issue that was avoided by filmmakers till now. In Onir’s episodic film, I Am, one of the segments has Purab Kohli playing a young boy who makes a living as a sperm donor. The story shows how a single woman played by Nandita Das approaches the donor.