Archives: My Daddy’s Name is Donor

I’d like to start off by thanking Elizabeth for inviting me to be a guest blogger. For those who don’t know me (most of you) my name is Rickard Newman, I’m a recent transplant to New York and I’m engaged to Alana S. Since I met Alana I went from knowing nothing about the fertility industry to being knee-deep in near constant immersion in the topic. A year ago I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a fertility “industry”. Today I’m making my own documentary about it. Thank you for letting me share some of my thoughts with you.

Yesterday I watched the movie “Rise of the Planet of the Apes”. After being three feet away from a black back gorilla in Uganda earlier this year I now have to watch everything with big apes – real or computer animated, doesn’t matter. Unexpectedly I found a story that reminded me of something familiar, perhaps even with a lesson to be learned. Let me give you an introduction to the first 30 minutes of the movie.

A young genius scientist comes up with what he believes is the cure for Alzheimer’s. He tests his medicine on chimps and one of them shows outstanding growth of intelligence due to the healing effects the medicine has on its brain. But one day the chimp goes on a rampage for no obvious reason and security at the laboratory shoots it to death. The incident scares off investors of the project and the scientist is told to put all his apes to sleep. But he finds out that the reason the female chimp became so aggressive was because she tried to protect her newborn. The scientist takes the baby chimp home and raises it as his own child. He very quickly understands that the little one is extraordinarily intelligent and that it has genetically inherited this from his mother.

For the coming years the chimp, Caesar, is raised in the most loving home, with a lot of compassion and understanding – kind of the perfect home environment it seems. But as the chimp grows older he feels that he doesn’t fit in. He is a very troubled youngster and one day he confronts the scientist, through sign language, and asks him where he comes from. “Who is Caesar?” he signs. The scientist first says “I am your father”, but sensing Caesar’s dissatisfaction with the answer, takes him to his lab and shows him the laboratory to tell him about his mother. The monkey is perplexed by hearing about his conception story and is left with a lot of questions, an emptiness, a sense of not belonging that eventually turns into anger. The scientist “dad” is also troubled but insists that “he belongs with me, with us”. But it is too late. New technology with honorable intentions, and an upbringing full of love has nevertheless created an angry activist, a revolutionary that seeks justice and vengeance for having been stripped of family, freedom and dignity…

There is no apparent way to reach them and make them fix it, but the group “Free Sperm Donations Worldwide- Private Sperm Donor Arrangements” has set up a Facebook page in which they have tried to take aim at me, but they’re so dim they can’t even figure out how to do it.

First, the quote they attribute to me was actually in a piece by lesbian mom Mary Bowers in the Windy City Times, which I linked to in the blog post they happened to see but apparently not read or understand.

Second, they claim that I am a supporter of The Child Listener group, when actually I am not a supporter of that group and have never suggested otherwise.

And finally they reprint Vince Londini’s bizarre BioNews piece critiquing our report, My Daddy’s Name is Donor. As I posted at the Family Scholars blog, earlier, in response to his piece:

The author, Vince Londini, seems not to have read, or at least, not to have read with any real attention, the section in our report called “Is Donor Conception ‘Just Like’ Adoption?” But you can read it, if you like, on pages 71-76, here.