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!

Although (as you know) I agree with you about many donor conception issues, I do have a criticism of “My Daddy’s Name is Donor.”

As I understand it, when subjects were surveyed, the questions within each section were asked in random order, but the sections themselves were always asked in the same order.

So the questions reported on page 102 of MDNID — about mental health problems, alcohol or substance abuse, and trouble with the law — were always asked AFTER the questions in the earlier sections.

With all due respect, I’d argue this is a design flaw in the survey, because it means that by the time respondents answer those three questions, respondents who were raised by two bio-parents have experienced a very different survey than respondents who were either donor-conceived or adopted.

Specifically, the donor-conceived were asked a lot of questions which could direct them to focus particularly on their insecurities about their backgrounds.

First, in the case of those DC respondents whose parents weren’t open with them, they were reminded that their parents kept their origins secret from them (p 86).

Then they were asked questions like:

“The circumstances of my conception bother me.”

“It bothers me that money was exchanged in order to conceive me.”

“It hurts when I hear other people talk about their genealogical background.”

“When I see friends with their biological fathers and mothers, it makes me feel sad.”

They were asked if they felt “special” or “curious” about their background, but also terms like “freak of nature,” “angry,” “lab experiment” and “abandoned.”

It is only AFTER all those questions that people are asked to consider mental health, substance abuse and trouble with the law.

That means that the folks who are DC have just been through what can reasonably be described as an emotionally harrowing series of questions which get at some huge existential questions about their own lives; questions that, in any reasonable person, could provide great anxiety.

And the folks who have bio-parents have taken an entirely different survey, one that is shorter, less emotional, and has far less potential to feel intense or provoke anxiety.

I’d expect that if you took any group of people, asked half of them a series of harrowing, anxiety-producing questions about their backgrounds, and then asked both halves if they’d had trouble with the law, mental health or substance abuse, you’d get elevated reports of trouble from the group that had been through the extended questioning. Even if both groups were alike in all other ways.

When you look at the differences between donor-conceived people whose parents were always open with them, and those raised by bio-parents (pg 112), there’s barely any difference between DC respondents and bio-parented respondents on mental health problems. The other difference are relatively small — 82% of DC and 89% of bio-parented didn’t report substance abuse problems, and 80% of DC and 89% of bio-parented didn’t report any troubles with the law.

How much of that difference represents a genuine difference between the two groups, and how much represents the effect of extremely different questions that the two groups had been asked leading up to those three questions? I don’t think there’s any way to know.

If there’s another study like this, I’d strongly suggest that all the questions that are asked of DC respondents but not of bio-parented respondents should be asked after other questions are completed. To do otherwise risks biasing the responses.

* * *

Some folks might respond that it doesn’t matter, because what’s being asked about is objective; surely people will answer objective questions the same way, regardless of the context around the questions. But that’s definitely not true. For example, we know from medical studies of abortion that the answer to the question “have you had an abortion”? is highly dependent on context; someone worried that they have a medical problem is much more likely to honestly report their reproductive history than another person would be.

Especially when dealing with issues that people may be ashamed of — such as arrests, mental health issues, and a history of substance abuse — it’s not safe to assume that people will always recall the objective truth regardless of context.

My response:

Hi Barry,

Yes, I remember tussling with you over this soon after the study was released.

It is true that there were some questions we only asked of donor conceived persons, because the questions were so specific to donor conception that they would be nonsensical to anyone else (such as “At age 15 what feelings best describe how you felt about being a donor conceived person?” or “Which words or terms best describe what the phrase “sperm donor” means to you?”)

But there were plenty of what you might consider emotionally charged questions we asked of all three groups – the donor conceived, the adopted, and those raised by biological parents. Questions such as “Growing up, I sometimes felt like an outsider in my own home,” or “I worry that my mother may have lied to me about important matters when I was growing up” and even some that may sound pretty bizarre to most people raised by biological parents,
such as “I have feared having sexual relations unknowingly with someone I am related to.” So all three groups had confronted some pretty intimate and perhaps troubling questions before being asked those more straightforward questions about being prescribed medication for depression or other mental health problems, struggling with substance abuse, or having been in trouble with the law before age 25.

You may have a point that having already bathed in that emotional soup of the earlier questions their responses to the fairly objective mental health/substance abuse/delinquency questions could have been affected, but I’m not sure what can be done about that. We could have asked the mental health/substance abuse/delinquency questions earlier in the survey but then you could argue that recalling those troubling episodes in their lives might shape how they responded to the other, more subjective, questions if they came later.

With a background in survey research yourself, you are familiar with the challenge of designing surveys. Any survey has its limitations and its design can be critiqued. I hear your critique. I still think we produced something useful and there is much more to be done.

At the present time, in the United States, if you apply to adopt and state that you plan to lie to your children about their origins for their entire lives, you will be told to learn more about adoption and the best interests of adopted children. Indeed, from my experience of American social workers, most would consider your intention to lie to your children about their origins a form of child abuse.

And yet, the infertility industry considers this a perfectly reasonable stance for parents using donor gametes. I can only conclude that infertility specialists, as a rule, are not friends with psychologists. Whether this is a by-product of their busy lives or perhaps an intentional rejection of the social sciences is difficult to say. However, the result of this highly unfortunate miscommunication between people who understand cell structures and people who understand human beings is that donor-conceived people are back where adoptees were fifty years ago – confused, traumatized and angry. And rightly so: confusion, trauma, and anger are appropriate psychological responses to being lied to by those closest to you.

This is one of the most articulate portrayals I have read of this current contradiction, including, as you so well put it, the only apparent conclusion one can reach that perhaps “infertility specialists, as a rule, are not friends with psychologists.”

For one who is so well-spoken, I was disappointed by your relative inarticulateness in trying to take on –something, I cannot exactly tell what — that you did not like in the piece I wrote and/or the reports it was based upon. You point out that most donor conceived people are not told the truth about their status and today most adopted people are, and then say I should have, in our study reported in My Daddy’s Name is Donor, compared “apples to apples,” that “you cannot compare the psychological outcome of a 20-something donor-conceived adult who was told about DI two days after her father died to an adoptee who has known his identity from birth.”

You then say the data tables at the back of the report are “inscrutable,” but it doesn’t seem to me that you scrutinized them very carefully. For one thing, we make clear that for the purposes of this report we only analyzed the 485 donor conceived persons in our sample who knew they were donor conceived (and not the additional ones who thought they might be). Table 4 on page 112, whcih you seem to refer to without giving a page number or table number, makes clear that a surprising 304 donor conceived adults in our sample said their parents had “always been open” with them about their conception. The same table makes clear that those whose parents tried to keep it a secret in general have far worse outcomes than those whose parents were open with them. But it’s also clear, from the same table, that even those whose parents were open with them had elevated risks of negative outcomes compared to those who were adopted or raised by their biological parents.

You say we “did no regression analysis to examine the effect that late discovery might have had on participants’ feelings about donor conception.” We did all kinds of analyses of this data set and reported them in this 134 page report with marginal frequencies and all tables available at the end. There is tons more work we could continue to do with the same data set. That’s a great idea to look specifically at those 52 donor conceived adults whose parents told them the truth at age 12 or older, and/or the 120 whose parents tried (and apparently failed) to keep it a secret. Would you like to write that paper with me?

I am sorry that you don’t like my organization or the money that was used to pay for this study, as you suggest in your piece. But I cannot see any evidence, from you, to support your claim that this study is “rife” with “political bias” that some “peer reviewers” somewhere would have rooted out but apparently you cannot. And you have certainly offered no evidence that this study represents “poorly executed social science.”

Would you like to try again?

This is a transcript of the talk the mother has with her daughter the day before they are going to meet the dad/sperm donor for the first time.

Mom: I wanna talk to you about going to meet Ben in Boston. Do you think that something might happen with mommy and Ben? Because he’s marrying another lady, who’s a very nice lady and he loves her a lot.  

Daughter: So he’s gonna break up with you?

Mom: He’s not with me silly. Remember?

Daughter: So you already broke up?

Mom: Ok sweetie, so is he in our lives? 

Daughter: No.

Mom: So how could we break up if he’s not in our lives?

Daughter: ‘Cause you’re married.

Mom: We’re not married. Why would you think that we would be married?

Daughter: Because you got the sperm!

Mom: How did mommy get the sperm?

Daughter: Google.

Mom: Google, that’s good. 

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…

After they published their critique, I responded in this piece at BioNews and on this blog to what I felt were unfair statements by them. And while I believe we continue to have some differences of opinion, I respect their work and expertise and feel that certainly if there is going to be a way forward on regulation in the US that Wendy Kramer is and will be a leader of that movement here.

Anonymous Sperm Donor, whoever you are, you’ll go further and achieve more in this debate if you’ll find better ways to express your concerns. Sometimes when I’ve overstepped the line of civility I’ve recognized it and apologized. Maybe you’d like to consider a better way to talk about Wendy Kramer and the DSR and offer her an apology too (and by the way, Eric Blyth really is a professor…why on earth give  him grief for saying so?)

It’s interesting that a euphemism like “sperm donor”—a word meant to evoke positive feelings by making men who sell their sperm sound like philanthropists—is also used as a slur to describe dads that shirk their responsibilities.

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.