The controversial technique known as “three-parent IVF” came a step closer yesterday after the Department of Health asked the fertility regulator to conduct a public consultation into its acceptability.

For more, see One Parent or Five.

A FamilyScholars reader sends me two recent examples in the news, apparently spurred by yet another ridiculous new “family building” website:

…In comes co-parenting.  It’s a concept where unmarried adults who decide that marriage isn’t for them, or whose biological clock is winding down, decide they want to have a child, married or not.   Two mature adults can decide that they want to have a child, become loving parents, and never even live together.  …A start-up company has actually moved to capitalize on this concept.  Modamily, a New York based firm, has developed a social network for potential parents to find a mate without the pressure of relationships or marriage.  The site reminds me of Match.com, but with a completely different focus. You can even choose which method of conception you are open to (natural or artificial).

…Simply put, co-parenting is the practice of raising a child together without all the messy romantic stuff. Two adults, both hankering to be parents, join forces to have and raise a baby. But they don’t get married. And they don’t love each other, at least not like that. According to Modamily, a website for people looking to create co-parenting arrangements, co-parenting is, “the shared raising of a child between two loving, committed, and financially secure adults.” Modamily claims that the set-up helps to solve the problem of quickie-clock-ticker marriages and resulting divorces.

If you want to learn more about Modamily google them yourself.

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!

Kudos to the UK-based BioNews for providing two separate reviews today of a new book, Precious Babies, on fertility technologies, with one of them by a donor conceived person, Rachel Pepa.

As an informal guide to having children after fertility problems, Precious Babies has much to recommend it. There is, however, an omission which, as a donor conceived (DC) person, I found particularly troublesome – the book is entirely devoid of DC voices.

Quotes from parents and ‘experts’ are scattered throughout but the words of DC people are nowhere to be found. This lack of representation is even reflected in the title, with its emphasis squarely on babies.

Babies cannot speak. They rely on their parents to make decisions for them. However, early infancy is only a fraction of our lives. Babies will grow to become adults with their own independent thoughts and feelings about the method of their conception.

Many DC people are fed up of forever being seen as children; it is patronising and disempowering. The author shows a belated willingness to include the viewpoints of people conceived by assisted conception – towards the end of the book there are interviews with seven young people conceived via IVF – but this only makes the lack of dialogue with DC people all the more apparent.

The section of Precious Babies that concerns DC people – the chapter on donor families – is irrepressibly upbeat. Donor families are, we are told, closer than most other families. There are DC adults who are angry and find the method of their conception difficult to accept, but that is because they found out about their origins, often by accident, later in life. The author is clearly keen to present a positive picture of life after donor conception but her argument is disingenuous – the academic literature actually suggests a far more complex reality. more

Human dignity, once a cornerstone for bioethics, is increasingly obscured by a contemporary culture of commodification. Myopic fixation on sexuality, fertility, and reproduction reduces the female body to a resource for medical exploitation and reproductive tourism. Procreation is being engulfed by the reproductive imperative and the child of choice. Without neglecting the ongoing emphases on beginning- and end-of-life issues, our task must include attention to prenatal discrimination, the neglect of the girl child, worldwide disparities in women’s healthcare and maternal mortality, and the objectification and exploitation of the female body. Responsible Christian bioethics embraces her dignity as essential to her community and foundational to our common humanity. Join us as we explore important ethical considerations surrounding developments in reproductive practices and global women’s health through the lens of reclaiming dignity in a culture of commodification.

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.

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.