" ... I don't want to be on his family's Christmas cards or to take up an inordinate amount of his time. I just want to know who he is."
"I feel like half a person."
"I wish he simply knew I exist."
If you are a man who gets a woman pregnant after meeting her in a bar, you cannot legally hide your identity from your child, nor walk away from at least minimal responsibility as a father. Yet if you wish anonymously to sell your sperm to a sperm bank, you can remain hidden from your child forever.
No one knows how many persons are conceived each year in the U.S. through anonymous sperm donation. Experts estimate it could be somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 annually, but the numbers are only a guess because the U.S. government does not require reporting or tracking of such pregnancies. For the fertility industry, anonymity is the grease that keeps the machinery going. It allows men (and women) in exchange for money to conceive offspring they never have to meet or acknowledge. It allows parents who wish to purchase sperm or eggs not to have to tell their child the truth about how the child was conceived. And, it has allowed our society to avoid the uncomfortable fact that we are creating two classes of persons, those who have the legal right to know their origins and those who are legally forbidden to learn the same thing.
Now, anonymity is being turned on its head. This week saw the launch of the first-ever online story collective for donor conceived persons and others involved in reproductive technologies. AnonymousUs.org allows persons conceived through sperm donation and similar practices to tell their stories anonymously, without fear of hurting their parents, getting flamed on the Internet, or having to go on record about intimate details of their lives. The brainchild of donor-conceived activist Alana S. (who is also a blogger at the site I edit, FamilyScholars.org), AnonymousUs.org is already filled with powerful stories from donor conceived persons, donors, legal parents, adoptees, and others whose lives have intersected with these technologies, with new stories being added daily.
The stories echo and affirm research that colleagues and I published last year in a report, My Daddy's Name Is Donor. They tell us that bodies matter. That to be deliberately denied knowledge of where you come from is painful and bewildering, at any age. That the human longing to know where you fit in the human family extends also to donor conceived persons. That the fertility industry is rife with contradictions, praising donations and altruism when in fact cold cash fuels each transaction, minimizing the significance of biological connections for children even as the biological connections desired by would-be parents are served, and undermining the importance of ancestry even as other aspects of U.S. and international law and great swaths of culture devoted to genealogical and ethnic studies affirm just the opposite.
The stories at AnonymousUs.org tell us what it's like to grow up in a world where almost no one -- including the parents who raise you -- understands what it's like to be conceived deliberately denied knowledge of or a relationship with one of your biological parents. In a story called "Jaws of Life" one young person asks:
"How could my own parents decide to deliberately separate me from my kin, to grow up half blinded to my own identity? If they couldn't face telling me the truth about what they had done, why did they do it?"
"How could the doctors, sworn to 'first do no harm' create the system where I now face the pain and loss of my own identity and heritage?"
"How could the government, charged with protecting the most vulnerable members of the community, its children, legislate to make it illegal for me to know the identity of my biological father? How can its institutions subject me to the psychological torture of knowing that records exist, but I am forbidden to know the contents?"
"How could my donor help create me, and then abandon me without even leaving his name?"
In a story titled "Missing Pieces," one 19-year-old writes of struggling to protect the feelings of his or her mother and social father, even while coming to terms with painful personal losses. The storyteller writes, "I have to be so careful not to upset anyone about it, when really, it's me that's upset!"
Others, like those quoted at the beginning of this post, plead that all they are looking for are simple realities that most of us take for granted. They want to know who their father is. They want their father to know who they are. They want to feel whole. The titles of their stories say it all: "Alone." "Silence." "Beginnings and Ends." "Filling Out the Story." "I Have a Right to Know."
Anonymity has fueled the practice of deliberately denying children and young people the identity of their fathers. Now, it is allowing those very young people to tell their own stories, in their own way. A new generation of would-be parents, doctors and policy makers would be wise to listen. These young people are voicing a truth at once utterly simple yet breathtakingly profound: Fathers matter. For everyone.
BIO: Elizabeth Marquardt is editor of FamilyScholars.org and coauthor of "My Daddy's Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived Through Sperm Donation."
How many parents look at their child and say “where does she get that from? That’s not from my side! She is just like your aunt Betty! ” More specifically a medical condition may indeed skip generations or direct parentage.
Therefore full disclosure must extend outwards beyond the parent or couple having the child.
Everyone, everywhere must be legally compelled have a genetic test done to determine full lineage ,family tree and genetic and medical traits. To deprive any one of full information on their genetic family connections, inherited traits, medical history, or DNA makeup would be illegal.
"How could the government, charged with protecting the most vulnerable members of the community, its children, legislate to make it illegal for me to know the identity of my biological father?
To the person who wrote this..let people know that you are upset. Talk it out. If it was a family who could not have children otherwise that is one situation. If it is a single woman or two women, that is another. They need to know there are consequences affecting other people, and all to often they just slough them off with "I have enough love for two people" or "I am their mother and their father." A father is irreplacable, as is a mother. Some kids will be fine with any combination of parents, and some won't..which is why it is my personal opinion that it is best to take care of children already in the world if a traditional family makeup is not available or not desired. But have no delusions that there will be no pain if you use donors. And an uncle is an uncle, and a grandfather is a grandather, both very important roles, and a nice guy around every now and then is just that, and a father is a father. Hopefully a good one.
The relationship with our donor is more than we could ask for he has donated for us twice and we are starting for the third baby this year. He has regular days out with the children and they know him as 'dad', he sends Birthday and Christmas cards and we do the same from this end.
Our eldest is nearly six now and has already started asking questions, we have been honest with her that we love each other but we needed a man to make her and her brother, this she accepts and I am sure she will have questions for her Dad as she gets older about his reasons for donating.
The main thing is that both of our children are confident, happy, out-going children that enjoy their lives and we enjoy the joy that they have bought into our lives. Gayfamilyweb encourages using a known sperm donor so that at least the parents can pass on information to the children conceived.
Children are not involved in these decisions - made by adults- and deserve honesty and openess. To know as much as possible about their biological origins. This doesnt have to be threatening to the 'real parent/s - and ideally needs tstarts as early as possible. This is why The Child Listener promotes private arrangements- known and anonymous seem awful options, to her, as far as the child is concerned- as information isnt given until 18 at the earliest. Many of her donors and members have arrangements where the donor meets the child on a yearly basis- or is willing to be contacted when the child wishes. The Child Listener is speaking out for children- and also about the fact that so many men want to donate- but not when the child will not be known to him- or know of him - as a real person, not a number on a catalogue sheet.
When we start to put the rights and needs of children first, we will stop this hiding of information - children deserve access to it. Being a good parent is about putting your child's needs first- not your own.
And for parents who have tried to keep it a secret from their children that they were DC, the results are almost always negative. If you want a healthy relationship with your adult donor conceived child, transparency and full disclosure has proven to be best. Just read the stories. It negatively affects parents just as much as it does children.
Why should adults think they need to know if someone else's sperm was used or if they were adopted. Some things are secret for a reason.
Everyone deserves to know where and who they came from. Children that are adopted are already born. Adopting them aids society. I believe that women who decide to have children from donor sperm are selfish. There are so many children who need adoption that to have a biological child that will never know its father is cruel to the child. The adopted child may long to know who their biological parents are, but can be made to understand the positives associated with their adoption. The child born of DS grows to understand that his/her mother's needs were more important than the trauma he/she endures knowing that mother made a CHOICE never to allow her child to know his/her father. The adopted child grows to understand that yes, they were given up for adoption, but that could have been for their best interest at the time.
Whether adopted or being born of DS, the child/adult longs to connect with his/her ancestry. Children born of DS will never be able to say that they had a father who cared. Adoptees may. I believe that modern medicine has created a generation of DS children who will grow into somewhat dysfunctional depressed adults.
As a donor conceived person and someone who has studied A LOT about what "bonds" men to their children, I must say that NO, in general, we are not getting fathers that care about us as fathers should.
Kids who are raised in houses with stepfathers, and especially mother's boyfriends, are MUCH more likely to face child abuse, sexualization, and negligence.
Least I can do.