Who did I come from? The children of donor dads grow up
by Elizabeth Marquardt
A revealing new study shows that, for donor offspring at least, being wanted isn’t everything.
Experts estimate that there could be around one million young people alive in the world today as a result of sperm donation. How are they doing? Elizabeth Marquardt of the Institute for American Values and colleagues have done a unique study based on a large, representative US survey and, in a report published today, tell us that the kids, many of them, are not okay. In this interview with MercatorNet during a recent conference hosted by the Social Trends Institute in Barcelona, she talks about some of her findings.
MercatorNet: Reproductive technologies raise the question, as you have put it, of whether the child is a “gift or commodity” for us now. Historically, was “gift” the predominant way of looking at the child?
Elizabeth Marquardt: In working on my paper it struck me that the religious traditions of the world are very powerful on the idea of the child as a gift but in part because it is an idea that we humans have not always resonated completely with. I think there is a strong human impulse to want to control life and predict what will happen next and to will away suffering and uncertainty, and so the religious injunction that the child is a gift is something of a corrective to the impulse to control life, long before reproductive technology was available.
At the same time it is clear that the experience of a child as a gift for a woman or a couple remains a strong element of becoming a parent, and so I believe that religious traditions today can still offer insights into this experience.
On the other hand I think it’s too easy to say that we only came to treat the child as a commodity in the wake of reproductive technology. The human race has probably long had a tendency to see children not as means in themselves but as means to our ends — as labourers, or as insurance in our old age or for many other purposes. Reproductive technologies have given us a new and more chilling way of seeing the child as commodity.
But it came to me while I was writing that even before in vitro fertilisation and the like, abortion and contraception already treated the child as a commodity, although I don’t come at this as someone who’s thought that way before. I don’t address abortion and contraception in my paper but I know others have.
MercatorNet: Your research is specifically about the grown children of sperm donors. What is new about your study?
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