Ruth Institute Blog

by I. Glenn Cohen

Harvard Law School, Georgetown Law Journal, Vol. 100, p. 431, 2012, Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 11-32

Abstract:

In the United States, a movement urging legally prohibiting sperm-donor anonymity is rapidly gaining steam. In her forthcoming article in this journal, The New Kinship, and in her wonderful book, Test Tube Families, Naomi Cahn is among this movement’s most passionate and thoughtful supporters. Read more…

By Rachel Pepa [Please note the other resources at the bottom of the article when you click "Keep reading."]

A review of Precious Babies: Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting after Infertility By Kate Brian

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. Read more…

by Damian Adams

Not knowing your biological father is hardly a fit topic for Hollywood slapstick.

Starbuck is a new French-Canadian comedy about what happens when a sperm donor who has fathered 533 children is tracked down by over 100 of them. There is all manner of hilarious slapstick when he anonymously steps into their lives after watching them from afar. According to the Ottawa Citizen, it’s “a sparkling crowd-pleaser”. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

Watch the video.

It’s Father’s Day again — that is, Anonymous Father’s Day, a time to become aware of what the children of donor dads think of their absent, unknown progenitors. Read more…

Alana Stewart, Elizabeth Marquardt, Jennifer Lahl, call your offices! Check out this NPR interview with a representative of the IVF industry and Wendy Kramer, founder of one of the sibling donor registries. Listen to Sean Tipton, director of public affairs for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of reproductive medicine practitioners.

We think everyone is entitled to whatever they want and whatever they agree to, so we think the informed consent process is essential. So everyone needs to understand what the restrictions and rules are or are not, agree to it only if all the parties agree, and don’t have any changes to that agreement unless all the parties agree.

When asked about the fact that children haven’t given their consent to these arrangements, here is his flippant answer:

Well, as far as I know, no one has ever consented to the circumstances of their own conception. I happen to have teenage boys who I suspect currently probably would not consent to me being their father. I don’t know too many teenage boys who would consent to whoever their father is. Read more…

Wonderful! The world is coming to its senses!

FROM THE IONA INSTITUTE BLOG:

In the last year to 18 months the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, pictured) had handed down several excellent decisions. The most famous is the Lautsi judgement in which it ruled that Italy could place crucifixes on the walls of state classrooms.

In another, it ruled that a prohibition on same-sex marriage did not violate the European Convention on Human Rights, and this week it ruled that a ban on the use of donor sperm or eggs does not violate the Convention. Read more…

Such children struggle with a unique anxiety: What if I fall in love with my half-sibling?

by CHRISTOPHER WHITE

Thirty-two invitro fertilized children gather at the Swedish Medical Center in 2003 in Denver. The Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Center gathered the children from each of its 16 years of work in the field. Guests included Payton Kline, 4 1/2 months, the 5,000th invitro fertilized baby born at the center. – Kevin Moloney/Getty Images Read more…

An open letter to the ASRM from Susan Kane, a donor conceived person, in response to Todd Essing’s commentary (Balancing the Rights of Donor Offspring With Those of Donors: But What About Parents? Forbes. June 30/11,  http://tinyurl.com/Essig-2011-06-30) which was a response to the commentary that Naomi Cahn and myself placed in BioNews last week (The Birth of Donor Offspring Rights in the USA?,  http://tinyurl.com/6ce5kny).

Great article. From start to finish.

by Barbara Kay

A Canadian provincial court rules that gamete donors may not hide their identity.

The British Columbia Supreme Court struck down provisions of the Adoption Act and Adoption Regulations on Thursday. They argued that the legislation denies offspring of sperm and egg donors (gamete donors) their Charter rights, which ought to be equal to those of adopted children with regard to knowledge of the identity and medical history of their biological parents. Read more…

by Elizabeth Marquardt 05.19.2011

A big, big day!

See Karen’s post below.

Here is the Vancouver Sun article:

by Damian Adams

Social acceptance of commercial conception ignores all the hidden costs.

It is often said that we cannot put a price on happiness. However, for those who are medically or socially infertile, happiness has a dollar value. For the first time in history adults can use technology to create their babies, with the only restriction being their ability to pay. Read more…

from Yahoo News:
France’s top court refused Wednesday to allow French citizenship for 10-year-old twin girls born to a surrogate mother in the United States, in a ruling that affirmed France’s legal ban on surrogacy.

In a case straddling international legal rights and bioethics, the Court of Cassation ruled a California county went too far by ruling that a French couple are legally the twins’ parents.

Keep reading…

“Surrogacy is also banned outright in most European countries, including Germany, Spain, Finland, Italy, and Switzerland. But the French have articulated the reasons for this rejection most eloquently”: Read more…

Yesterday there was a segment on NPR titled Taming The Twin Trend From Fertility Treatments. They talked about how various forms of ART have caused an increase in the incidence of twin pregnancies:

Twins, once a rarity to marvel over, are now a common part of American culture, thanks in large part to increased use of reproductive technology. Twins are conceived naturally just 2 percent of the time; for those who get pregnant with fertility treatments the rate is more than 40 percent.

They also discussed some of the health risks associated with twins: Read more…

Yet more evidence that Anonymous Sperm and Egg Donation is Over (and not soon enough, if you ask me).

newsweek.com:
Currently, in the United States, you need a license to sell a condo or cut hair in a salon, but not to broker human life. The $3 billion fertility industry goes largely unregulated, offering blank pages to those searching for information where the rest of us are free to access vital statistics of public record. “I’m not a treatment, I’m a person, and those records belong to me,” says Pratten.

On top of the serious risk of inbreeding and the medical and health concerns associated with anonymous sperm and egg donation, we all should be entitled to know our biological heritage for the sake of the effect it has on our self image and identity: Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

The story of Carlina White, the American woman who was abducted as a baby and has only just found her mother and her own identity, has made world headlines. But how many journalists are drawing the obvious moral of the story: kids need to know who they are.

Right now, babies are being concocted in laboratories around the world from the ova and/or sperm of anonymous donors and in some cases carried to birth by surrogate mothers — all to satisfy the desires of adults to have a child. Their successes will be written up with sentimental approval. Read more…

First Ever Story-Collective for People Involved in Reproductive Technologies

“Not all the kids are doing all right,” says Alana S., founder and curator of AnonymousUs.org, “Anonymous Us is a place for all participants in the fertility industry to share their own truths in a way that retains dignity and privacy for our loved ones, while also sharing valuable perspectives and life experiences.” Read more…

Posted by ceridwen

“One of my least favorite things is sperm donor jokes, which are also inexplicably common. The only thing I hate more than sperm donor jokes is when someone calls their absent dad/child’s father a sperm donor… I literally have to walk away in order to not to get incredibly angry at whoever is saying it. ” Read more…

CBC’s Jennifer Lahl and Wesley J. Smith are occasional writers for ToTheSource.org. Recently ToTheSource interviewed Jennifer.

To The Source: How did you become interested in egg donation? What brought this to your attention?

Jennifer Lahl: I became interested in it as a broader issue within the various reproductive technologies. I’ve been writing and speaking on reproductive technology for close to a decade, and through my work, egg donors in the U.S. have found me and contacted me to tell me their stories. These were women whose stories had a negative outcome, and the donors had nowhere to go. Also, being involved in the stem cell debates, I was concerned with the growing demand for human eggs which will be needed to do the research. Read more…

I’ve been telling my audiences that redefining marriage means redefining parenthood. I’ve told people that same sex marriage will create pressure for triple parenting. Now, here is an article in the Boston Globe, explaining what I’m talking about. You can see for yourself that I am not making this up. (By the way, notice the unisex, ungendered, “generic human” look of the child in the Globe’s drawing.)

Now a few family-law scholars have begun to argue that there is nothing special about the number two — if three or four or five adults have a parental relationship with a child, the law should recognize them all as parents. Going beyond two, these scholars argue, would better reflect the dynamics of the modern family, and also protect the children in such families. It would ensure that, even in the event of a split or major disagreement between the adults in question, the children would not be deprived of the affection, care, and financial resources of any of the people they have grown up regarding as their mothers and fathers.

“The law needs to adapt to the reality of children’s lives, and if children are being raised by three parents, the law should not arbitrarily select two of them and say these are the legal parents, this other person is a stranger,” says Nancy Polikoff, a family-law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law.

Gosh, that all sounds so reasonable. But why are we allowing adults to manufacture children in the first place? Is there any thought to the interests of children here? The Globe evidently thinks interviewing a couple of Sex Law Radicals, and giving one short paragraph to their thoughtful critics like Elizabeth Marquardt (author of the important report, “My Daddy’s Name is Donor,”) is fair and balanced journalism.
Read it all here.

This article from Canada’s National Post focuses on a woman’s quest to give Donor Conceived Persons the right to search for their genetic, but absent parent. This is a right accorded to adopted children, but not to Donor Conceived Persons.

One young woman I interviewed some months ago, who is making a documentary about her story, reported that she had become obsessed with her genetic heritage. She couldn’t understand how it could be assumed that she would feel the same sense of self-worth as children conceived normally. As another sperm donor adult child put it: “If my life is for other people’s purposes, and not my own, then what is the purpose of my life?”

Read it all here.