Ruth Institute Blog

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.

by Elizabeth Marquardt

A scruffy man, tanned and good-looking, dressed in an old leather jacket and snug jeans, is on a motorcycle zipping through a neighborhood near you. He’s a restaurateur into “local” everything, a man whose produce vendor is one among many sexy women who want to hook up with him. He was also, years ago, a sperm donor who, unbeknownst to him, achieved reproductive success. Read more…

by Margaret Somerville

For whose benefit are these children created? Their own? Or their parents?

Two stories concerning the donation of gametes – sperm and ova – appeared recently in the media.

One related that a “virtual” sperm and egg bank is being established that will only accept offers to donate from “beautiful” people. Internet polling will determine who is beautiful enough to do so. The goal – informed by the principle that “everyone deserves a beautiful child” – is to enable “ugly” people to have beautiful children. Read more…

Alana S, who blogs at the Family Scholars blog offers this testimony about some of the ambiguities, complications and stresses of being a conceived through anonymous sperm donation:

I decided to tell my mom about my blogging. I decided to explain to her how extensively I plan on combating commercial conception. Read more…

We here at the Ruth Institute have been saying for quite some time that Artificial Insemination technology can and will be used to push men out of families, and in so doing increase fatherlessness.

It almost boggles the mind that there is any dispute about this proposition.  Witness the strange and unexpected changes in the law that Kay Hymowitz documents in this article:

Unfortunately, in the absence of any other authority, answering these questions has fallen to family court judges, who are—and I mean no disrespect—not always the sort you’d expect to be on the short list for the Louis Brandeis Award for Cautious Jurisprudence. Read more…

New podcast!  Drew Mariani interviews Dr J on his radio show about Fathers’ Day, the president’s speech commemorating same, homosexual parenting, and the oft-mentioned Pediatrics study championing lesbian parenting.  Listen here.

Fathers’ Day and Homosexual Parenting

By W. BRADFORD WILCOX

In “The Switch,” coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie offers a largely celebratory treatment of donor insemination, as do two other movies out this year, “The Back-up Plan” and next month’s “The Kids Are All Right.” Indeed, one of the bottom-line conclusions these movies are pushing is that the children turn out “all right” with donor dads. Read more…

Brad Wilcox weighs in on the My Daddy’s Name is Donor study. Brad is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and lectured at our ITAF conference last summer.

Seventy-one percent of the adult offspring of these single mothers agree that: “My sperm donor is half of who I am,” and 78% wonder “what my sperm donor’s family is like.” Half report that they “feel sad” when they see “friends with their biological fathers and mothers.” Donor offspring with single mothers also are much less likely Read more…

You’ve all seen the headlines by now: “Children of lesbian parents do well.” These headlines are based on a new study published in the journal Pediatrics. I actually read the study, which is my custom before commenting. I also read the letters to the editor on this study.

Here are 8 reasons why this study does not prove anything about the functioning of the children of lesbians.
1. The sample is extremely small: 78 children of lesbian mothers and 93 children in the control group.
2. The sample of lesbian mothers is unlikely to be representative of the general population of lesbians. This is a sample of people who volunteered for the study, not a random sample. The most motivated and high-functioning people are the most likely to volunteer for a politically charged study.
3. The “results” are intrinsically unreliable. The results are nothing but the mothers’ reports of their childrens’ behavior and functioning. There is no cross-checking with objective outcomes, Read more…

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. Read more…

Wow. Powerful title.

by Michael Cook

Is it high-tech child abuse to rob children of their biological heritage?

A 51-year-old Michigan man may have fathered as many as 400 children by donating sperm to an IVF clinic between 1980 and 1994. At the time Kirk Maxey saw this as a way to pay his way through medical school and to help infertile women. “You would get a personal phone call from a nurse saying, ‘The situation is urgent! We have a woman ovulating this morning. Can you be here in a half hour?’,” he told Newsweek last year. Read more…

by Michael Cook

In the US alone an estimated 30,000-60,000 children are born each year through sperm donation, yet no entity is required to report on these vital statistics. Until now, no reliable evidence has been available on the experiences of young adults who were conceived in this way. A report released this week by the Institute for American Values, My Daddy’s Name is Donor, is the first-ever representative, comparative attempt to learn about the identity, kinship, well-being, and social justice experiences of these adults. Read more…

While I was over at the My Daddy’s Name is Donor site, I came across this entry, called Debt and Donation, by a woman who was donor conceived herself, and who “donated” her eggs for the money. Poignant, painful, powerful: I can’t begin to do it justice. Go read it yourself.

by Jared Yee

Are sperm donor children interested in their biological father and half-siblings? How does the knowledge of their unusual conception affect them? Read more…

A professional journal reports on the experiences of Donor Conceived Persons searching for their anonymous dads, and/or half-siblings. One fact that I have been interested in for some time: how many people using Artificial Reproductive Technology are actually infertile, and how many have normal fertility, but do not have opposite sex partners? This study is obviously quite preliminary, in that it only looks are the subset of DCP’s who have chosen to use the Registry to search for their donors. However, among that set of 165 people:

Fifty-eight percent (96) of offspring reported their parents to be a heterosexual couple, 23% (38) a single mother and 15% (25) a lesbian couple.

In other words, nearly half of the mothers in this sample had no male partner. We don’t know whether they had medically impaired fertility.
I have no idea how representative this would be. And I don’t know of anyone else who is even asking this question. This article deals with only a very limited set of issues surrounding the DCP’s decision to search, and how satisfied they were with it. We definitely need more research, before we go careening off, making the purchase of human gametes an entitlement for anyone who has the money or the insurance coverage….