Who’s Your Daddy?

December 18, 2006

Yesterday’s Washington Post has a fascinating first-person account of the effects of reproductive technologies on the children thereby conceived.

The author, 17 year-old college student Katrina Clark, is the child of a single mother who was artificially inseminated with donor sperm.

I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is concerned, everyone focuses on the “parents” — the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his “donation.” As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?

Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies — conceived in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when sperm banks became more common and donor insemination began to flourish — are coming of age, and we have something to say.

I’m here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn’t ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It’s hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won’t matter to the “products” of the cryobanks’ service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.

She goes on to say

Those of us created with donated sperm won’t stay bubbly babies forever. We’re all going to grow into adults and form opinions about the decision to bring us into the world in a way that deprives us of the basic right to know where we came from, what our history is and who both our parents are.

This article is particularly interesting coming on the heels of the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority overhaul of fertility laws so that fertility “clinics would no longer be required to consider the need for a father when deciding to offer treatment.”