The Donor Who Dared To Say Don't

The Anonymous Us Project

2011-02-19T05:52:00.000-08:00

About the Anonymous Us Project

The Anonymous Us Project is a safety zone for real and honest opinions about reproductive technologies and family fragmentation. We aim to share the experiences of voluntary and involuntary participants in these technologies, while preserving the dignity and privacy for story-tellers and their loved ones.

We honor and are forever thankful for the courageous minds among the donor-conceived who have worked tirelessly before us for justice and education on the ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) family experience. We hold these story-tellers, educators and leaders in high esteem and are forever grateful for all of the sacrifices they have made to improve family policy and thus quality of life for all parties. We also acknowledge that many members of the ART community have serious opinions and experiences regarding their family structure that they'd like to add to the discussion, but feel they cannot because of a need for privacy.This project gives them an opportunity to be heard without having to reveal their identity and potentially hurt their loved ones. Though anonymity in reproduction hides the truth, anonymity in story-telling will help reveal it.

We hope that The Anonymous Us Project will fill out the conversation on reproductive technologies. We hope it will inspire more truth and transparency. We hope it will help shape healthier families and happier people.

About Alana S.

Alana S. is a donor-conceived adult and creative professional devoted to contributing insights and commentary about family fragmentation through evocative music and storytelling. Alana became an activist and child advocate while writing her upcoming film, Adam & Eva, a narrative screenplay from the perspective of a young woman conceived via artificial insemination, who chooses to sell her own eggs for the money she needs to independently investigate her ancestry. Alana has been interviewed by Womens' Health Magazine and Elizabeth Marquardt of My Daddy's Name is Donor (a representative, comparative study of young adults conceived through sperm donation) and is a major contributor to an upcoming documentary from Brooklyn-based film company Rumur Productions on her experiences as a donor-conceived adult. Alana fuses her feelings on motherhood and family often with her music, which can be found at www.myspace.com/missalanastewart.

http://anonymousus.org

Murky business of donor conception is having a brutal effect on the offspring

2011-02-18T23:26:00.000-08:00

Children are being ignored while the media invests heavily in the adults' side of the IVF equation
THIS week as the debate over homosexual marriage hots up, a very important Senate committee report on donor conception practices was tabled which should have far-reaching effects on the issue.
However, "should have" is not the same as "would have". Aside from a couple of brief reports in the Fairfax press, the news media have been strangely silent on this report with its criticisms of the in-vitro fertilisation industry and the whole murky business of donor conception, and some powerful testimony of the often brutal effects on the children who are its products.
This lack of interest in the downside of the new biotechnological-produced family seems odd. Although the majority of these children are born into heterosexual partnerships where one partner is infertile, there have been a number of stories -- including a cover story in The Weekend Australian's Magazine earlier this year -- about lesbians happily having children who are "co-parented" as the fashionable gender-neutral terminology has it, without any intention of contact with the donor, or in the unfashionable, sex-specific father.
So, one might assume that with the amount of recent focus on the "gay" family, the problems of their donor-conceived offspring would command more attention.
But the media have heavily invested in the simplistic emotionalism and cheap moral utilitarianism of the adults' side of the equation. Now they are somewhat taken aback that those children whose human rights were never considered in the beginning of the great biotech revolution are starting to raise their heads.
Briefly, the Senate committee found that donor conception in Australia and the IVF industry that oversees much of it is surprisingly badly managed for something as important as the creation of new human life.
Indicative of the chaos is the disturbing fact that the committee could not even find out approximately how many of these children are in Australia.
The estimate of somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 is ridiculously broad. It just doesn't know and it should because many of these children could be related.
The committee found that donor-conceived people may have up to 20 genetic half-siblings because there is nothing to stop donors donating multiple times and in a variety of places.
Hence the committee's recommendation that there be a four-family limit, especially now the ability of one donor to give gametes is unlimited.
The committee also reinforced the ban on payment for gametes. This has always been the case in Australia and Britain.
However there are loopholes in this, such as payment for "reasonable expenses", and it is a big enough loophole at the moment to allow some smart operators to act as sperm brokers.
But the most controversial of the committee's decisions was to recommend that, like adoptees, donor-conceived children should have the right to track their biological parents through a national register.
Setting up such a register will be difficult. Under the present ad hoc arrangements, as Senator Trish Crossin noted, there is a "quite appalling" lack of legislation in half of Australia's nine jurisdictions.
Tasmania, Queensland, the ACT and the Northern Territory have no laws at all regarding donor conception practices.
One woman said: "I cannot begin to describe how dehumanising and powerless I am to know that the name and details about my biological father and my entire paternal family sit somewhere in a filing cabinet . . . with no means to access it.
"Information about my own family, my roots, my identity, I am told I have no right to know."
The committee made controversial observations which will probably meet stiff resistance from the IVF industry.
It noted that the accreditation process for IVF clinics seems to have broken down and is not transparent. It calls for national regulation and suggests that an ombudsman may be needed.
The importation of sperm -- which has already become a cottage industry -- should be banned.
In fact, the kind of resistance Australia can expect to the regulation of these practices has already begun in Britain where, due to a decline in the numbers donating, there is even a movement, backed by the IVF industry, to introduce anonymity.
Prospective parents place great weight on donor anonymity. The majority of donor-origin children born into heterosexual families do not know of their origins. Most parents pretend that the biological origins of the child don't matter.
That is understandable; it must be very difficult to give birth to a child within a family where the father has the usual emotional and psychological input and then possibly run the risk of damaging that bond with the revelation that half the child's physical self, its other 23 chromosomes, really came from someone else.
But it is amazing how many such children feel that something is not quite right.
On such person is Alana S., a 24-year-old writer and musician from San Francisco who has launched a website called anonymousus.org.
She is the child of an anonymous sperm donor and she is inviting parents and children to contribute their stories, positive and negative.
This forum is a first. There are many forums where IVF mums can swap stories about their pregnancies, online discussions on how to get sperm and inseminate oneself (complete with e-hand-books), but until now there have been none about the children born from these techniques.
Why? Well one reason is that for the past 20 years the biotech industry has conspired with the "new family" agenda underscored by manipulative emotionalism beloved of the media, to create the dubious notion of a right to a child, and suppress the rights of the child, even the obvious right to a mother and a father.
Nevertheless, most of today's donor-conceived young adults not only want a mother and a father, but the right to the knowledge of those other 23 chromosomes, their genetic forebears.
Once nurture was considered everything for children and nature was given very little credit.
Now through genetics we are beginning to understand the fundamental pull of our physical nature and what binds most of us to our parents.
But this issue should not be turned into an emotional contest. The most important people in this are not the parents -- neither the genetic nor the birth parents -- and certainly not the IVF industry. The important people are those that no one thought much about in the beginning: the children.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/murky-business-of-donor-conception-is-having-a-brutal-effect-on-the-offspring/story-e6frg6zo-1226008097867

MYFANWY DARES TO SAY DON'T:

2008-02-16T20:13:00.000-08:00

Fertile ground for doubt

Sian Powell | February 16, 2008 [THE AGE - MELBOURNE - AUSTRALIA]

MYFANWY Walker objects to the way she was created: sperm donation.

She has given speeches explaining why she has grave doubts about the increasingly popular procedure of sperm and egg-donor conception.

"It's the whole reason I exist, so it's difficult for me to say I have a problem with this, but I think I have the right, and I think my arguments are valid," she says. "I see my friends being hurt by this."

She was one of a group of like-minded agitators who have met legislators and lawyers in Victoria, where the assisted reproduction technology legislation is due for amendment in the coming months. She has come to understand the new legislation will probably take in many of the Victorian Law Reform Commission's recommendations, broadening the scope for assisted reproduction, including donor conception.

Walker is appalled, but many MPs, women's groups and activists think it's about time Victoria relaxed the draconian restrictions on who can use fertility technology.

Walker doesn't agree with the discrimination - rather for the children's sake, she thinks gamete donation should be generally restricted, regardless of the recipient's married state or sexual orientation.

When she was 20, she discovered she was not the genetic product of both her parents. She decided to find her biological father, and in 2001 she told The Australian about her search.

She had very limited information about the donor; she had discovered he was a 26-year-old married university student with a three-year-old child and a week-old baby when he donated sperm in 1977. He had fair skin and blue eyes, his blood was A-positive and his donor tag was CP.

Michael Linden read the article, recognised himself and made contact. He and Walker have now established a friendship. Yet even though Walker has found her biological father, and filled in some of the gaps in her life, she has taken a principled stand against donor conception.

Almost 27, a graphic designer who will begin a law degree next month, she is an extremely thoughtful and intelligent nay-sayer. She says there is a range of reasons why the practice of donor conception is riddled with difficulties.

Even if donor-conceived children (as they are known) have some form of relationship with the donor, it obviously falls far short of a loving parental relationship. And Walker warns that in many cases, the donors simply can't be located.

These days, assisted reproduction is largely governed by guidelines that compel donors to waive anonymity once the offspring reaches adulthood. The guidelines of the federal research funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council, make it clear that donors have to agree to be identified to the children, and if fertility clinics breach the guidelines their accreditation can be withdrawn. In Victoria, it is a matter of staying within the law.

But Walker warns that contact is by no means guaranteed: the information is not kept up to date, 18 years is a long time, and the donors may change their names, leave the country, or even actively evade the offspring.

The UN Convention on the Rights of a Child, she says, declares that children have a right to their identity: that identity can be fully or partly compromised when one parent is a donor, and probably anonymous for the first 18 years of the child's life.

"The child does not really know who they are," she says. "I know lots of facts about Michael, but I can't really 'know' him until I have a relationship with him."

Walker's stand against donor conception does not mean that she gets on badly with her genetic father, or that she is sorry they made contact: she is very happy she has found her genetic heritage and she is fond of Linden. "But there was a massive amount of loss there for me," she says. "There were 20 years I could never reclaim, coupled with the realisation that I could never have the genetic relationship with my own dad. My feelings about donor conception are quite different to the feelings I have about Michael. But some donor-conceived people have really horrible experiences."

They might be unable to find the donors, or appalled when they do find them. Walker says there's a growing feeling now that openness and transparency is the cure-all; if a child is told from very early age that one genetic parent is a donor, it should lessen the chance for psychological damage. But Walker says surveys have found most parents of donor-conceived children are reluctant to tell them exactly where they came from. The requirements only stipulate the donors agree to be identified when offspring turn 18.

She has been pushing for the Victorian law to include a requirement that donor status is listed on birth certificates: so far with little success. She is also one of many concerned citizens pushing for a conscience vote on any new reproduction law, again, so far without any success.

She is up against a solid phalanx of frustrated women, lawyers, politicians and medical professionals on other side of the assisted reproduction divide, all of them intent on easing the Victorian law and bringing it into line with the rest of Australia.

Melbourne solicitor Carmen Currie has been involved in a number of assisted reproduction cases, and she has written a paper on ART legislation titled Regulating Baby Making - Is Legislation an Appropriate Instrument for Regulating Assisted Reproductive Technologies?. She says the Victorian law is "arguably the most prescriptive of its kind in the world".

She would like to see it repealed, or substantially watered down, and the various ethical issues arising Victorian fertility clinics governed by the NHMRC guidelines, as they are everywhere else in Australia, at least for the time being.

Among other things the guidelines state (in a stipulation first introduced in 2004): "Persons conceived using ART procedures are entitled to know their genetic parents. Clinics must not use donated gametes in reproductive procedures unless the donor has consented to the release of identifying information about himself or herself to the persons conceived using his or her gametes."

These guidelines came too late for Walker: there were no such requirements when her genetic father donated his sperm. Many of her friends from the donor-conceived community are still searching fruitlessly for their genetic parents.

Four Australian states - Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and NSW - have assisted reproduction legislation in place, although the NSW law won't be implemented until the end of this year. Yet, by and large, the law in these states doesn't seek to prescribe who can and who cannot access reproductive technology, and the NRHMRC guidelines prevail, including the requirement for a donor anonymity waiver.

Currie points out that a moral code is embedded in the Victorian reproduction law, which strikes her as out of step with other laws. The law doesn't forbid unmarried people from having sex, so why should it prevent single women from using ART?

The Victorian law limited assisted reproduction to married couples until the stipulation was struck down by the Federal Court in 2000 citing anti-discrimination legislation. But the law is still restrictive. It says: "A doctor must be satisfied ... the woman is unlikely to become pregnant from an oocyte (female germ cell) produced by her and sperm produced by her husband other than by a treatment procedure." This is the foundation of a rigid policy used by fertility clinics to refuse anyone other than clinically infertile women, and excluding lesbians and single women. Many of these marginalised women prefer to travel interstate for treatment.

"Other states have laws regulating fertility treatment, but Victoria's laws have historically been by far the most restrictive in terms of the sort of personal criteria you need to satisfy to even get in the door of the clinic," Currie says. "The Victorian laws are concerned with who should or shouldn't be allowed to be a parent than simply regulating the technology, and there is a real question about whether that should be an appropriate focus for the law."

There are still enormous hurdles barring single women and lesbians from Victorian clinics, hurdles which are non-existent in other states, she says.

The technology has always outpaced the legislators. Even as Victorian legislators muse on how to shape a new assisted reproduction law, scientists in Britain announced earlier this month that they had created in-vitro fertilisation embryos with DNA from three parents. Legislators may think they can get round the problem of accelerating technology by fostering ever-more prescriptive and detailed laws, but Currie warns this approach is likely to push more and more cases into the arms of lawyers and the courts. It would be better to keep any laws general, with enough flexibility to permit clinics' ethics committees to resolve issues on a case-by-case basis.

In NSW, the assisted reproduction Act will come into force at the end of this year, and it is regarded with some consternation by fertility clinics. They fear the requirement to lodge donor-identifying information with the NSW Health Department, rather than simply keeping the information themselves, will deter potential donors. In reality, the NSW law will be far less prescriptive than the Victorian equivalent, simply because it does not stipulate eligibility criteria. Single women, lesbians and married women are treated equally, and unlike in Victoria, it isn't necessary to get consent from the spouse of a donor.

Walker says these debates are all very well, but they are entirely missing the point: that gamete donation is likely to be damaging for the child it produces, no matter how it is handled or who is eligible for it.

The Victorian Law Reform Commission's review of the Victorian legislation missed the point, she says. "No one asked, is this a good thing? Is there anything bad about it? It was just legislated. I suppose the feeling was that it was happening anyway."

She believes the Victorian parliamentarians will adopt almost all of the recommendations, effectively rubber-stamping an extremely significant loosening of the laws. "I have spoken with some of the MPs," she says. "Their scope is more about eligibility and access. We had meetings with them. They said 'it's not in our scope, it's not what we've looked at'."

"Basically my problem is with the ethics of the practice. It doesn't protect the rights of the child. Once people understand the issues they probably wouldn't choose to conceive via donor. And also once the Government is aware of the issues I think they will inevitably either legislate against it or strictly govern its practice, that is, treat it as an adoption."

ART is seen as a medical treatment for adults, and regarded almost entirely from the adult donors' and recipients' point of view. But it produces flesh and blood children.

"It should be a question of whether it's in the interests of the child," she says. "You can't negate that, you really can't."

Victorian donors retain right to find their children

2007-12-18T01:23:00.000-08:00

Government rejects bid to restrict donor contact

from THE AGE, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Carol Nader
December 18, 2007

SPERM and egg donors will still be permitted to initiate contact with children they helped conceive, after the State Government rejected the recommendation of a report it commissioned that the law be overthrown.

In Victoria, anyone who donated sperm or eggs that were used in the conception of children born from July 1988 onwards can apply to the Infertility Treatment Authority for information about the child.

Once the child turns 18, the authority is required to write to them, requesting consent to release identifying information to the donor.

But there are concerns that people who are not aware of their genetic origins would face possible trauma upon learning of their history. Studies have shown only about a third of parents tell their children how they were conceived.

The first people affected by the law turned 18 last year. The authority launched a public awareness campaign, encouraging parents to tell their children and offering support.

The Victorian Law Reform Commission in its report argued it would be "intrusive and unenforceable" to legally oblige parents to inform their children of their genetic origins.

It recommended that only children be allowed to initiate contact, but donors should have a 12-month period to apply for information. It said donors should be encouraged to tell authorities if they became aware of a genetic condition that might have been transmitted and the information would be passed on.

The Government last week announced it would make surrogacy available and ease restrictions on single women and lesbians to access fertility treatment. But it won't accept the commission's recommendation about sperm and egg donors' access to information.

A spokesman for Health Minister Daniel Andrews said: "There have been a number of changes over a period of time in this area. To change the laws again would be confusing and destabilising."

Melbourne IVF clinic medical director John McBain has been trying to persuade the Government to repeal the law and intends to write to Mr Andrews.

Dr McBain said by refusing to change the law, the Government was effectively frightening people into telling their children about how they were conceived.

The authority has so far received fewer than 10 applications from donors requesting information about children who have turned 18. Chief executive Louise Johnson said donors making the applications to date had been sensitive.

Well, at least they are calling him the father.

2007-09-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

True love eludes internet daters, but a father found

Carol Nader
September 13, 2007

The Age, Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Ann Bell and her daughter Jennifer, 10 now know - by chance - who Jennifer's biological father is.

Ten years after conceiving a child together, they finally met.

Ann Bell was looking for the love of a good man when she logged onto an internet dating site.

This is where the story takes a somewhat bizarre turn. What she found instead, she believes, is her child's biological father.

When the Perth woman, originally from Scotland, and her former husband were trying to have a baby together, they needed a sperm donor. Their child, Jennifer, was born 10½ years ago. The marriage ended when Jennifer was a few months old. Ms Bell started dating. Curious about her daughter's roots and fascinated by the psychology of sperm donation, she got into the habit of asking the men she met if they had ever made such a chivalrous gift. She met a man on the internet early this year and asked him the bold question — had he ever been a sperm donor? He said yes.

The way Ms Bell tells the story, they chatted in cyberspace for a while. He lived outside Perth. Eventually, they met, a couple of times. They soon established that he was not for her. Nor her for him. But she wanted to know more about his sperm donor history.

They compared information she had been given in the donor profile. She didn't think it was possible that he was the one. Some things just didn't fit. His date of birth, for instance, was wrong (they later learned the clinic had recorded an incorrect date). But there were things that matched. His place of birth in another state was the same.

Months after their last meeting, Ms Bell, now happily ensconced with another man she met on the internet, could not stop wondering. She asked, by email, for him to contact the clinic. On a visit to Perth, the man went to the clinic, showed some identification and was given his donor code. That night he phoned — the code matched. "I couldn't even digest what had happened, the randomness of it. I was caught up in the bizarreness of life."

So thrown was she that she didn't tell her daughter until weeks later, when Jennifer was mulling over how much she'd like to have siblings. Actually, Ms Bell told her, she did. The donor, who does not want to be identified, has his own children. Jennifer, who had met him, laughed. She thought it was pretty cool. She is going to spend time with him.

Both Ms Bell and the donor, who also spoke to The Age, are confident the matching donor code is enough to confirm he is Jennifer's biological father. They don't feel the need for a paternity test to prove it.

The clinic where Jennifer was conceived, the Concept Fertility Centre in Perth, could not provide information on the case for privacy reasons. But Bruce Bellinge, a reproductive biologist at the clinic, said a matching code should be enough to confirm the biological connection. "If they're both dinky-di about the code, then that would be identifying enough," he said. "You're assuming that both donor and recipient have given each other the correct code."

Leonie Hewitt, from the Donor Conception Support Group, said the case highlighted the need for a national register of sperm donors. "What would happen if a donor and a half sibling met on the internet?" she said.

The nation's attorneys-general agreed in July to form a working party to investigate donor registers. Victoria already has a register.

Donor Hero of the Month (September , I guess)

2007-08-23T05:17:00.001-07:00

Here's one guy, at least, who is not in any doubt that he is their father and that they are most definitely his kids

What Is A Father: The Genetic Parent

As told to: Jennifer Wolff, Photograph: Alessandra Petlin
May 16, 2007 - 2:51:35 PM

Mike Rubino, 47, artist, sperm donor, father of untold numbers of children

I might have 10 kids, or I might have 50 kids. I have no idea. For sure I know about seven kids through six different mothers who live in six different states, from New York to Hawaii.

I donated sperm once or twice a week for about five years in the early 1990s. Before that, I was one of those people who spent their life savings on fertility treatments, trying to get my ex-wife pregnant, to no avail. She was infertile, but I wasn’t. We felt that by donating, I could help couples going through what we went through, plus pay for groceries for the week.

Each time I gave a sample, I was aware, Wow, there could be a child produced from this. And I told the sperm bank I was open to having contact with any of them after they turned 18. I had this vision of being in my fifties and having these teenagers showing up at my door, looking similar to me, and saying, “Hi, Dad. Want to go for coffee?”

Several years after my divorce, I found the Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site where donor offspring can find their half siblings and, sometimes, their donors. Rachael, one of the moms, had listed her two kids, Aaron and Leah, under my donor number. When I saw their names and their ages—6 and 3 at the time—I got very weepy. Oh my God, these were my kids!

Within hours, we were talking on the phone. Rachael asked, “Is it okay if they call you Dad? Would you prefer they call you Donor?” I was fine with Dad, and that’s what they called me when Rachael brought them out to see me from Massachusetts. Today I have relationships with four of my children. My son in Southern California knows I’m his father, but he calls me Mike. More recently, I met Precious, my daughter in Hawaii. She never asked; she just called me Dad.

I assumed 99 percent of people who bought donor sperm would be infertile couples and that the kids would already have fathers. I didn’t anticipate so many single moms. Of my known kids, none of them has a dad. Most of them don’t have living grandfathers or uncles or any men in their lives, really.

A lot of men out there get married, have children, raise them for a year, and then take off. They are still very much these kids’ fathers, even if another man moves in and takes over. The biological father could be a deadbeat dad, but he’s still a dad. He could be an awful dad, but he’s still a dad. Now I’m a donor dad, or an absentee dad. But for these kids, even though I don’t live with them, or even near most of them, and I don’t pick them up from school or help them with their homework, I’m the only dad they know. And the mothers…until now, they had been complete strangers to me. But I haven’t been a complete stranger to them. They chose me. Granted, all I was to them was a donor profile and a tape recording, but that alone creates a persona in their minds. They carried their…my…our children, and of course they are madly in love with them, so the donor becomes a part of all that intense emotion. I think some of the moms have some issues, not with me, but with one another. I don’t want to say there is a tug-of-war over my time, because no one has been demanding. But there is definitely tension.

All of our names are now off the Donor Sibling Registry. The moms and I need to take a breather to figure out how I can accommodate the kids I know of, because there’s always the chance that another one might turn up. That doesn’t mean that the kids I don’t know yet aren’t entitled to meet their father, but I don’t necessarily want 50 kids in my life either. I’m eventually going to have so many little families that I won’t be able to afford to spend airfare and a week off to visit every one of them. It might have to be one or two kids a year, one or two kids the next year, and then, depending on how many I have, come back around. At this point it’s hard to know what’s fair.

I was really burned by my first marriage, and I thought I’d never have a family—I thought I’d missed my chance. Now I have all these kids to add meaning and purpose to my life. I can’t see them or talk to them over the phone without smiling or busting out laughing.

What I miss is waking up with them on Christmas and watching them opening their presents and believing in Santa Claus. If I’m lucky, I’ll catch one of them on Christmas who still believes in Santa, but maybe not. I also realize that some guy could come in and marry one of these women, and I could be squeezed out. I would miss them, but my primary concern is for my children’s happiness. If some great guy comes in and it’s good for them, then I am happy for them. I absolutely love it when my kids come to stay with me. But I’m also okay when they leave.

Hats off to you, Mr Donohue (Donor Hero of the Month)

2007-08-08T04:08:00.000-07:00

Modern Love: I Made Him What He Is, but Who Is He?

By Thomas Anthony Donohue, family therapist, West Roxbury, Mass.

New York Times. July 29, 2007

Last December I got a call from a health and fertility clinic in Cambridge, Mass., asking if I would be willing to respond to a male teenager inquiring about his sperm donor. I donated there in the late 80s, and it seemed any children I had helped create were just now becoming of legal age to contact me if I would allow it.

At 50, I have never married, never raised any children. And about a month before the call, I had reached a point where I was feeling anxious and socially disconnected, no longer relaxed with my friends and sensing there had to be something more meaningful in my life. Perhaps this predisposed me to say yes, the boy could call me, and shortly thereafter I received the following message on my answering machine: “Hello, Anthony. I know this may come as ... a surprise. But I knew you might be waiting for it. But uh ... I, uh ... guess you’re my ... sperm donor.” He then gave me his name and cellphone number, and closed by saying: “Thank you. I hope you call back. Bye.”

Thinking about such an encounter has always provoked anxiety and excitement in me. I’ve been anxious about the potential awkwardness of a meeting and worried about possible financial liabilities that could come out of this largely uncharted legal territory. But I’ve also felt excited, after years of wonder, about one day actually meeting a person who emerged from this process.

I called him back, leaving a message of my own. I half-wondered if he heard me leaving the message but didn’t pick up because he first wanted to get a sense of my voice, my attitude and my openness to meeting him.

Finally, a day or so later, we spoke. “Hi,” I said. “This is Anthony. The guy who was your sperm donor. Strange, isn’t it?” “Thanks for calling back.” “I’m happy you called,” I said. “You’re very brave.” “Maybe, like, you’d want to meet?” he asked. He mentioned a restaurant in Harvard Square, and we agreed to a late breakfast in a few days.

I felt a little paranoid on my way to meet him, not knowing what to expect. We didn’t tell each other what we look like, and I was still idly wondering if there might be a camera to take photos of me to account for some potential child support. Of course, he also could just have been a child wanting to meet his biological father.

Outside the restaurant, I passed a tall teenager leaning against a pole. I thought I should say his name to see if it was him, but part of me needed to procrastinate a minute longer, to catch my breath and get some perspective. Inside I looked around purposefully, but no one made eye contact; everyone seemed to be busy with someone else.

Back outside, I approached the teenager and said his name. “Yes?” he replied. “Anthony,” I said. “Hi.” I reached out for him, thinking I should embrace my child, and we hugged. Struck by his height (I’m only 5-foot-8), I asked him how tall he is. “Six-three,” he said. With his scraggly beard and dark features, he looked somewhat Russian-Jewish, but I could also see some of me in him, a dab of Irish in his light, reddish complexion. I had the same scraggly beard at his age -- now a goatee.

The only table was by the door, amid the noise and bustle. A young waitress with a soft-spoken accent (Portuguese, I think) briskly delivered us cups of coffee. Getting right into it, he said, “Can I ask you some questions?” “Absolutely.” “Do you know many lesbian couples?” he asked, and then: “What made you donate?”

“People wanted children,” I said. “I was available at the time.” I took a sip, then elaborated, since he seemed to want more. “An ex-girlfriend called and said a nurse friend of hers was looking for a donor for her clinic. I thought about it and even went to a counselor. She told me to go for it and to think of it as sharing light.”

The waitress approached for our order. I asked for a vegetable omelet with dark rye. He ordered pancakes with strawberries and cream. Typical kid food, I thought. After the waitress left, he asked, “Are there any medical issues in your family?” “None that stick out. Except for a little accident proneness on my part.”

I told him about my more glamorous accidents from when I was closer to his age, bumps and broken bones from parachuting and hang gliding. What I didn’t bring up was an accident I’d had just before I started donating sperm; I’d been painting a house with a friend when a platform collapsed, crushing my right leg. It took a few years to learn to walk again, and during this time I donated sperm because I needed extra income. Not that it was very much: $40 a visit. I donated probably 30 to 40 times over a couple of years.

As soon as we left the restaurant, his cellphone rang: it was his mother, asking where he was. He answered by saying he would be home in an hour. After he hung up, I asked, “Did you tell your mothers we were meeting?” He shook his head no. “Just wanted to do it.”

Walking from the restaurant, I wished I was taller and had a surer walk. He seemed so athletic, and I wanted to be on an equal footing with him, maybe portray an image of a person who would have kept up with him as he was growing into a teenager.

“Let’s go this way,” I suggested, pointing toward Boston. But when I realized we had no particular destination, I started feeling uncomfortable. “Is there anywhere you want to go?” I asked. “No,” he said.

I thought in our first walk together that I, as his biological father, should know where to go, and as we walked I kept hoping for some intuitive clue as to which direction would be the right one. It was hard to be an instant father. I kept thinking I should be acting in a way he would approve, a way that showed me to be a capable and confident father, even though I had never been one.

Our time together was good but bewildering and emotionally taxing; my right leg was even starting to ache. So by the time we circled back around and reached his bike, I was relieved that it was over.

“Would you like to meet again?” I asked him. “It’s been great.” “Yeah. Could we do something together next time? An activity?” “Sure,” I said. “Like what?” “I don’t know. I’m open.” “What about a movie?” I said, disappointed in my lack of imagination. “Which one?” My mind was blank. Shouldn’t a proper father have a time sheet and listing of the various films available? “I’ll call you,” I finally said. As he biked off, I felt tired and confused. I walked past the Harvard Coop and saw a book in the window titled, “Take a Nap! Change Your Life.” When I got to my car, that’s exactly what I did.

We brought photos to our second meeting. As a young child, he definitely looked more like someone from my family line. For the past 17 years I’ve at times dwelled on these possible children of mine: who they were, and where, and how many, especially given that the nurse at the donation center said my recipients showed positive inseminations. I felt a sense of relief that I had finally met one of my offspring.

My latest connection with him came in January, before he went back to college in California. We met outside one of the oldest chapels in Cambridge, Christ Church. As he locked up his bike, I noticed for the first time the address, Zero Garden Street, which I thought was oddly appropriate. I was more aware than ever that I hadn’t raised him as my son and that he hadn’t had me as his father. At zero we could at least adjust our social expectations to this lack of history.

We decided to go bowling -- his idea -- and on the way into the alley, I took out my wallet and gave him $40, which is all the cash I had on me. He was embarrassed by my clumsy attempt at a gift, but he accepted it on my insistence. I don’t know why I thought to give him some money that day, especially in such an awkward and insufficient way, but a couple of days later, while sharing the story of my meeting with a friend, I remembered that $40 is what I was paid each visit to the sperm bank. I already felt sheepish that my gesture had seemed a bit too transactional, rushed, inept and definitely cheap. Part of me, perhaps, wanted to get business out of the way. Give back what I was paid, for my part in him. Start fresh. But $40? What must he have thought? I hope to find out when he returns in the summer. If he wants to meet again, that is. Making contact seemed like a big step for him and maybe all he wants for now, to calm his curiosity.

But it was good for my curiosity, too, and for me in general at this point in my life. Later I called the donation center to approve any future contact from other children. A little more than a week after placing that call, I came home to the voice of a nervous-sounding girl on my answering machine, who introduced herself and then said: “Uh, calling you, and, uh, looking forward to talking to you about being my donor, and I guess ... I’ll try again later. “Bye.”

Extract from the Parliamentary Committee's Report

2007-08-06T04:20:00.000-07:00

Ethical issues surrounding fertility

A major ethical issue raised in the draft Bill is whether children born as a result of donor conception should have the right to know they are donor conceived. The Committee argue that, as the State has a direct involvement in assisted conception, it has a moral duty not to be party to a deliberate deception about the person's genetic history. The direct involvement of the State makes the situation of children conceived via sperm, egg or embryo donation different from those conceived naturally who may also not know their true genetic parentage.

The Committee say they recognise the force of the argument that the fact of donor conception should be registered on the person's birth certificate. This gives the parent the incentive to inform their child but allows them to do this at the time and in the manner of their own choosing. It also goes some way to address the value of knowledge of genetic history for medical purposes. The Committee call on the Government to give this further consideration as a matter of urgency.

Another nail in the coffin of donor conception...

2007-08-03T22:23:00.000-07:00

It probably doesn't get much better than this. But, who knows? International sanctions should come next.

from The Times

August 1, 2007

Birth certificates ‘should tell donor children who their real parents are’

Mark Henderson, Science Editor

The birth certificates of children born from donated eggs and sperm would be marked with details of the way they were conceived, under proposals advanced yesterday by MPs and peers.

A legal requirement to register such births openly is the only way of ensuring that children conceived from donors have the right to learn of their biological origins, a parliamentary committee that is scrutinising fertility reforms said.

The joint Commons and Lords panel said that it recognised “the force of the argument” for including this information on birth certificates, and urged ministers “to give this consideration as a matter of urgency” for legislation that will be included in the Queen’s Speech.

It stopped short of backing a legal obligation on parents to tell their children if they are donor-conceived, which it decided would be unenforceable.

The suggestion raises significant privacy issues as birth certificates are public documents. Anybody would thus be able to find out whether any individual had been conceived from donated eggs or sperm.

The committee, however, said that it saw no other way of guaranteeing the right to know. Although people can consult a register when they turn 18 to find out whether they are donor-conceived, and those conceived after April 2005 will be allowed to trace their biological parents, many never think to do so as they never suspect their origins.

Phil Willis, the Liberal Democrat MP who chaired the joint committee on the draft Human Tissues and Embryos Bill, said: “We were very strongly of the view that the State should not be complicit in what in fact would be a lie regarding the origins of where a child actually came from. The principle is that we believe children have a right to know.”

The committee, which was established by ministers to examine draft reforms to Britain’s 17-year-old fertility laws before they are presented in the Queen’s Speech, also objected strongly to several of its central elements.

It urged the Government to drop its plan to merge the fertility treatment and human tissue watchdogs, as disclosed by The Times last week. The half of the draft Bill that creates the replacement Regulatory Authority for Tissues and Embryos (Rate) should be ripped up altogether, it said.

“We are proposing very considerable changes to the Bill that undermine its architecture,” Mr Willis said.

The report was also critical of the Government’s plans to ban hybrid embryos made by fertilising an animal egg with human sperm or vice versa.

It also questioned plans about whether a doctor should take into account a child’s need for a father before providing IVF. The Government wanted to remove the requirement, but the committee want it retained with language that makes clear that it relates to the ideal of two parents.

Other recommendations included a parliamentary bioethics committee and reform of the Human Tissue Act.

A father by any other name is still a father....

2007-07-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

The story as it was published in the Herald Sun (Melbourne, Australia) expanded on the judgement further:

"...to out of three judges ruled the toddler should stay in Ireland close to his father. They said a year was a long time in the life of a developing infant to be away from his dad."

Sperm donor wins court fight to keep lesbian couple's infant in Ireland
Thursday, July 19, 2007
By SHAWN POGATCHNIK
Associated Press Writer

DUBLIN, Ireland (AP) A man who donated his sperm to a lesbian couple won a legal fight Thursday to keep his biological son in Ireland.

The Supreme Court judgment was a first in Ireland, a predominantly Roman Catholic country where the rights of same-sex couples and sperm donors have not been spelled out. Now the couple, wed in a civil union ceremony in England, cannot spend long periods in Australia with their 14-month-old boy as planned, but can only vacation there for up to six weeks.

Another courtroom battle between the man and the couple looms over joint custody of the boy.

Two judges, Justices Susan Denham and Joseph Finnegan, ruled that the toddler's best interests required him to stay in Ireland near his biological father. The third judge, Justice Nial Fennelly, disagreed, arguing no evidence was offered that the boy would be harmed by leaving Ireland.

``The case is utterly unique and unprecedented,'' Fennelly wrote in his dissent, noting that neither the parental rights of sperm donors nor lesbian couples are defined in Irish law.

Neither side has been publicly identified, following Ireland's policy of granting anonymity to family law litigants.

The lesbian couple an Irish woman and an Australian exchanged vows in January 2006, just after same-sex civil unions were legalized in the United Kingdom. The Irish woman was pregnant by the Irish sperm donor, who signed a contract giving him visitation rights.

The boy, born in May 2006, has his biological father's name as his middle name, and the lesbian couple initially granted the man regular visits. But tensions quickly grew, both sides' lawyers agreed.

The couple restricted the man's access to the boy, then announced they planned to go to Australia for up to a year. The man filed two lawsuits one to restrict the trip and another seeking joint custody. The custody case is to be heard this fall.

Thursday's verdict upheld a judgment by High Court Justice Henry Abbott, who ruled the lesbian couple could take the boy to Australia for six weeks. The Supreme Court held that until the custody claim is considered, the boy should travel outside Ireland for only a limited period.

(Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Dispensable dad they all said

2007-07-02T02:54:00.000-07:00

They needed a donor and chose a friend who would have little role in their son's life.

"Sam does not have a father; he has someone who helped bring him into the world," Annan said. "After Sam was born, he (the donor) stopped by the hospital, held him for a minute or two, said he was proud of us and then left us. He has his own family. He is happy with what he has got."

These few words manage to encapsulate the mindset (hopes and wishes) of all who use donor gametes to produce a child for themselves.

Not only did these two women purposefully choose someone who they knew would have little role in their son's life they then go on to override their son's right to even have a father.

How do they propose referring to his father in years to come? Clearly at this point in time they would rather he were no more than a 'midwife' (aren't they the people who help bring babies into the world?)

How readily they dismiss the father's feelings.
And besides, how would they know how he really feels?

I would wager that the statement, "He is happy with what he has got", says more about the apprehensiveness of the mother and her partner that this seemingly blithe unconcernedness of their son's father may well not stand the test of time.

The man is a fool and they are just plain selfish.

We got what we wanted and you can go now....

2007-07-02T02:51:00.000-07:00

Alyson Annan (centre) and Carole Thate with six-week-old Sam on the couch in their living room.

A son crowns union of Hockeyroo champ and former Dutch captain, as Liz Hannan reports.

First they played against each other, then they fell in love. Now two of the world's greatest women hockey players have had a baby together.

That's the story of Australian Olympian Alyson Annan and her partner, former Olympic rival Carole Thate.

Annan is widely regarded as the greatest female hockey player of all time, but the latest chapter of her remarkable career is giving birth to a baby son, an event that seals her relationship with the former Dutch captain.

Sam Henk Brian Thate was born six weeks ago in the Netherlands, where the retired hockey greats have lived since a friendship, built at the 2000 Games, led to their marriage.

Annan conceived the baby using the donated sperm of a friend.

"One of the great gifts of life is being able to have a baby, but a greater gift is having someone help you," she said. "We have been blessed twice."

Annan played 228 internationals for Australia, while Thate played 168 for the Dutch, leading the side for four years. Annan won gold at two Olympics, Atlanta (1996) and Sydney, consigning Thate and the Dutch to bronze each time.

On the night the Hockeyroos celebrated gold in Sydney, Annan and her husband of two years, former Argentine player Max Caldas, separated after an unhappy year.

Months later, Annan's friendship with Thate blossomed into love after she moved to the Netherlands to play hockey. In September 2005, the couple were married, sharing a common hope: that they would have a family.

"I had wanted to have a baby for a long time. But having a family is different for us; we had to plan it," Annan said from her Amstelveen home.

They needed a donor and chose a friend who would have little role in their son's life.

Thate is finalising the legal adoption of their son, who will grow up with a "Mama" and "Mami".

Genetic rights? Whose rights?

2007-04-28T22:32:00.000-07:00

The other night I watched a news report dealing with the legal parentage issues arising out of the current laws governing the use of IVF and surrogacy in Victoria.

One heterosexual couple - shortly after using a surrogate mother to give birth to twin boys - were dismayed to discover that they were not recognised as the legal parents of their children.

In fact, even though the children were conceived using the couple's own gametes, only the surrogate mother and her partner were entitled to be named on the birth certificates as parents.

This made me think that, essentially, the commissioning couple find themselves in the same position as a gamete donor who, under the dictates of the same legislation, has no claim to be recognised on the birth certificate as a donor-conceived child's biological father or mother.

In other words, it is implied that the male and female named on the certificate are the actual biological parents of the child.

In the first instance, it seems absurd that the commissioning couple are not recognized as the legal parents of their children; hence recommendations are shortly to be considered by our state parliament which will modify the relevant legislations in order to rectify such anomalies.

So, soon, our unfortunate couple will be able to have new birth certificates issued proclaiming that they are indeed the legal and (implied) biological parents of their children.

But here's the sting: it is highly unlikely that there will be changes to that same legislation which will guarantee equal acknowledgement of true biological parentage on the birth certificates of donor conceived people.

Nor would donors like myself be able to claim, as this couple has done, that at least one of the persons named as parent on the birth certificate is effectively an imposter and that the donor's name should be substituted instead.

Once again the legislation will protect the interests of the recipients to the perpetual detriment of the donor-conceived people themselves.

Mother>daughter egg donation

2007-04-28T22:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=11086f39-9913-4ca1-a6c5-4122ed4d41a3

[b]Mother and sister, mother and grandmother
Now that human eggs can be frozen, the effects of gamete donation on the resulting children are the subject of an overdue debate[/b]

Margaret Somerville, Citizen Special
Published: Friday, April 27, 2007

Last week it was announced that a Montreal woman, Melanie Boivin, had undergone ovarian stimulation and had her ova (eggs) frozen for possible future use by her daughter, Flavie, who has Turner's syndrome and who will be infertile as a result. While Melanie's action was done entirely out of love for her child, if Flavie uses those ova she would give birth to her half-brother or half-sister, and the child would be the son or daughter and grandchild of Melanie.

The media reported this case on two fronts: The scientific focus was the recent "breakthrough" of being able to freeze human ova.

The ethical issues this raises was the other focus. Leaving aside for the moment the most fundamental question of whether any gamete donation is ethical, here's a sampling of some ethics questions I've been asked in the past few days.

If a young man is infertile and his wife fertile and they belong to a cultural group in which genetic relationship is very important, is it acceptable for the man's father to donate sperm to inseminate his son's wife? This would result in the same genetic relationship on the male side as would result on the female side in the Boivin case.

I would argue that both are ethically unacceptable, but if the male donation is seen as acceptable, consistency seems to require, at least at first glance, that the female donation be treated in the same way.

Is one problem here that it's a parent donating to a child? What about the other way around -- a daughter donating ova to her mother who has experienced premature menopause? If we accept that gamete donation can be ethical in some circumstances, would it be ethical for a brother to donate sperm to a brother, or a sister donate ova to a sister? Or is any donation between close relatives unethical?

An obvious case of such ethical unacceptability would be a brother donating sperm for his sister's use. This would not be incest, because that requires sexual intercourse, but the vast majority of people would see it as ethically wrong, quite apart from the genetic risk involved for the resulting child. But how should we view these other "related donor" cases and do they all raise the same ethical issues?

For instance, is a man donating sperm for his son's use ethically different from a woman donating ova for her daughter's use? The wider question that raises is: Are there ethically relevant differences between male and female donation of gametes? And the even wider one: Is gamete donation itself ethically acceptable?

Let's start with the last question, whether gamete donation, in general, is ethically acceptable.

"Anticipated consent" is an emerging doctrine in ethics. It requires us to ask whether we can reasonably anticipate that the persons most affected by what we plan to do would, were they able to decide, be reasonably likely to give their consent. The answer we are now getting from many people conceived through gamete donation is that they would not have consented.

They believe that an ethical wrong was done to them -- especially if the donation was anonymous -- and that society was complicit in that wrong by providing its resources to make their conception through gamete donation possible. Some people respond that many children conceived naturally don't know who their father is or are reared in a family where their mother's husband is not their genetic father, so why is sperm donation an ethical problem?

The reason is society's intentional involvement in their conception in that way. This complicity requires society to ethically justify the outcome for the child. Because ova donation can never occur naturally and always requires technological intervention, unlike "private" sperm donation, society will necessarily be complicit in it, and therefore must ensure such ethical justification is present.

That being said, might there be differences between sperm donation and ova donation that are ethically relevant? Children conceived through sperm donation have life handed on to them through the natural process of conception and birth. That is not true of ova donation, because the gestational mother is not the biological mother, a situation that could never occur naturally.

Usually, the nearer we are to the natural in using the new science, the fewer ethical difficulties we are likely to encounter. This distinction is sometimes summed up as the difference between repairing nature when it fails and doing what is impossible in nature.

In a broad sense, all children are conceived by "sperm donation," which might explain why we have not analysed the ethics of such donation as closely as perhaps we should have. Sometimes, further scientific developments cause us to revisit practices that we have regarded as ethically settled and identify further ethical questions that need to be addressed.

I believe ova donation is doing that in relation to sperm donation, at least regarding the conditions under which it should be allowed. For instance, there is a growing international consensus that anonymous gamete donation is unethical and should be prohibited. To the contrary, the Canadian Assisted Human Reproduction Act makes it a crime, with heavy penalties, to disclose the identity of gamete donors without their informed consent.

The fertility industry -- a $5-billion (U.S.) per year business in the United States -- is strongly opposed to prohibiting either anonymous gamete donation or payment of gamete donors, because such prohibitions can decrease access to gametes. Yet, strikingly, altruism is used as a major marketing tool to recruit donors. I suggest that emphasis helps to suppress moral intuitions donors may experience about the ethics of what they are doing in relation to their resulting child. What is clear is that without payment, whether in cash or kind, many people -- in particular, women -- are not willing to donate.

Other, more general, questions I was asked in relation to freezing ova included whether women would now store ova as teenagers in order to attain their career goals before having babies in their 50s. The companion comment was invariably, "If men in their 70s can father a child (and usually Charlie Chaplin and Pierre Elliott Trudeau were mentioned as examples), what's wrong with a woman being a new mother at that age? Isn't preventing women from freezing their ova to use at any time during their lives, discrimination on the basis of sex and age?"

I would argue, again, that there is a difference ethically between that which happens naturally (old-age fatherhood) and that which is impossible naturally and requires a technological intervention to do an end run around nature (old-age motherhood).

Sometimes scientific advances solve some ethical problems rather than -- or, as well as -- creating new ones, and that is true of freezing ova. Just as we've been able to freeze sperm for young men whose fertility is threatened by cancer treatment, we can now freeze ova for young women in the same circumstances. That will avoid the ethically troublesome situation of having to create an embryo in order to preserve a young woman's opportunity to have her own genetic child and heartbreaking situations such as that of the British woman who stored embryos created with her partner's sperm before cancer treatment that left her infertile. Her partner later withdrew his consent for her use of the embryos and the European Court of Human Rights, the final court of appeal, consistent with all the other courts which heard the case, has just ordered them destroyed.

Ova freezing is just one more example that raises the broad question: How should we deal ethically with scientific advances in reproductive technologies? I propose that all these technologies must be ethically evaluated primarily through the lens of the children who will result from their use.

That lens requires that, at the very least, we first do no harm to those children; that we respect their fundamental human rights to come into being from natural biological origins; and that we act in their "best interests," in particular, in preserving their natural genetic relationships.

Except for concern about physical risks to children from using reproductive technologies, the focus up to now has been almost entirely on the rights of adults, who want to have a child, to use these technologies -- that is, only the adult lens has been used. That has caused a failure to consider, in the depth and breath required, both what ethics requires with respect to the children conceived through the use of reproductive technologies and the fundamental human rights of those children with respect to their coming into being.

Margaret Somerville is founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. Her recent book is The Ethical Imagination:

Journeys of the Human Spirit (Anansi, 2006).

2007-04-17T02:30:00.000-07:00

A growing culture of fatherlessness

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-hymowitz16apr16,0,3606964.story?coll=la-opinion-center

The legal dilemmas of erecting a wall between sperm donors and mothers.

By Kay S. Hymowitz, KAY S. HYMOWITZ is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. A longer version of this article will appear in its spring issue.
April 16, 2007

YOU'D THINK that we have enough problems keeping fathers around in this country, what with out-of-wedlock births and divorce. But these days, American fatherhood has yet another hostile force to contend with: artificial insemination, or AI.

While the number of kids born as a result of the procedure (about 1 million so far in the United States) is still quite small, AI is having a disproportionate cultural and legal effect and is advancing a cause once celebrated only in the most obscure radical journals: the dad-free family.

Today's sperm banks provide lengthy online catalogs of donors, containing such basic stats as height, hair color, eye color and education, as well as results from personality tests for an extra fee. The sophisticated marketing of sperm banks, which appeals to single women and lesbians as well as infertile married couples, has coincided with what I call the "unmarriage revolution" — that is, the decoupling of marriage and child-rearing. The California Cryobank, the country's largest sperm bank, estimates that about 40% of its customers are unmarried women. The Sperm Bank of California says that two-thirds of its clientele are lesbian couples.

In AI's early days, doctors worked to contain the potential ambiguities of paternity by signing birth certificates with the husband's name as father. Then in 1973, California and other states adopted the Uniform Parentage Act, which proposed that a woman's husband automatically be deemed the legal father of her AI children — assuming that he had consented to the procedure and that a doctor had performed the insemination of some other man's sperm. The donor dad was a legal cipher, just as he was a domestic one.

But with a growing number of AI cases involving single women and lesbian couples, the pretense of the donor's nonexistence is no longer tenable because there is no "other father." The issues then grow vastly more complicated: When is a sperm donor a father? Can his mother be the child's grandmother? Can a child have two mothers and no father?

Unfortunately, in the absence of any other authority, these questions have fallen to family court judges. The last label that these people imagine applying to themselves is "activist judge," but their decisions could be enshrining in law a profound cultural transformation that few Americans have had a chance to register, much less opine on.

The courts, in unwitting alliance with a fertility industry fiercely protective of anonymous sperm donation, have given their imprimatur to two nonsensical biological conditions: children who have no fathers and fathers who have no children. The old Uniform Parentage Act needed to resolve the potential problem of two fathers: the donor and the mother's husband. It should be obvious that in the case of a single or lesbian mother, where the donor is the only father, the act is not applicable.

But it hasn't proved obvious to most legal experts, who continue to be guided by the old formula: As long as a doctor performs the insemination or a sperm bank sells the sperm, the donor is not a father. This doesn't simply mean that the child is fatherless in the way that, say, an orphan is fatherless. Rather, according to the law, the child never had a father at all. The man involved was simply the originating site of organic material that was for sale, like a fish farm.

Legal scholars argue that we should reject biology as the basis of parentage in favor of "intentionality." It's the person — or persons — who planned the child who have parental rights and responsibilities. A sperm donor doesn't intend to become a parent, while the woman who uses his sperm does.

But intentionality is wildly inconsistent with the law's traditional presumption of paternal responsibility. Say a man has a drunken one-night stand. If the woman gets pregnant, the law sees him as a father, and he must pay child support for the next 18 years. But if a college student visits the local sperm bank twice a week for a year, produces a dozen children anonymously and pockets thousands of dollars, he can whistle his way back to econ class, no worries. Intentionality can't explain that legal disconnect.

As intentionality has supplanted biology, the law, by pretending nature doesn't exist, has pole-vaulted over reality. A family court in Burlington County, N.J., recently put two women on a state birth certificate. Some legal scholars are proposing that courts move beyond the "heterosexist model" entirely. Why not put three parents — or four, for that matter — on the birth certificate? The scholars had their way in January in Canada, when an Ontario court included a father, a mother and her lesbian partner on a birth certificate.

There are multiple ironies in this unfolding revolution, not least that the technology that allows women to have a family without men reinforces the worst that women fear in men. Think of all the complaints you hear: Men can't commit, they're irresponsible, they don't take care of the kids. By going to a sperm bank, women are unwittingly paying men to be exactly what they object to. But why expect anything different? The very premise of AI is that, apart from their liquid DNA, we can will men out of children's lives.

It's not a good idea for society to erect a wall between children and their biological fathers — nor to encourage men to disown their kids. In several nations, including Britain and Sweden, sperm donors must agree to be identified if the child wishes, typically as of age 18. It would be a good idea for America to follow suit.

But let's not kid ourselves that such a rule would also put an end to fatherlessness — which is nourished by our cultural predilection for individual choice unconstrained by tradition, the needs of children, or nature itself.

Saying No To Junk Male

2007-04-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

SPERM donors are becoming rare in WA.

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21498,21518415-2761,00.html?from=public_rss

The number of men wanting to become sperm donors has plummmeted since state laws changed to allow children conceived of donor sperm to have access to the identity of their biological father once they turn 16.

Waiting time for insemination with anonymous donor sperm has increased to nearly two years at some fertility clinics.

Bruce Belinge, reproductive biologist at the Concept fertility clinic, said changes to the law in December 2004 had made men more reluctant to become donors.

Each donor could be used to achieve only five pregnancies and ``our waiting list for access to donors has blown out beyond 12 months'', he said.

Helen Stapledon, 37, of Kingsley, who conceived her son Banjo with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, said she couldn't express how grateful she was to the donor.

Ms Stapledon, an accountant, said she approached a fertility clinic after deciding to become a single parent.

"I thought about it for quite a while and decided I didn't want to give up the idea of having children just because Mr Right hadn't come along,'' she said.

"I also didn't want to go into a relationship just to have a child.

"I didn't want a donor who I knew because, I guess, I didn't want someone else interfering. Also, if I do meet Mr Right, there's less baggage because there are no shared-custody issues.

"It doesn't bother me that Banjo may want to know his biological father in the future.

"I guess my overwhelming feeling is gratitude to the donor.

"Donors also have to agree to allow their sperm to be given to single women, so I'm extremely grateful he said yes to that.''

Dr Belinge said the profile of donors had changed.

"In the past, a lot of young guys were doing it for pocket money when they were going to university,'' he said.

"But the average donor now tends to be a bit more considered about his decision and have a more philanthropic approach. I think older men don't seem to be nearly as concerned about a donor child making contact with them.

"Evidence in other countries where donors have been identified shows that most donor children who contact their donor parent are not looking for anything more than an understanding of their roots - just to find out who they are and where they came from and perhaps a bit more information about their genetic parents and grandparents.''

Concept offers men $75 a donation. Dr Belinge said there were no thoughts of increasing the payment, but the clinic planned to increase its advertising to find more donors.

Steven Junk, scientific director at Fertility specialists of WA, said anonymous donors had become so scarce his clinic no longer canvassed for them and advised its clients to find their own donors.

"The law now is that the donor has to be identified once a child turns 16, so they may as well be identified now,'' he said.

"Many people find that while family members initially aren't willing to be donors, often they change their mind after counselling"

The donor cannot possibly have the emotional ties of real parents

2007-04-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

I just wrote the following in response to an assumption by Beck, a member of the Yahoo 'spermdonors' group, that a donor cannot possibly have the emotional ties of real parents:

"...that donor cannot possibly have the emotional ties of real parents...It is those interactions that form the emotional bonds. " (her quote)

Beck, I am in the position of both having raised three children over 25 years with a partner and also having met, almost six years ago now, two of the children I fathered as a sperm donor.

With both of these experiences at my disposal I can tell you quite categorically that what you state is wrong. In fact, the emotional ties I have with both sets of children are of equal intensity and importance; though perhaps even more so with the latter since I am constantly aware of the fact that they are the children who I effectively abandoned to be raised in 'a foreign land'.

If you think emotional ties and bonds are solely predicated on the mundane activities which accompany child-rearing then I think you are deluded: or maybe you really need to convince yourself of this for whatever reason? However, if you mean 'ties' in the sense that these activities promote the integration of a family's experience together - the shared ties that bind and hence form bonds, its gestalt perhaps - then I would at least allow you this. But, I think emotional bonds in themselves are transcendent of such activities: they exist along side them but not because of them.

I didn't need twenty tears of shared experiences, nor was I moved by recalling the accumulated dross of 7300 days or so of child-rearing, in order to experience the instantaneous and overwhelming emotional tidal wave of bonding which swirled over me when I met my two lost children for the first time. It was there in their very eyes, and in their long-unacknowledged longing to be re-united with their real father.

We didn't need to talk about this emotion. We all FELT it. We all KNEW that it was there.
We never had to sit down together and recount all the 'calming nightmares, bandaging bruises, sharing holidays, attending school plays, coaching teams, choosing schools and baby-sitters'
in order to better understand this bond which you talk about. Instead we sat down together and looked at all the family photographs in which I was absent: all the days of their upbringing of which I was not a part; and yet still I was: because I existed in them and they knew me, even though they didn't know precisely who I was nor why I was there, nor why they never saw themselves reflected in the man who raised them.

Yes, it was all about loss. But it was also about redemption: for in those first moments, and in all the moments since, my abandoned children and I have been reclaiming our lost relationship and learning to understand ourselves as reflected in the other: their recognizing 'me in them' and being able to re-write their identity accordingly: and my recognizing 'them in me' and hence being properly able to help them integrate me as their real father.

I am sorry, but it is for reasons such as this, that you Beck, and all the people who think like you, are misguided in the way in which you can so blithely dismiss the fundamental bonds which really tie children to their genetic parents. But then, you may simply accuse me of arguing about subtle energies which no doubt you will dismiss as intangible and, hence, not worthy of your obviously materialist inclination

However, "There are more things in heaven and earth, (Beck), Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. "

Don't mention the father

2007-03-30T20:10:00.000-07:00

On reading the preceding article I immediately wrote the following letter to the editor:

Carol Nader's article ( 'Making babies' 31/3) presents a precise but otherwise incomplete picture of the issues surrounding access to donor sperm for 'socially infertile' women in Victoria.

Whilst Nader portrays in fine detail the hardships and activities these women have had to undergo in circumventing the restrictions of Victoria's current infertility treatment legislation, she pays scant attention to how this quest for their 'most wanted children' ultimately entails the negation of the genetic rights to which these children are entitled.

For instance, she neglects to mention that children who are the result of inseminations presently carried out in NSW or Tasmania are not necessarily guaranteed information regarding the identity of the 'kind man (who) supplied the sperm' - the same man who is, of course, none other than their biological father. Indeed, it is not uncommon for women to travel to the clinic in Albury to purposefully ensure that the sperm they receive is from an anonymous donor. Sometimes, this may even be sperm which they have privately arranged to be imported from overseas sperm banks.

It needs to be affirmed that what 'matters most to children' should not be, as Sarah Wise implies, whether they grow up in a loving family - no matter what the makeup of that family be - but whether our laws accord with international covenants guaranteeing them a right to their full genetic history.

Hence, the primary concern of any new legislation should not be centred on legal recognition of the non-biological parent, but rather that full acknowledgement and identification of the 'missing' biological parent should be noted on birth certificates. Then, and only then, will a donor conceived person be guaranteed full disclosure regarding their genetic inheritance and unimpeded access to the identity of their father.

Whilst Victoria's current and proposed legislation supposedly gives pre-eminence to the best interests of the child, the Law Reform Commission in its deliberations over the past four years has consistently stepped away from its obligations under international law to ensure total transparency with regard to that same child's genetic identity. For this it must be condemned.

Don't mention the rights of the child...

2007-03-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

Making babies for all

Sacha Petersen, 17-month-old Mabel, conceived in an Albury clinic, and Anna Russell.
Photo: Rebecca Hallas

The Age, Melbourne

Carol Nader
March 31, 2007

TO MAKE their first baby, Anna Russell and Sacha Petersen drove 3½ hours to cross the NSW border to Albury. Petersen lay on a table, and a nurse inseminated her with a donor's sperm. Ten minutes later, what the couple call the "spermination" was complete. Blue-eyed baby Mabel was born 17 months ago.

Now Russell and Petersen are trying for a second child. The first donor is unavailable and the Albury clinic — traditionally the place where Victorian lesbians and single women go for fertility treatment — has all but run out of sperm donors. So the couple have shifted their hopes to Tasmania. Each month they fly to Launceston and leave Mabel with family there. Then they drive to Hobart, where Petersen receives treatment. They drive back to Launceston, pick up Mabel, and fly back to Melbourne. The couple have gone through this ritual five times, costing them about $5000 in airfares and treatment. But Petersen hasn't fallen pregnant.

If their sixth attempt in May fails, Petersen can be declared "medically infertile" — that means that under Victoria's labyrinthine laws governing reproductive treatment, she can receive IVF treatment in her own state for the first time.

"There's no logic behind it that we can see," Russell says. "The Federal Government is handing out money for straight people to have babies left, right and centre. The famous quote (by Treasurer Peter Costello) 'one for you, one for your partner, and one for Australia'. You have a whole community wanting to do that."

There is another anomaly. Victorian reproductive laws are the most restrictive in the country mainly because it was the most progressive state for infertility treatment in the early years. Victoria was one of the first places in the world to offer IVF, in which embryos are created using a woman's eggs and a man's sperm then implanted into the woman. It was the first Australian state to legislate in 1984 when IVF was so new and so controversial that it was strictly controlled. The sole purpose of IVF then was to help infertile married couples have biological children.

The medical technology has always bumped up against community unease. Even de facto heterosexual couples were banned from using it until a decade ago and, although attitudes towards lesbians and single women having children have changed dramatically in a generation, such people remain excluded unless they are clinically infertile.

Soon, that might change. The Victorian Law Reform Commission has spent more than four years reviewing the state's fertility legislation. Yesterday, it handed its final report to Attorney-General Rob Hulls, and its recommendations will be made public in coming weeks. In a draft report released in 2005, the commission indicated it would recommend that lesbian couples and single women be given the same access to fertility treatment as women in heterosexual relationships. That would have been unthinkable 20 years ago, when the notion of "social infertility" was unheard of.

Despite the rapidly changing definition of "family", the debate about whether Victoria should, like most other states, make it easier for single women and lesbians to have children is likely to be emotional and intense. In a sign of the discomfort the issue arouses, the Bracks Government has so far avoided making its position clear.

What is clear is that the impact of the restrictions has been profound for Victorian women desperate for a child who have been forced to travel around the country for treatment. The phenomenon even has a name — "reproductive tourism". Last year, the Albury clinic treated 44 women, of whom 30 were from Victoria. Thirteen were lesbians, 19 were single and eight were married. Victorian women also travel regularly to Canberra, Sydney, Hobart and Brisbane.

Those wanting change see the law as a mishmash of contradictions. For instance, for lesbians and single women, infertility can be a cause for celebration — they can have IVF treatment in Victoria. But fertile single women or lesbians, who do not have a male partner or who are unwilling to sleep with a man solely for the purpose of becoming pregnant, do not have access to reproductive help.

The anomaly is due to a court case six years ago. A single woman who could not conceive for medical reasons, Leesa Meldrum, and her doctor, Melbourne IVF director Dr John McBain, tested a ban on single women using IVF in the Federal Court. The court upheld their argument that state legislation contravened the federal Sex Discrimination Act. Since then, women can no longer be excluded based on marital status. But they still need to meet the requirement of infertility.

So women who are fertile have to be creative. They either ask a friend to provide the sperm and inseminate themselves at home, a practice some worry is unsafe. Or they travel interstate.

In the aftermath of the McBain case, Hulls asked the Law Reform Commission in 2002 to review the legislation. Its interim recommendations urged the Government to remove the infertility requirement and allow access for women who are "unlikely" to become pregnant without treatment. That would cover all women without a male partner.

The commission argued the law was unfair because it was applied unevenly — a single woman with a genetic abnormality that could be passed onto her child is eligible for treatment. A single woman of 45 may be eligible for treatment because her age has made her clinically infertile. But a single woman aged 35 who does not have clinical infertility cannot be treated. These distinctions, the report noted, "make no sense". Nor did it believe that the marital status of a child's parents was linked to the child's health and welfare.

One heterosexual woman who spoke to The Age first explored the idea of having a baby when she was 40 but was ineligible because she was single. She is now 43 and pregnant, but only because tests proved she was medically infertile. Instead of celebrating her pregnancy, she lives in fear that she is going to have another miscarriage — her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage late last year. "I've been waiting for this all my life and then it's not the journey it should have been," she says. "I want to celebrate it, but you're scared all the time. Your chances of doing it earlier are easier. You shouldn't have to wait until you're infertile and you have 50 million obstacles in front of you."

There are other quirks caused by galloping technology. If a woman can find her own sperm donor, the Melbourne IVF clinic will screen and store the sperm for six months to make sure it is safe. She can then take it home and inseminate herself. The clinic can do all the tests but not the insemination. The aim is to reduce a woman's vulnerability to HIV.

Alice Murray and her partner are trying to have a baby using this program. "Both my partner and I work full time and going to Sydney when you're ovulating, which might be mid-week, is impractical from a work perspective," she says. "If you're working in a professional environment you can't just drop everything and leave."

The law may change to allow women to be inseminated in a clinic. But even if they could, some women might still choose to do it at home.

Dr Ruth McNair, a Melbourne University senior lecturer in general practice and a GP who specialises in gay and lesbian health, believes self-insemination is relatively safe. She says some women prefer the autonomy of doing it themselves. And some like the idea of giving gay men the opportunity of being parents, too. But if it isn't clear where they all stand — or if feelings change after the birth — it can lead to problems later.

"The most fraught part of it is the medical risk of transmitting infection, and secondly the legal risk if they haven't managed to make an adequate written negotiated contract," McNair says.

Dr Deb Dempsey, a lecturer in sociology at Swinburne University, says the law needs to catch up with the complexity of people's relationships. "Children deserve to be well supported and have legal recognition for the people that are actually parenting them," she says.

Opponents of lesbians and single women having access to IVF argue that children are better off being part of a traditional family. In the storm following the McBain case, Prime Minister John Howard said: "Children are entitled to the opportunity of both a mother and a father." His views were echoed by State Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu, who said in the lead-up to the November state election: "My view is that IVF ought to be for heterosexual couples."

When the Law Reform Commission released its interim report, Health Minister Tony Abbott blasted its "apparent dismissal of the traditional notion that children should ideally have male and female parents".

Australian Family Association spokeswoman Angela Conway says the priority should be the rights of the child. "Children do best in the context of family life, where their natural mother and father are involved in their day-to-day life and upbringing as their recognised parents, and preferably where that natural mother and father are married," she says.

But the Law Reform Commission has reviewed the literature and does not believe this is the case. It says there is sound evidence that children born into families with non-biological parents or same-sex parents do at least as well as other children.

According to social researchers, there is scant evidence that children who are not raised by a father and mother in a traditional way are worse off than children who are.

Sarah Wise, the principal research fellow in children and parenting at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, says the research, predominantly from the United States, does not suggest that children's wellbeing is at risk. Whether they're raised by one parent or two, a heterosexual couple or a gay one, is less important than the quality of care," she says.

"What matters most to children is the environment in which they grow up, the quality of the interactions they have with their care-givers and the security that they feel within those relationships."

What may be harmful to children is the lack of legal recognition given to the non-birth mother in a lesbian relationship. The non-biological, or "social" mother, does not have the right to be on the child's birth certificate and is not recognised as the legal parent in Victoria.

However, in another anomaly, if a heterosexual couple uses donor sperm to have a child, the woman's male partner is on the birth certificate.

The Law Reform Commission has suggested the non-birth mother deserves legal recognition and should appear on the birth certificate alongside the birth mother. Acting chairman Dr Iain Ross says if the birth mother dies , there is legal ambiguity about the rights and obligations of the surviving partner and it would be possible that the child could become a ward of the state. Then there are issues to do with inheritance and being able to consent to medical treatment and sign school forms.

"At worst, you've got a position where someone who was for all intents and purposes the parent of the children does not have any legal rights," Ross says. "They're not recognised as the parent and would have to seek some sort of legal intervention."

Robyn Hamilton and Helen Grutzner want this legal recognition. They have a four-year-old daughter, Harper, who was conceived in a Sydney clinic. They believe the non-birth mother, Hamilton, should automatically be considered a legal parent from birth. Their only recourse was to go to the Family Court to get a parenting order that gives her limited recognition of responsibility but doesn't give her legal status as a parent.

Anyone can apply for such an order — a grandparent, relative, even a friend. The order enables non-biological mothers to make some day-to-day decisions. But if anything were to happen to Grutzner, Hamilton would not necessarily get custody of Harper. That would depend on the good will of the court.

"It has an undermining impact on us as a family, in that we don't have that legal recognition and protection that other families do," says Grutzner.

Felicity and Sarah Marlowe are in a similar position, although they have not yet applied for a parenting order. Sarah Marlowe is medically infertile and can legally have IVF in Victoria. Her partner can't. Marlowe had twins Callum and Rafi, who are nine months old. As the birth mother, only her name is on the birth certificates. Even though the couple went through the process of having children together, Felicity Marlowe has no legal rights. She could walk away from the relationship and not be obligated to pay child support. If Sarah Marlowe ended the relationship, her partner may never see the twins again.

Meanwhile, for the women who are still trying to have a baby, the frustration and sense of grievance lingers. "We have a good house in the suburbs," says Alice Murray.

"We can afford to send our kids to good schools, we earn good money, we're in the best position to be parents, we want it more than a lot of people and there are roadblocks in the way."

Anna Russell and Sacha Petersen are creating story books for their children to explain how they were conceived. They've made one for Mabel, detailing how the couple met, fell in love and knew they wanted to have babies together.

But, the story goes, to have babies, you need an egg and sperm — but "mum" and "muma" are both girls who only have eggs. So they got into their little blue car and drove to a place called Albury, where a kind man supplied the sperm.

Mabel will know her story from the start. But more importantly, says Russell: "Our children will know that they're the most wanted children, because we had to go all over Australia to create them."

Victorian sperm banks looking for 'the right stuff'

2007-03-30T20:03:00.000-07:00

Footballers begged to lend a hand to help increase supplies of sperm

The Age, Melbourne

Carol Nader
March 31, 2007

ELITE AFL footballers are being asked to lend a hand to lift the nation's sperm supplies.

As the AFL season starts this weekend, fertility clinic Monash IVF will write to the 10 Victorian-based AFL clubs, asking their players to become sperm donors.

Another clinic, Melbourne IVF, is lifting a 20-year ban on gay men becoming sperm donors. It has not permitted gay men to be donors since HIV became a problem in the 1980s. But gay men have been allowed to donate sperm for friends.

The two clinics are on a recruiting drive in anticipation of changes to state laws that will put their sperm supplies under even more pressure.

The Victorian Law Reform Commission has spent more than four years reviewing the state's fertility legislation. Yesterday, it handed its final report to Attorney-General Rob Hulls. A key recommendation is likely to be that single women and lesbians be permitted access to donor insemination and IVF, regardless of whether or not they are clinically infertile.

Melbourne IVF donor counselling co-ordinator Kate Bourne said while she supported the changes, the "floodgates" would open. She urged men to think about coming forward. "Donors aren't wankers," she said. "The donors I've had contact with have been genuinely nice men."

Melbourne IVF has changed its policy on gay donors because it is confident that sperm can be safely screened for HIV. Couples would be aware of the donor's sexuality before selecting them.

Monash IVF managing director Donna Howlett said the clinic was also considering approaching Victoria Police. It tried to recruit AFL footballers about 10 years ago, and sought the sperm of Victorian MPs two years ago. Neither drive was overly successful, but they raised awareness.

"If we get support from high-profile footballers it may highlight the need for donor sperm."

2007-03-16T15:07:00.000-07:00

Sperm donor kids win inheritance after DNA tests

By Janet Fife-Yeomans

March 16, 2007 12:00am

Article from:

THREE children have won a share of the estate of a man said to be their sperm donor father after using tweezers to pluck his eyebrows for DNA testing as he lay dead in a hospital morgue.

In a landmark decision, the NSW Supreme Court yesterday granted administration of Willem Wijma's estate to one of those children, ruling against his family's wishes.

It is a judgment that raises questions about the legal rights of thousands of men who have donated sperm – and alarm among the men's families who face sharing their inheritance with a stranger.

"I haven't heard of a case like this before," Leonie Hewitt of the Donor Conception Support Group said.

Mr Willem's daughters from his marriage, Janna and Tineke, claimed the "sperm donor" children had ransacked their father's house, stolen and destroyed his will and showed "unseemly haste" in plucking his hair for DNA testing.

But Justice Ian Gzell found Mr Willem, who died in October 2001 aged 75, with an estate worth about $500,000 including a house and car, had died without a will.

The court was told Mr Willem and his family migrated to Australia in the 1950s but his wife and daughters returned to Holland after the couple divorced.

He then fathered three children – Julie Mougalis, Jeffrey Sullivan and Scott Sullivan – with Constance Sullivan, whose husband, Ed, was infertile but did not know it.

The children grew up believing Ed Sullivan was their father until their mother told them the truth in 1995 after Mr Sullivan died.

Mr Sullivan also believed he was their father.

Mr Willem's Dutch daughters claimed he told them in 1995 that he had a brief affair with Mrs Sullivan. Then, in the days before IVF, she had returned to ask him to be a sperm donor because she wanted children.

Mrs Sullivan told the court the children were born out of love.

Justice Gzell said yesterday Mr Willem, caretaker of the former Koala Inn apartment complex on Sydney's Oxford St, had never supported her children.

"They were careful to avoid any public acknowledgement of their relationship," he said.

However after the Sullivan children found out he was their biological father, they met Mr Willem and he "appears to have cared for them", the judge said.

Friend Hendrik Korporaal, said that, shortly after confessing he was the father of the Sullivan children, Mr Willem discussed his will.

He said Mr Willem told him: "I want the bulk of my things to go to my two daughters. You are my executor . . . I know that when I die the vultures will come out."

Justice Gzell rejected any suggestion the Sullivan family had stolen a will and said evidence pointed to it having been destroyed beforehand.

DNA testing proved they were Mr Willem's biological children after their solicitor plucked his eyebrow hair as he lay in Port Macquarie Base Hospital.

How Do Donors Really Think?

2007-02-17T04:13:00.000-08:00

The Millionth Muse.

Christmas just happened. What was that all about then?

Apparently, it's for the kids. And since, at the age of 23, this is the first year my sister has not bought me an advent calendar, and my personal Christmas run-up (as opposed to the commercial Christmas run-up which appears to begin in August) has not been punctuated by the promise of some cocoa-based snowman for breakfast, it seems the theory works. Never mind the barmitzvah, the year you realise you are sending cards to everyone in your filofax and not everyone in your class at school, is surely the time to admit you're a man.

Bit of a shame really, and it's set my mind wondering as to where the kids are in my life. I have some, but I do not know where they are.

On Christmas morning in my sister's spare room, lying in an extremely hard, silly single bed, I was woken by a selection box of crumpling, swearing, and banging of head on the side of the bath as aforementioned sibling attempted to wee on a paddle. Having waited until she was busting to "go" , she had left her unslept in, tangled bed and locked herself in the bathroom with a little blue box. Some time later she emerged in my doorway with the greeting "Merry Christmas, Uncle Paul."

My sister is having a baby, and I do not know another sentence that can make my brother-in-law, my mother, and my father find such unknown delight on their faces.

Christmas is for the kids. And if we were not all delirious enough this year, when the sprog has finally arrived and is playing with a large cardboard box (which five minutes earlier contained an extremely expensive, but sadly ignored Fisher Price entertainment centre) next December the 25th we'll be tripping over ourselves like idiots.

I am having a baby too.

I do not know when it is due, and I will not be with them on Christmas day.

I do not know who the mother is.

I am a sperm donor. Was a sperm donor.

Linda at the clinic called me up the other day; "We don't need you to come anymore." (I suppressed a laugh) "Perhaps you should pop in and I'll explain."

Typical, I can't even sell my own sperm. Obviously I^'ve not been selling and will be found in the catalogue as a two for the price of one offer, line discontinued. Brings a whole new meaning to the January sales. I suppose my sperm is not attractive to the average couple, gagging for a threesome. Donor number 432; blue eyes, brown hair, 5ft 11", 23yrs old.

Trained as a drama student, gave up after six months to become a writer, history of alcoholism in the family, has tendency to demolish kettles.

Clearly, they were looking for someone with a degree in accountancy who knows all the words to Rule Britannia and traces his family tree at weekends.

Not so.

Linda informs me I've done my bit. Legally, one is only allowed to donate a maximum of ten prizes to the baby raffle.

TEN! I've had ten babies?

Well, technically no, but most of the parents (Parents! Who are these usurpers?!) have applied for another kid from the same carton and I have been popped in the deep freeze until such time as they can afford to have another spare bedroom decorated. And although forced into it I suppose there comes a time in one's life when one must stop being a wanker and get a proper job.

Ten kids.

I wonder what their names will be. I wonder if they'll look like me. I wonder if they'll become

alcoholics.

I did not wonder any of these things as I was jizzing them into a plastic cup, but when it came to the crunch, it was a bit like being told you've won the lottery but cannot have the money.

I told my family on Christmas day, only one report of a disgusted party (older brother, sleeping with five different women at the moment and must have some sort of venereal disease by now).

Next Christmas the majority of my five-a-side football match will have been born and I shall wet the baby's head in a silent, Southern Comfort-type way. I don't know where it leaves me. Not in my sister's spare room, as that will undoubtedly be a nursery by then. I don't know were it leaves this article either. What can I say? Ten kids. It's something to think about.

PAUL MARTIN

Paul Martin is a writer and actor who has to do other jobs to pay the rent. He wrote in Mag 3 about kettles.
http://atschool.eduweb.co.uk/hojoy/mag5/mag5.html

And Then There Were More...

2007-02-16T20:06:00.000-08:00

Dad's happy to see this father and child reunion

The eyes have it: Brian Wollaston (right) with his biological child Daisy Gleeson and her father, Paul Gleeson.
Photo: Craig Abraham

Carol Nader
February 17, 2007
The Age: Melbourne, Australia

A potentially fraught search for a biological father has had the happiest of endings.

THEY could have passed each other in the street many times over many years, two strangers oblivious to their biological connection.

Daisy Gleeson had wondered all her life who her biological father was. As it turns out, he was living in the next suburb.

The Age first told Daisy's story in June 2005. She was 17 and had grown up with the knowledge that a sperm donor helped conceive her. But she was curious: who was he? Since then, Daisy has had some closure. She has found him.

Daisy's parents, Paul and Andrea, had explained to her from the start that they needed another man's help to have her. Daisy, an intelligent child, easily digested the information. But at about the age of six, she burst into tears one day and blurted out: "Daddy's not my daddy!"

Mrs Gleeson explained that that wasn't true. Your daddy is the man who is raising you. That put the matter to rest, temporarily. By the time she entered her teens, her curiosity was piqued and with it came impatience. "Can't you ring the hospital now?" Daisy would say from her Warrandyte home. The long wait until her 18th birthday stretched out before her.

In the neighbouring suburb of Eltham, Brian Wollaston, the man she urgently wanted to meet, went about his own life, unaware of all the fuss.

Had his surname been Smith, Daisy may have been left to wonder forever. But in the end, it was his unusual surname that helped Daisy find him. That, and the impeccable record-keeping of the Royal Women's Hospital, which tracked him down.

Daisy, now 19, remembers the day she got the call. "I think I've found him," the counsellor said. Suddenly, he had become a real person. "It messed with my mind," she says. "It was all-consuming." Long before she started searching, counsellors were preparing her for the worst. The fear of rejection was in the back of her mind. Would he refuse to meet her?

Mr Wollaston got the letter from the hospital telling him someone was looking for him. He called the hospital. Daisy had prepared a list of questions that she wanted answered. What was his favourite football team? What food did he like? What was his favourite Italian motorbike? And was there a history of medical problems in his family?

The counsellor made several phone calls to Mr Wollaston, each time asking for something extra. He had been a sperm donor at a time when the law allowed him to remain anonymous. Would he be willing to let Daisy know his name?

And five phone calls later, the most tricky question - would he meet her?

"I was always going to," Mr Wollaston said this week during a gathering with Daisy and her parents at the Fairfield Boathouse. "I made the donation in a certain spirit, and I wasn't going to cut her off at the knees."

The relationship started tentatively. First, there were nervous emails. Then they swapped photos. At last, Daisy knew what he looked like.

Then came the first meeting. They decided on an Eltham cafe - neutral territory. Daisy had pictured him in her head a million times, even before she had seen the photos. She watched him crossing the street until he was standing in front of her. Then she gave him a big hug. They have since become, in Daisy's words, "unique friends".

Mr Wollaston decided to become a sperm donor when he had just had his own child and thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to help others? So he went to the clinic. It's not a romantic ritual and he "went through every well-thumbed magazine in the place". The result is 14 children conceived with his sperm, in addition to his own three children. His wife worries that one of their children might bring home a girlfriend or boyfriend that is related, a tiny possibility but still possible. "The ramifications of that are severe," he says.

Daisy is lucky she found him. Many young adults will never be able to trace their roots. For those wanting to find out their origins, they can apply to the Infertility Treatment Authority, which keeps registers for donors, children and their parents.

For Mr Gleeson, who had five children from a previous marriage, infertility was never a problem. He had had a vasectomy and when he and his wife decided they wanted a child, he considered reversing it. But the medical advice was that it probably would not have worked.

Mrs Gleeson says: "I've been just as curious as Daisy is, and I was hoping for a good ending to the story. And it seems to be a good ending."

LINK: www.ita.org.au

A Donor Who Dared (More Needed)

2007-02-15T02:50:00.000-08:00

Jeffrey Harrison, once a highly requested sperm donor, with a biological daughter, Ryann M., in Los Angeles, and two of his dogs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/14/us/14donor.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

There is no established ritual for how an anonymous sperm donor should contact his genetic children. But for Jeffrey Harrison, Valentine’s Day seemed as good an occasion as any.

“It’s a short life,” he said, “and these children need to have some kind of resolution. I thought I could send a little valentine, kind of, to everyone, just saying hello.”

Mr. Harrison had been thinking about getting in touch since reading in an article in The New York Times 15 months ago that two teenagers whose mothers had used his sperm to conceive were looking for him. The headline, “Hello, I’m Your Sister, Our Father Is Donor 150,” made him choke on his coffee, said Mr. Harrison, who made $400 a month donating sperm under that number twice-weekly during the late 1980s.

But California Cryobank, the sperm bank that had promised anonymity to its customers and to Mr. Harrison, proved unresponsive to his repeated requests for assistance. Besides, he had misgivings. What if the girls were disappointed by his humble circumstances?

Once one of the sperm bank’s most-requested donors, with a profile that described him as 6 foot and blue-eyed with interests in philosophy, music and drama, Mr. Harrison, 50, lives with his four dogs in a recreational vehicle near the Venice section of Los Angeles.

“I make a meager living,” Mr. Harrison said, taking care of dogs and doing other odd jobs.

Still, he said he thought he could explain to the girls why he had taken an unconventional life-path. Their grandfather was an Ivy League-educated retired financial executive, he would tell them; their grandmother was a former volunteer president for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

Six weeks ago, Mr. Harrison logged on to the Donor Sibling Registry, the Web site devoted to facilitating connections between donor-conceived offspring, where the two girls, Danielle P. and JoEllen M. had initially found each other. Four more teenagers from his sperm samples had since surfaced, he saw on the logs.

How many could he handle, he wondered?

As Valentine’s Day approached, though, Mr. Harrison resolved to get in touch with them all.

Last Saturday night, Mr. Harrison e-mailed a picture of his birth certificate to Wendy Kramer, the founder of the sibling registry, to confirm his identity. Several dozen donors have contacted offspring on the registry, Ms. Kramer said, but none have been brave enough to come forward with such a large group of teenagers.

“You don’t know what to expect,” Ms. Kramer said. “How do we define this family, and what are we to each other?”

Danielle and JoEllen called Mr. Harrison together the next day. The moment that had preoccupied their fantasies for years began in a more prosaic fashion than they had anticipated. But they said they were not disappointed.

“The first thing he said was, ‘Holy moly,’ ” said Danielle, 17, who has spent several hours on the phone with Mr. Harrison in the last three days. “He’s sort of a free spirit, and I don’t care what career he has. I got to talk to his dogs.”

Mr. Harrison met a third daughter, Ryann M., in Los Angeles yesterday afternoon. His other newfound offspring, who live in Colorado, Florida, New York and Pennsylvania, are busy marveling over their shared love of animals and the distinctive forehead evident in the pictures he has e-mailed.

2007-02-02T14:21:00.000-08:00

Sorry chaps, but you're utterly redundant...(that's what feminists and scientists believe — and humanity can go to hell)

Author:Melanie Phillips - The Daily Mail

Her name was Frances Swiney, a feminist whose vision for the sisterhood and humanity was more than a trifle extreme.

She thought men were the waste products of the reproductive process and wanted them eliminated. Her ideal method was asexual reproduction — the creation of children without a man involved.

That way, she thought, women could look forward to the "gradual extinction of the distinctive male organism and the assimilation of the male to the female".

Until now, people like Mrs Swiney, who lived in the 19th century, were considered to be several apples short of a picnic. But now her vision of a female-only world is all but with us.

Sorry to tell you, men, but you are shortly to be declared redundant, superfluous to the requirements of the human race, written out of the reproductive script. Cheerio and please close the door behind you on your way out of history.

At least this is the prospect laid out before us by the latest lurch into the brave new world of medical research.

In the attempt to find a cure for male infertility, a Newcastle University biologist, Karim Nayernia, has succeeded in using artificially produced sperm to fertilise mouse eggs.

He removed stem cells from mouse embryos and coaxed them into developing into sperm, which was used to fertilise eggs transplanted into female mice, resulting in the birth of seven baby rodents.

Blighted

Professor Nayernia believes his work offers hope to men whose lives are blighted by their inability to father children.

However, the rest of us might wonder whether he is sounding the death knell for fatherhood altogether — and, more to the point, threatening to undermine the very basis of what it is to be human.

The success of these experiments opens up a number of possibilities. One is to extract stem cells from an infertile man and use these to grow sperm in a laboratory. These could then be transplanted back into the man's testicles, enabling him to procreate in the normal way.

That at least — despite the awesome safety issues to be overcome — would retain the man's genetic connection with any child he produced, as well as allowing him to father that baby through a normal sexual union.

But other possibilities are far more problematic.

It would become possible, for example, to use stem cells not from the infertile man at all, but from embryos which are routinely produced in IVF clinics, but are then discarded as surplus to requirements.

This would mean there would be no genetic connection whatever between "father" and child.

Moreover, such a process could mean the eggs being fertilised might not even come from the mother of the child being produced. Instead, spare eggs donated by another woman could be fertilised by the artificial sperm.

As a result, there might be no genetic connection with either parent.

This could mean courtship and sexual love would be replaced by the mating dance of test tubes.

How would a child feel about the fact that one or both of his parents was merely a cluster of randomly selected cells grown artificially in a laboratory?

How would he feel, indeed, to know that his parent was a discarded human embryo?

The truth is that having a mother and father is essential to our sense of identity.

That's why family disintegration is so harmful to children and why the stampede to produce and bring up children without a biological father around — through artificial insemination by donor, IVF or sperm banks — spells disaster for the future.

Test-tube mating could deliver a terminal blow to the pulverised nuclear family True, we have already under-mined sexual reproduction and genetic transmission through IVF.

But at least the mother in such cases has a powerful biological connection to the baby.

Fatherhood, however, is altogether trickier.

Since human babies take years to become independent, they need prolonged care. It is difficult to furnish this while simultaneously providing subsistence and protection.

That's why the human male is essential, to protect and nurture the mother and child.

But the male needs a certain amount of cultural coaxing to stick around. And essential to that bargain between the sexes is his certainty that he is the father of the child.

Fragile

While there is no such question mark over motherhood because women bear the baby, fathering, by contrast, is a socially constructed institution.

Men have a fragile sense of their role in the human drama. At some deep level, they dread that they are merely an add-on to a female genetic inheritance.

As we can see from the epidemic of fatherlessness, it doesn't take much for them to say "I'm off!" if they feel pushed away.

And pushed away they have certainly been. No one bats an eyelid when a woman has a baby without a father on board.

Male breadwinning is regarded as an unforgiveable anachronism. Masculine characteristics such as stoicism or emotional restraint are scorned or vilified.

And now, men find that their active involvement in the reproductive process might be by-passed altogether.

Currently, it is against British law to create a baby without the need for a man — even if a child can be brought up without one.

But considering how all our taboos are being systematically smashed in the interests of fulfilling every desire, can anyone doubt that, if the technological problems can be overcome, medical ethics and the law will be adjusted to suit?

Clearly, these developments have the potential to undermine parenthood and our very understanding of kinship and human identity itself.

As so often, the aims are noble — to remedy the suffering of childlessness. But medical research, which invariably takes the amoral view that the end justifies the means, brushes aside the fact that the damage such advances may do to our society might hugely outweigh any benefits they may bring.

Brutalise

Already, the use of discarded embryos has helped brut-alise our society by commodifying and cannibalising early human life.

And most outlandishly of all, some even claim it is theoretically possible to produce sperm from female cells and eggs from male ones.

This seems frankly absurd. There is no form of higher animal life that has not depended on sexual reproduction. But now that scientists are modern gods, who knows what unnatural developments might become possible?

Such a world, where procreation was through asexual reproduction, was the vision of those early feminists, such as Mrs Swiney.

But in their book The Ethics Of Human Cloning, the American thinkers James Q. Wilson and Leon Kass wrote: "Only sexual animals can seek and find complementary others with whom to pursue a goal that transcends their own existence."

In other words, sexual reproduction produces the sense of generosity and concern for others on which our human society is built.

The authors also observed that asexual reproduction was found only in the lowest forms of life: bacteria, algae, fungi and some lower invertebrates.

Would it not be an irony if, through their egregious hubris, the effect of the most brilliant scientific minds in the most advanced age known to mankind was to reduce the human race to the status of primordial slime?

When I Look In the Mirror...

2007-02-01T23:20:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth has very kindly allowed me to reprint the following post from her blog:

http://frabjousdays.blogspot.com/

I think she portrays quite perfectly both the subliminal and overt identity questioning which donor-conceived people experience when they have been kept in the dark about their origins.

Brown-eyed girl

When I was 15, I found out by chance that I was donor conceived. There were a couple of letters in a drawer that I didn't know I shouldn't be looking in. They were from a clinic in Harley Street and were addressed to my mother. One was dated a year or so before I was born, and said that the clinic would be happy to help my mother again, and would 'try to ensure that the same donor is used'. The other was dated about seven months before I was born, and talked about 'the second success'.

I tackled my mother about this, and she gave me a cock-and-bull story about blood tests. I didn't have the courage to pursue the matter, so I gave up. A few months later I tried again, and didn't give up. She broke down in tears, and told me that they had never intended us to find out, but that my 'father' had been unable to have children, so they'd gone for 'artificial insemination by donor' as it was known in those days. Apparently they'd matched the donor with my 'father's' hair and eye colour, and that was that.

Then the lies began. The man listed as my father on my birth certificate, isn't. No-one knew, or even guessed, the truth. The little lies my mother told helped the deception. My brother had big hands like Dad. My sister had blue eyes like Great-Granny Alice (on my 'father's' side. The correct term these days is 'social father'.) What I have only just realised is that these lies even extend to what colour eyes I think I have. Mark and I have a long-running joke/argument: he says I've got green eyes, I say they're brown. When I look in the mirror, I do see that the nearest they get to brown is hazel. Maybe. But the reason I think they're brown is that my mother always said I had brown eyes like Dad. So all along, in school essays entitled 'Myself' or letters to penpals or anything, I have said I have brown eyes. But I don't!

I did always worry as a child that I was adopted, and even quizzed my mother about it on several occasions. 'You would tell us if we were adopted, wouldn't you?' 'Oh, yes.' My mother even told a story of a boy who killed himself on discovering, at the age of 18, that he was adopted. Strange choice of anecdote in the circumstances.

I did also feel a bit like a changeling. For example, I had my nose in a book from an early age. My mother had done well at school, but wasn't a reader; I never saw my 'dad' open a book except for a car repair manual. He left school at 16 with no qualifications. (He said he'd failed them on purpose so that Grandma couldn't force him to become a doctor. Hmmm.) But he apparently produced three children who were in all the top sets at school...

The irony is that I spent several years as a teenager (OK, I was a weird teenager) researching my family tree. My mother and I went into the wilds of Leicestershire looking at obscure parish records to see how far back we could get. As I found out, these random Leicestershire labourers were nothing to do with me.

Now there is a great big gap in the children's baby books for their grandfather. I've registered with UK DonorLink (a voluntary agency where donors and donor conceived adults can register their DNA) but realistically, there is a minute chance that I will ever find the donor. He did the deed for money as a medical student and has probably wiped the memory from his mind. I did, however, find my half-sister; meeting her has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me.

Funnily enough, for years I perpetuated the lie with my own children. How on earth do you broach the subject with tinies? But at some point I realised that I was repeating, albeit in a minor way, my parents' own deception. We'd covered the facts of life in a basic way when Gregoria was about 4, because she asked. So I just told her at some point that the daddy who brought me up wasn't my real daddy because he coudn't make seeds, so my mummy got the seed from someone else and unfortunately we don't know who that is. Now that is as normal to her as anything else. She knows I'm sad about it, and that's OK too.

I am passionately opposed to donor conception, because it deprives children of a basic human right: to know, and be brought up by, their mother and father. It is completely different from adoption, because in that case the child already exists and needs to be cared for. Donor conception exists for the convenience of people who want to be parents. Wanting a baby is a natural desire, but is not to be achieved by unethical means. Why can't infertile people adopt a baby? 'Because it wouldn't be ours.' Why do they privilege the genetic link on the one hand and deny it on the other?

I could go on and on, but for the sake of my home educating readership, won't. Please excuse me venting. This is part of my journey of self-acceptance. (When I was exploring Catholicism and finding out about Catholic opposition to various artificial means of conception, including this one, I worried that perhaps it meant that I didn't have a soul!) For many years this was my guilty secret. Now it's part of who I am.

If I Were You I Would...

2007-01-26T21:13:00.000-08:00

Yesterday my wife and I arranged to meet with some friends in the park because it was a sunny Australia Day holiday and we hadn't caught up with them since before Christmas.

They are a couple in their early forties and they had brought with them a friend of theirs (let's call him P) who had just separated from his partner after 15 or so years.

So we got drinking and talking and as evening came on we moved to a local bar where, in addition, we got some eating done as well.

I don't quite know how it happened but somewhere in the middle of our conversations P announced that he was a former sperm donor and that in fact he knew my story quite well and, as a consequence, I had inspired him to register his name with our Infertility Treatment Authority as being a donor who would be amenable to being contacted by his children should they wish to find him (as I have also done).

He told me that he knew he had produced ten children in a total of nine families but this is all he knew and that he really didn't want to know any more than that. But the most surprising information he gave me was that he became a donor in 1988 which just happens to be the year when landmark legislation which governs infertility treatment in Victoria was first enacted.

One of the most contentious pieces of that legislation is that it gives donors the right to attempt to initiate contact with their child when that child reaches the age of majority which in our country is 18. Hence from the 1st of July last year it has been legally possible for donors in the 1988 cohort to approach the Infertility Treatment Authority to request that their child be informed of their existence.

The oft-cited problem with this arrangement has been that - as is well known and acknowledged - despite being counselled to do otherwise, only a very small percentage of donation recipients are prepared to inform their children of their donor-conceived status.

It has not been surprising, therefore, that in the last six months not one single donor-conceived adult from the 1988 cohort has approached the Authority to exercise their equal legislated right to access information about their donor. And the same applies to the donors who it seems, in the main, are just not interested or don't want to know about it.

So there I was sitting right next to someone who has all the power which I do not possess: the ability to seek out a lot more information about his children than I will ever be able to do (short of burglary!) and yet he professed no wish to do so even though he has never had children with
any of his partners.

I must say the urge for me to proselytise was overwhelming and had it not been for P's openness, intelligence and honesty I might well have become akin to a rabid prophet.

What could I say to this man who, as a 23 year old, had donated for pretty much the same naive and mercenary reasons I did and had swallowed lock stock and barrel the clinic's argument that really it was not much different from donating blood and besides he was giving childless couples the 'gift of life': all the usual altruistic rubbish.

So I levelled with him. I told him things that he probably didn't know: that he could at least request of the clinic that he be given non-identifying information regarding his children.
This will tell him their gender and what years they were born in and, if he is lucky, some brief details regarding the ethnic background, occupations and place of residence of the parents.

And I further told him, that armed with the knowledge of their birthdates, he would know precisely when those children turn 18 and will therefore be able to request to make contact with them when the time arises.

But getting him to realise, despite his reluctance to do so, that he has - from my perspective at least - a moral duty to announce his existence to his children was a pretty hard nut to crack.

This is not to say I don't respect his concern for the incredible impact this announcement might have on these children and the ramifications for their families but I cannot subscribe to the notion that "what they don't know won't hurt them" because in this instance it is precisely 'what they don't know' which is hurting them and their relationships with their parents whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

Ultimately, I am more inclined to assert that "the truth will set you free"; and I told P so.

This was one of the first times I had found myself having an in-depth conversation with a fellow donor about all these issues. It helped that he had obviously thought long and hard about his act of donating during the subsequent two decades since he did so.

All I could hope was that I was having some impact on him and might push him closer towards accepting that he is indeed the father of his donated children and has every right to assert that status despite what the law might say or what others might want to deny.

All the while he and I were talking my wife was having a somewhat more heated discussion with our female friend who needed a lot of convincing that donor conception is a bad idea until she was made to realise that DC people don't even have the same rights or are awarded the same openness about their origins as truly adopted people are.

My wife told me later that it was at this point where she finally won our friend over and that she also happened to notice that P, who was standing there at the time, turned away with tears in his eyes.

Later we went back to P's house and he knocked together a wonderful gourmet salad.

The evening concluded with much inebriation at 3 a.m.

When we said goodbye P and I gave each other a big hug because we are truly brothers now.

And he said that he will.

Spot-On Dr Dalrymple

2007-01-25T15:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/01/22/do2201.xml&sSheet=/portal/2004/01/22/ixportal.html

The fact that there are single mothers doesn't make it right

By Theodore Dalrymple
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 22/01/2004

The worst child abusers in the country have been successive British governments. They have done everything in their power, by means of social reform and fiscal policies, to promote the very circumstances in which child abuse and neglect are most likely to take place. He who says single parenthood – at least in Britain – says moral, spiritual and emotional degradation, squalor and deprivation. He who promotes single parenthood is indifferent to the fate of children.

Yet another step on the primrose path to perdition has just been proposed by the chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Suzi Leather (beware of people in authority who use diminutives of their names). She has suggested that, henceforth, the clause requiring doctors to take account of the need of a child for a father, when offering in vitro fertilisation to infertile women, should be removed from the law. The idea that fathers are necessary or even desirable in the lives of children is, in the opinion of Ms Leather, too old-fashioned to be entertained any longer.

Ms Leather is one of those who think that the social trends she no doubt approves of are self-justifying. "It is absolutely clear," she said, "if you think about the changes in society and the different ways that families can be constituted that it is anachronistic for the law to include the statement about the need for a father." That is to say, if enough people do something, it is right, and the law should lend its imprimatur to it. If you think about it, it is absolutely clear that the changes in the rate of burglary over the past 50 years mean that it is anachronistic to lock your door or expect the police to do anything about it when your house is broken into.

What is so deeply revolting about Ms Leather's lucubrations is their unutterable and invincible bourgeois complacency, worthy of Messrs Pecksniff and Podsnap. If you care to look at the already extensive part of the country in which fatherhood scarcely exists, except in the merest biological sense, you will find not merely an alternative, but a very much worse kind of family life (the word family being used very loosely). It exists in a Hobbesian world of primitive brutality, where the man with the biggest fist or biggest machete or biggest gun rules, and where children are soon inducted into a wholly egotistical code of conduct in which what you do is determined only by what you can get away with.

It is a world from which increasingly there is no escape. It is a world in which women are subjected to far more domestic violence than ever before, and in which children experience a dialectic between gross over-indulgence on the one hand and savage repression on the other, according to the mood of the moment. Merely to call this way of life different is abject cowardice or dishonesty. Indeed, having lived and worked in several parts of the world, and having travelled very extensively, I should say that it is the worst way of life known to me anywhere. To say that we should merely accept it as inevitable, as part of the march of history, as an inescapable part of the zeitgeist, is to accept descent into degradation. It is complacently to accept disaster, both for the individuals caught up in it and for society as a whole. Ms Leather's proposals are one more sentence in our long national suicide note.

For her, a seventh-rate sophomoric moral generalisation – that we should not discriminate between ways of life – is more important than the real lives of millions of her fellow beings, including children. What she demands is this: IVF on demand. In order to satisfy women's unbridled whims, children will be brought into the world at public expense, and then brought up at public expense. You, dear reader, are already de facto more responsible for the upkeep of a good (or should I say a bad?) proportion of the children of Britain than their fathers are, who would never dream of wasting their money on support of their offspring; and here is yet another proposal to extend the paternal role of the state.

In Ms Leather's brave new world, women are to have children merely because they want them, as is their government-given right, irrespective of their ability to bring them up, or who has to pay for them, or the consequences to the children themselves. Men are to be permanently infantilised, their income being in essence pocket money for them to spend on their enjoyments, having no serious responsibilities at all (beyond paying tax). Henceforth, the state will be father to the child, and the father will be child of the state.

There is nothing pre-ordained about this. It is not written in the genes of history; on the contrary, it is something that successive governments, either deliberately or by inadvertence, have brought about. It is simply not true that it is irreversible, in the sense that people could not be encouraged to behave otherwise by tax incentives and changes in the law.

Ms Leather's proposal is a peculiar and, in my view, poisonous mixture of unbridled individualism on the one hand and nanny-state interference on the other. In order that all the children in the vast kindergarten, conventionally known as Britain, should get exactly what they want, the teacher-state has to assume vast powers of taxation, regulation and redistribution. Without these powers, the women simply couldn't afford to have children on a whim, just because they wanted them, nor would men be able to escape their responsibilities.

In my medical work, I meet practically no child, youth or young adult who has any kind of relationship with his or her father. Not only do fathers believe they have no responsibility towards their offspring, but the mothers do not believe it either. The mass misery of this way of life cannot be offset by the undoubted fact that a relatively small number of very capable women bring up children successfully without the support of fathers.

Ms Leather's proposals are thus completely lacking in compassion, deeply unimaginative and wholly bad in their effects. A social trend is not to be accepted merely because it exists. We should not follow a multitude to do evil.

Theodore Dalrymple is a practising GP

Donor Insemination and the Degradation of Fatherhood

2006-12-09T17:05:00.000-08:00

The moral philosopher David Velleman has said:

How odd it must be to go through life never knowing whether a sense of having met a man before is due to his being one’s father.

How tantalizing to know that there is someone who could instantly show one a living rendition of deeply ingrained aspects of oneself.

How frustrating to know that one will never meet him.

My name is Michael Linden and I am a sperm donor.

In the spring of 1977 I provided ten ejaculates of my semen to a fertility clinic at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Carlton.

MelbourneIVF, the successor to that clinic, has informed me that a total of five births resulted from medical inseminations utilizing my sperm.

At that time, recipient couples were counseled, as a matter of course, NEVER to tell their children how they really came to be: it was intended that they should grow up and forever remain in total ignorance of their donor conceived status.

Certainly, I know that Myfanwy and her brother Michael did until that fateful day in early 2001 when Myfanwy’s mother told her of their true origins.

And, it is with an equal certainty that I can state it is extremely unlikely that my other three children – my three lost daughters – will ever be told at all.

One of them was born in 1980 to a farming family in NSW. Another, in 1979 to a family who lived in the north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. And, in 1982, a girl was born to a Turkish Muslim couple both of whom were process workers in an inner suburb of Melbourne. I was told they chose my sperm because the clinic assured them they thereby had a chance of having a blue-eyed child. With not a little irony, I have become accustomed to calling her my blue-eyed Turkish daughter.

As far as their parents are concerned, I am the man who never was.

And, even should those parents ever find the courage to stop living in deceit, I may only at best become the man who was never meant to be.

Indeed, the whole notion of conception by way of donated gametes is based upon a lie – or perhaps more so a series of lies – promulgated by a profound cynicism with regard to our most fundamental biological relationships.

These lies have come to permeate and inform every aspect of reproductive medicine and have been reinforced by being duly enshrined in the legislation which governs it.

With respect to the donor, the fundamental lie is, that apart from being the source of a much-prized commodity, once his job is done he simply doesn’t count.

And worse, by some perverse corollary, with regard to the fate of his children, it is assumed that he really doesn’t care.

It is asserted that when he gave away his sperm he likewise gave away all claim to or connection with the resulting children.

And, really, how can he even claim to be their father when he didn’t even fuck their mother?

But just because he wasn’t there doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.

The symbolic separation of the donor from his children begins with the encapsulation of his semen in a plastic vial.

It is now outside of himself and, in virtue of the agreements he has signed with the clinic, outside of his jurisdiction.

His sperm, that part of himself which has the ability to help create a new human life, has become medicalised, institutionalised, frozen.

The donor is encouraged to see his act as a supreme form of selfless giving, as if his sperm were like any other transferable body part such as a heart or a kidney, no more, no less.

He has given the recipient parents ‘the gift of life’ and the child, should it ever be informed, will be expected to be duly happy in the knowledge that, without this act of generosity, it would never have become a ‘miracle baby’.

What the donor will not be told is that, in the crystal clarity of biological fact, his genetic inheritance has been injected into a foreign domain.

Although it is mediated by a clinical process, his role is that of an interloper who slips between the sheets of the marital bed and impregnates the wife of another man: a man who is infertile.

For, in its very essence, donor insemination is nothing more than a form of polyandry, which starts from the moment of conception and increases in complexity from the moment of birth and is evidenced in every aspect of the family nexus.

The donor is always there in every facet of the child which does not match that of its mother and, likewise, in every glaring dissimilarity between that child and the man who is not really its father.

The donor is always there as a shadow, as a third party in the marital relationship whose ubiquitous presence informs every minute of every single day of that child’s ascent to adulthood.

For the child is a half-alien. Like the egg of a cuckoo become a hatchling in a host bird’s nest.

For the parents there will always be stark reminders, or subtle jolts, that the child they are raising is not wholly their own.

The child also will grow up as if haunted by a half-remembered past and, even if they have not been informed of their origins, will be troubled by an innate sense of disjunction between what they are told and what they intuitively apprehend. They may look in the mirror but only recognize half of their self. For although they are truly mirrored in their mother the man who purports to be their father cannot offer them an equal sense of identity.

This psychic dismemberment has profound implications for, as David Velleman once again points out:

What is most troubling about gamete donation is that it purposely severs a connection of the sort that normally informs a person’s sense of identity, which is composed of elements that must bear emotional meaning, as only symbols and stories can. To downplay the symbolic and mythical significance of severing a child’s connections to its biological parents is therefore to misrepresent what is really going on, if not because the symbols and stories are literally true, then at least because they are truly part of the human psyche.

To the parents, whether they would wish it or not, and whether they disclose to their child or not, the child will always be the donor’s child. He is the father of that child. This is an inescapable biological fact and the fundamental reason why the continuing practice of donor insemination is a tragic if not a criminal mistake.

So, at this point, I think I should ask all of us this question: Would anyone of you here ever give away or even sell your children?....

I did. And so have hundreds of other men in this supposedly civilized country of ours.

Since the mid-1970s something of the order of twenty to thirty thousand children have been born in Australia by means of donor insemination. The vast majority of these children do not know it, but for all of them there is a man somewhere with whom they share the most basic biological connection. These men are their fathers.

Whether they realized it or not, what these men were really doing when they gave away their sperm was giving away their unborn children. Indeed, this is the sole purpose of the practice of donor conception: it is not so much the provision of the means of fertility to the infertile but the exploitation of those who are fertile in order that they provide the infertile with the child that, as it is usually so plaintively phrased, they desire.

Yes, it is true: I never held my lost children in my arms when they were just born as I did with the three daughters of my first marriage.

And yes, it is true: I never felt the pain and anguish such as young mothers felt when their babies were wrenched from them into adoption leaving them with a lifetime of sorrow.

But this does not mean that I cannot feel cheated, and at times even angry that – even though I cannot deny my utter responsibility in choosing to donate – I may never get to meet those three remaining young women who are just as much my daughters as those I raised.

Just like some donor-conceived adults of my acquaintance, I am sometimes struck by a passing person in the street or elsewhere, by a fleeting resemblance, by a flash of recognition. And I wonder…

In 1992, in the Utah Law Review, the moral philosopher Daniel Callahan, contributed an article entitled ‘Bioethics and Fatherhood’.

I think I can categorically state that if I had had the benefit of his insights back in 1977 I would never have become a sperm donor and thereby relinquished my unborn children.

For this is some of what has to say:

Biological fatherhood carries with it permanent and non-dispensable duties.

I believe there is no serious way of denying the moral seriousness of biological fatherhood and the existence of moral duties that follow from it.

The most important moral statement might be this: once a father always a father. Because the relationship is biological rather than contractual, the natural bond cannot be abrogated or put aside.

Does this mean that each and every father has a full set of moral obligations toward the children he procreates. My answer is yes.

To treat the matter otherwise is to assume that fatherhood is some kind of contractual relationship, one that can be put aside by some choice on the part of the father, or the mother and father together, or on the part of the state.

And, in extending his argument to donor insemination itself, Callahan deals it a crushing moral blow:

A sperm donor whose sperm is successfully used to fertilize an ovum, which ovum proceeds through the usual phases of gestation, is a father. Nothing more, nothing less.

He is as much a father biologically as the known sperm inseminator in a standard heterosexual relationship and sexual intercourse.

If he is thereby a biological father, he has all the duties of any other biological father.

It is morally irrelevant that (1) the donor does not want to act as a father, (2) those who collect his sperm as medical brokers do not want him to act as a father, (3) the woman whose ovum he is fertilizing does not want him to act as a father, and(4) society is prepared to excuse him from the obligations of acting as a father.

Fatherhood, because it is a biological condition, cannot be abrogated by personal desires or legal decisions.

I have been criticized – and even sometimes by they who are otherwise firm opponents of donor conception - for publicly affirming in the media that I am the real – by which of course I mean biological – father of my medically conceived children.

Most recently on a Four Corners episode dealing with donor conception my statement to that effect was dramatically counterpointed with the opinion of a social father. He was of course shocked that I should dare to reclaim fatherhood for myself in this way. But for me to have stated otherwise would have been to condone and further propagate the lie.

For I must remain ever mindful that I and my fellow donors have been not just willing agents but also unwitting perpetrators of what I believe is an immense and tragic denial of the human rights of our children to know their true identity.

And I think it is high time for all men to acknowledge the moral dictums of Daniel Callahan and give the lie to the degradation and denial of biological fatherhood which donor insemination entails.

For sperm donation is not some great and noble act; it is to the contrary: male irresponsibility with regard to procreation conveniently elevated by the medical profession to the level of a praised social institution.

It really is time that we grew up and stopped all that wanking.