In the never-easy area of family relations, fertility clinics are the inadvertent cause of a novel complication explored recently by the New York Times (“Are You My Sperm Donor? Few Clinics Will Say,” January 20). About 40,000 children a year are now born via donated sperm and eggs, and few of those children (or their resident parents) ever learn the identity of those who submitted their sperm specimen for cash.
All kinds of confusion follow from this policy of anonymity, though the Times largely focuses on the legal, financial and medical issues. Those who seek to force clinics (and the parents-of-possession, for that matter) to share information among both the adults and the children charge that such children suffer from “genetic bewilderment,” lacking knowledge of heritable medical conditions and the like. This is the high-tech argument for openness, long a favorite among advocates of open adoption, and in several European countries, including Britain, regulations now ban anonymous donations of “genetic material.”
The problem is, such bans cause many potential donors to bail. Not surprisingly, few 22-year-old students really anticipate being tracked down by a child they were paid to assist into life, and this is much of the client class that fertility clinics depend upon for the sperm samples they implant in women desperate to have children. The clinics also have another reason for resisting non-anonymous donations: they fear legal liability and general bad PR for advertising their donors as first-class physical specimens, when many may fall far short of that. Besides, tracking and disclosing donors makes for work and emotional messiness.
In some cases, the women who donate eggs are more open, and at times even eager, for contact with their offspring-once-removed and the families that bring them up. Maternal instinct may play a role in this difference, but the process of egg donation is also riskier, more time-consuming and painful than that of donating sperm, so it makes sense that more thought and even some altruism may enter into a woman's decision to be an egg donor.
In any event, time does not seem on the side of those favoring secrecy. The analogy with open adoption, the medical benefits of uncovering your genetic background, and, finally, the litigious culture surely will propel greater transparency among donors, clinics and fertility patients. Many are already happy with that, including the “father” quoted in the Times article who donated sperm as a student and then never got around to starting his own family as an adult. Now 46, he would like to connect with any adult child he may have casually and anonymously assisted into existence about 25 years ago.
But largely buried beneath this article lies the question being asked throughout our culture today in all sorts of unusually constituted “families”: Who is my father? Where is my father? What do I mean when I call someone father?
A few centuries ago, many children would grow up in fatherless or motherless families, or with stepfathers and stepmothers, due to the more perilous nature of life before modern medicine. But today's children live with the results of a truly bewildering array of family “choices” that not only deprive many of them of fathers, but leave them uncertain of the definition, nature, and scope of fatherhood. Illegitimate children may never have a male presence in the household, or they may experience a series of men who come and go. Children of failed marriages may live as part of more or less successful stepfamilies, or co-exist with live-in boyfriends. Their absentee fathers may or may not keep in touch. The numbers of openly homosexual couples choosing to become parents is small, but they further blur the distinctions between male and female, parent and child, family member and friend. And because so many of these “father” are transient, even good relationships may have a diluted and compromised effect.
But those are not the kinds of paternity (or maternity) problems the Times prefers to dwell on, since they call into question the basic soundness of “tolerant,” non-religious, and gender-neutral “Heather Has Two Mommies” society its editors hold up as ideal.
Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.