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TechnoratiA creation myth for the 21st century
Did anyone ever ask IVF children whether they wanted to go through life as genetic orphans?
This month, a court in British Columbia, Canada is expected to certify an important class action that was launched near the end of last year by a gutsy 26-year-old journalist. Her name is Olivia Pratten, and her lawsuit is likely to become a major thorn in the side of the booming fertility industry. Olivia was conceived with the sperm of an anonymous donor, and she is supposed to not care about her genetic origins -- after all, she was wanted and loved by her "intended" parents. But Olivia compares herself to adopted children, and like them, she wants the law to recognize her right to information about her biological parent.
Many people are still surprised to learn of the scale of the donor-gamete business. Louise Brown, the first test tube baby, was only born in 1978. How much could have happened in just 30 years? Let's put it this way – the growth of reproductive technologies has been not linear, but exponential. In 2006, Harvard Business School Professor Deborah Spar estimated the worth of the fertility industry at US$3 billion in the US alone.
IVF has become a beacon of hope for many infertile couples who could not otherwise have their own biological children. What can compete with the powerful pain of infertility, combined with the desperate desire for parenthood? Regardless of its cost, and despite a success rate of only about 30 percent, couples have been willing to pay for IVF, even if it means remortgaging the house or racking up credit card debt. And IVF has opened the door to still other possibilities, especially the use of egg donors and surrogate mothers, the genetic screening of embryos, and recently, the creation of embryos with the sperm of infertile men (ICSI, a technique known to transfer infertility to the resulting male children).
The use of donor sperm was of course possible before IVF, and artificial insemination was practised to some extent even before Louise Brown came along -– but the practice really took off with the IVF boom. It has now become a gigantic industry, where profit-driven sperm banks compete in marketing paid "donors" -– and not just to infertile couples: the world's largest sperm bank, the California Cryobank, reports that over 30 percent of its clients are single women and a growing proportion are lesbian couples. Just visit their website to order from an incredible selection of donors described by physical features, occupation and education, sports inclinations, interests and personality tests, baby photos, personal essays, and even handwriting analysis and audio interviews. And for many fertility businesses, the higher the caliber of the donors, the higher the price.
Like a religion, the whole donor-conception industry is undergirded by a central creation myth. The industry cannot stand without faith in this central tenet: that biological parenthood is irrelevant, and that "social" parenthood is what matters for children's full emotional and psychological development. The theme of every sperm bank and egg donor agency is effectively the Beatles song "All you need is love." Needless to say, many infertile couples are only too happy to sing along and accept this claim at face value. Few reflect on the paradox that they clearly want a biological connection while denying its importance for their children. In effect, the industry heals the parents at the children's expense, by giving them their own genetic children while depriving these children of a biological parent.
Back to Olivia Pratten. According to the creation myth of the fertility industry, Olivia should not give a hoot about her anonymous sperm donor. She is one of those very special donor-conception children who was very deeply wanted and loved by her "intended" parents. For her, the anonymous donor should be on par with a nice blood donor who once donated blood to her parents – barely anything to do with her, right?
And yet, Olivia is disturbing the peace and challenging the creation myth. She insists that her sperm donor is important to her, and she speaks of the "psychological distress" she has suffered at not knowing her biological history, including what race, culture, and religion her biological father may have come from. In 2001, she went to the Canadian Parliament and told the Standing Committee on Health: "the genetic tie that I share with my biological father cannot be minimized or made to disappear. I carry it with me. It is visible in who I am and what I will be…. I'm always left pondering, trying to put the pieces together of who this man was and how this relates to who I am today. If I could somehow know who he was…everything I already know about myself would be put into a different context, and I believe my perception of things would be altered."
Olivia's voice is not the only one speaking out these days. The blogosphere is filling up with young people from around the world, conceived with the aid of reproductive technologies and crying out in pain. One Australian young man writes on his blog, Donated Generation: "Nothing can fix the sorrow I feel for my own loss and the loss experienced by other donor conceived children." A young American woman writes on Confessions of a Cryokid: "One tries to argue that having a social father makes up for the lack of genetic attachment, but it doesn't." And in a powerful cry, a young Australian woman writes on her blog, Umbilically Challenged:
"I am very sad today, with a grief that is not talked about. It is not allowed. Because I had two loving parents. I am not granted asylum. I am not allowed reprieve. Well... what…are you complainin' about ?? You got everything you wanted. You had so many presents at Christmas and your birthday that it was supposed to buy your happiness. You were supposed to forget about your mother. You had everything. Why would you want more? WE GAVE YOU EVERYTHING. I had everything... everything but my mother. You just can't fix that. Sorry."
How has the fertility industry responded to these cries of pain? Olivia and others have been accused of being "ungrateful" for their creation. They have been asked, would they rather not have been born? A rather shocking but frank answer was given by 23-year-old Tom Ellis, a donor-conceived man who wrote in a British newspaper: "I have done a Master's degree at Cambridge and am reasonably successful, but it doesn't make me feel any better about not knowing who I am... I don't think I should have been born. I can't compare living under these conditions and not living at all, but nobody should ever be created under these circumstances... I feel like a tree that has half of its roots missing. And without them, I can hardly stand up."
Voices like these will keep on coming, as donor conception becomes ever more popular. In fact, for the first time in history, our society is engaged in a massive re-definition of the family that rejects its most natural and fundamental basis, genetic connection. The Beatles expressed the mantra not only of the fertility industry, but also of our increasingly utilitarian society as a whole. More and more children are being taught that "love" is what makes a family. This is true especially in countries like Canada , which have already legalized same-sex marriage. To ensure that such unions are equal to heterosexual marriages, it is necessary to open up a way for them to create progeny – and when it comes to reproduction, such unions are largely dependent on the fertility industry. But if children are to have two mommies or two daddies, it also means that they will be separated from at least one of their biological parents, who is not part of the same-sex union. The myth requires us to believe that these other parents will not matter to the child.
If love is all you need to create a family, and if two mommies and two daddies are just as good as one of each, then what about other combinations? Today, single women and even single men are increasingly resorting to the fertility industry to have children without waiting for a suitable partner. Having a child is now only as difficult as buying a book on Amazon.com. No father need apply -- just order the sperm online.
On the other end of the scale, the highest court in the Canadian province of Ontario ruled in 2007 that a child can have three legal parents: the lesbian mother, her partner, and the sperm donor father whom the lesbians wanted to keep involved with the child. But if three legal parents, why not four or five? Certainly, a child could now have up to five "parents" of sorts -– the "intended" couple, the egg and sperm donors, and a surrogate to carry the baby to term.
What's happened is that children have become a commodity. Every movie star is entitled to a Chihuahua, and every adult is now entitled to a child. Though perhaps it started with the right not to have a child, by destroying the undesirables through abortion. The other shoe has now dropped, and we have added the right to have a child at almost any cost.
And to fill in the picture, we also increasingly have the right to choose the kind of child we will have. Pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) allows parents to select only embryos without genetic predispositions to various genetic diseases. For instance, recently for the first time the UK allowed parents to use PGD to select only embryos that will not carry a genetic predisposition to breast cancer – and to discard embryos that have the gene, even though they have a 20-50 percent chance of never having breast cancer at all. PGD has also been used by midget parents to have midget children, and by deaf parents to have deaf children. And of course, parents have used PGD to select "savior siblings" whose tissues may be used after birth to cure their ill brothers or sisters.
Who will stop the madness? Perhaps only a rising tide of the children themselves. In a "me first" society, adults seem too busy pursuing their own desires to care much for their children's rights and needs. But through lawsuits like the one started by Olivia Pratten, the children are forcing adults and governments to take notice. The myth that "love is all you need" needs to fall, and it might take the children themselves to cut it down, through their own bitter testimony and experience.
Lea Singh graduated from Harvard Law School in 2003. She works for a nonprofit organization in Ottawa, Canada.
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Dwight Jones quoting Trudeau says:
“As Pierre Trudeau cautioned “Govt has...no place in our bedrooms.” More fully it was “...in the bedrooms of the nation”.
I largely agree with that, which is why I think there should almost never be restrictions on people conceiving naturally - incest, underage sexual relations are exceptions.
But we are not talking about “the bedrooms of the nation” here - we speaking about “the laboratories, hospitals and clinics of the nation”, and in those the government (society, its values, law and ethics) has an important and legitimate role in dtermining what is and is not acceptable conduct within them.
As to Dwight’s statement: “The grand prize of Life’s feast is the fact of being at the table”, I agree that Life is the most important gift any of us ever receive - as an aside, I wish we were more conscious of that fact in other contexts. But I strongly disagree with him that how life is transmitted to us doesn’t matter. It does. The best explanation I heard of this fact was from either Jo Rose or Narelle Grech. When someone said to one of these donor conceived young women, “You wouldn’t be here complaining about not knowing who your father is except for donor insemination”, she replied, “But if I were the result of rape, I wouldn’t exist without the rape, but that doesn’t mean I approve of rape.”
Thanks to Sue Hurst and Jo Rose for your kind words. Jo, if you haven’t seen my most recent articles and would like to do so, please email me. I look forward to reading your thesis.
I just came back to look at what is going on with this argument, did not have time to read it all but really wanted to see what Margo was saying…I found my self saying yeh yeh yeh aloud at the computer, with happiness and excitement…as a donor I am saying exactly this in a 100,000 word PhD thesis but she has summed it up beautifully. It must be hard work but you are doing a good job! Thank you - Jo
Margo Sommerville - thankyou so much for the wise words you speak here. This I agree is the only way in which we can be responsible for the well being of the children we are creating. As adults we are able to make our choices, if the choices we are given by law are determined by what is right for any child created then we may get someway on the right track to be giving our children their basic human rights, as each an every one of us need to be entitled to.
Laws need to be kept up to date with our fast moving technology. Donor conceived people need to be recognised as having an entitlement to their biological history.
Hey, Dwight, do you know WHY “ethics are embedded within our species”? It’s because for aeons human beings came into existence as a result of one man + one woman “doing it” and then babies coming out, and those being raised according to laws of Nature, including natural death of sickly or inferior babies. It’s only in the past several decades that these laws have been arrogantly bypassed by (1)the artificial keeping alive of seriously defective children in large numbers; and (2) the discarding of natural conception. These few decades represent a tiny percentage of our total time on Earth.
In time, we will be able to see a difference between naturally conceived and un-naturally conceived, just as we see endless numbers of adults seriously crippled because they were not allowed to return to the Creator as a result of severe deficiencies in their constitutions. Nobody can fool mother nature, not even you humanists can do that.
“The grand prize of life’s feast is the fact of being at the table”? Oh my, that’s rich, coming from humanists, the biggest promoters of abortion anywhere.
Whosedaugher mentions in her blog headline “Society needs to hear our plight and recognize our complex personal narratives before it continues to blindly sanctify and commodify these procedures, creating a life debt that many of us are unable to fully accept”
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Can you elaborate more on what the “life debt” is, that you experience?
and then below:
“Dwight jones:
Knowing a name is not the same as being loved wanted and embraced. Laissez-faire marketplace is NOT a healthy way to regulate reproduction in a socially responsible context.
A child/persona should never be intentionally created in a way that PROHIBITS them (and their future children) from being acknowledged, embraced, loved and nurtured in a fully INCLUSIVE way by ALL the people they come from and belong to.”
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I was not suggesting that textual information, a name, could ever replace people, but may be complementary and rounding for DC offspring. there is no reason for DC people not to know everything as a matter of policy and law.
However, proscriptive rules delineating narrow pathways to permitted reproduction are more dangerous than any other route. Human history is full of church-guided rules, e.g. when “the Church” WAS the law in these matters for millenia. We have seen what the Bush administration imposed on stem cells, abortion, etc, and the grand works of the “moral majority” for the past generation. We must do better than them.
Humans work best when they are trusted, despite the fact that Napoleon declared that “..men are like sheep and must be driven to the pasture.” We don’t need more tribunals telling us we’re monsters for having a kid.
John says that maybe donors could choose the level of “knowness” they are happy with, that would also mean that parents would also be able to choose the type of donor - Again no choice for a great many donor conceived people. There should never be anything less that donor conceived people being able to know the identity of their donor. My husband & I made a choice years ago when we went along with the anonymous donors that our clinic offered. It is not a decision I am proud of though at the time I know I didn’t put much thought into it I was very focussed on pregnancy % we had no counselling. I know that even though our children don’t seem to have much interest in info about their donors that might change and the decision we made all those years ago took away the choices that they have now.
As for legislation being the reason for a drop in donor numbers - that is always the line trotted out by certain people who don;t want any legislation or control over what clinics do. Very few clinics in NSW have done anything in the way of recruiting donors for some time. Clinics will often have times when donor numbers are very low; it has always been like that. In the UK many clinics complained very vociferously about their legislation causing a drastic shortage of donors. But then one clinic wrote an article about how they had enough donors because of a recruitment camapaign they had undertaken.
Margo mentioned:
“A child’s right to be conceived with a natural biological heritage is the most fundamental human right and should be recognized in law.
In other words, children have a right to be conceived from untampered-with biological origins, a right to be conceived from a natural sperm from one identified, living, adult man and a natural ovum from one identified, living, adult woman.”
This is hardly a “fundamental right”. The grand prize of Life’s feast is the fact of being at the table, and which taxi company or cabrio you used to get there will not be of much import. Life is a VERY rare franchise, not a regulatory opportunity..
Margo also states:
“If anyone wants to breach these rights of children the burden of proof should be on them, to a standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, that they are ethically justified in doing so. I do not believe making that proof will be possible.”
As a Humanist, I maintain that ethics are embedded within our species, patent to every sensible individual, and given a timely exposure to our best institutions - one of which is The Law - a crap shoot we all have to live with, as we do with each other.
You don’t breach the rights of children by granting them Life, provided that you share with them the details of their provenance to the best of your abilities.
As Pierre Trudeau cautioned “Govt has...no place in our bedrooms.”
When my sperm was used in Sydney Australia in 1978&79;we donors were products of a fascist medical system that deemed that their was only one politically correct ‘paradigm’ the “Never to be known donor”. I still do not even know how many children I have helped create. I grieve for my “Stolen Generation” of children. I have left a letter at the hospital RNSH, to welcome them back into my family if they are ever told that they are ‘Donor conceived people’ DCP and track down their donor.
I am currently a “Known Donor” who insists that the straight and lesbian women to whom I directly give (AI) my sperm allow the children to know me and their siblings, as is the child’s right.
The law in my state has recently changed to allow all future DCP to know their donor at 18. Unfortunately, this may have been what has caused a reduction in the number of men giving their sperm at IVF clinics.
Perhaps their is a compromise position? Just as parents choose their donor for his physical and intellectual characteristics perhaps “Knowness” is also a characteristic that may direct the choice of donors?
Donors could list as either a) “Never to be known”, b)"Identity release at age 18”, c) “Known from conception”, d) “Coparent donors”. I have many ‘Rainbow Children’ with lesbian women who also choose a high level of “knowness”.
There may be many donors like me who were coerced into abandoning their children and would welcome them with open arms. However,there may also be donors who have a right not to be known. Rights extend back into history to DCP and donors and forward into the lives of childless people yearning for children. If we allow people to choose deaf or dwarf donors to perpetuate their genome type can we not allow a choice by parents into “Knowness” as a donor characteristic? Must their only be one politically and morally correct paradigm?
For the sake of clarity, here, in summary, is what I’m saying:
A child’s right to be conceived with a natural biological heritage is the most fundamental human right and should be recognized in law.
In other words, children have a right to be conceived from untampered-with biological origins, a right to be conceived from a natural sperm from one identified, living, adult man and a natural ovum from one identified, living, adult woman.
The addition of the words man and woman in defining the right to a natural biological heritage, prohibits creating an embryo with the genetic heritage of two women or two men, or with multiple biological parents.
The word “natural” excludes an opposite-sex couple using this technology to make an artificial sperm from an infertile man or artificial ovum from an infertile woman.
The requirement that the gametes come from adults preempts the use of gametes from aborted fetuses. And the requirement that the donors be living excludes the use of gametes for postmortem conception.
At the very least, society should not be complicit in – that is, should not approve or fund – any procedure for the creation of a child, unless the procedure is consistent with the child’s right to a natural biological heritage.
I also believe children have a fundamental human right to know the identity of their biological parents and, where possible, a right to both a mother and a father, preferably their own biological parents, unless an exception is justified as in the “best interests” of the particular child, as in many adoptions.
If anyone wants to breach these rights of children the burden of proof should be on them, to a standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, that they are ethically justified in doing so. I do not believe making that proof will be possible.
Dwight jones:
Knowing a name is not the same as being loved wanted and embraced. Laissez-faire marketplace is NOT a healthy way to regulate reproduction in a socially responsible context.
A child/persona should never be intentionally created in a way that PROHIBITS them (and their future children) from being acknowledged, embraced, loved and nurtured in a fully INCLUSIVE way by ALL the people they come from and belong to.
Lea and Margo both seem to be suggesting that reining in reproductive avenues and options (five parents?? cloning??)are somehow equivalent to advancing the rights of the born and unborn. This may do a disservice to children, rather what they intended.
1) Children have every right to know every detail of their genetic and cultural heritage, with a DNA sample from all of the involved parties permanently on file, for their own future reference.
The most important consideration here is that the CHILDREN BE ADVISED OF THEIR PROVENANCE IN THE FIRST PLACE. In all the uproar over donor anonymity, too little attention is paid to PARENT ANONYMITY, which is the ultimate deception and ripoff that can be imposed on them. No convenient and lame rationalizations of “loving parents who wanted them” can ever justify stealing the underpinnings of someone’s very existence. That should be a crime.
2) A laissez-faire environment toward reproduction is far healthier than the pinched models put forward by ethicists mostly concerned with the ethics industry and their own roles as self-appointed guardians of us all. The laughably in-limbo Reproductive Act in Canada is evidence of the camel their committees have built in the name of stewardship.
In nature, all forms of reproduction are legitimate - carrots are clones and being asexual is OK too. If we as a species turn to the petri dish or surrogate mothers to generate offspring, don’t cite the children as victims when there are none.
The presence of science within such an environment is a positive agency that is rapidly awarding us choices toward refining reproduction closer to our needs rather than to serendipity and poverty-induced breeding. Any Luddite approach is much more likely to cause harm and disruption than any amelioration of circumstances for the parties involved.
Free reproduction is always a wiser choice, especially if the rights and options of women are expanded and protected as part of the new regime.
Wow. This is an incredible and thought-provoking piece. I am an adoptive parent and new to this debate about cryokids, but it completely makes sense that we all long to know our history, our genetic composition.
I will be following this closer now to see what comes of it. What a brave choice for the young woman who is challenging in court, her right to know her history.
I have a son conceived with donor eggs. He is now 6yrs old and I love him more than life itself.
I agree wholeheartedly with this article and with Olivia.
We as parents of donor conceived children need to stop living a fairytale and give these “people” - the ones we love most in the world - their truth. We cannot own someone else’s biological heritage as also a donor cannot “give it away” - it simply exists. This is how it is. I feel that if we as parents cannot understand and agree to transparency then we should be deemed “unsuitable” for this “procedure”
Bettie, those embryos are there, because someone, without true respect for human life, put them there like they were nothing. Mere by-products of a medical process. If any of these embryos is implanted inside a woman, they have a chance of survival, so they are in fact, human beings.
I don’t shed tears, but if these microscopic entities are the “side effects” of IVF, then IVF is totally wrong.
The goal does not justify the means.
Pablo, I am on your side regarding the humanity of the fertilized egg, but when it is residing in a tank of nitrogen, it is not human any more. It is only human and deserving of protection when it is inside the woman, and growing. It can’t live without high-tech input, whereas a true embryo can.
Truly, I am as against abortion as you are, but I shed no tears for these microscopic entities. I wish they weren’t there, I wish there wasn’t any un-natural fertilization, but aren’t we getting carried away a bit, here. I apologize in advance for disagreeing with you, but how else can I get this point across.
To get back to the general topic, it is enraging that anybody here should have to resort to legalistic arguments against I.V.F. If you told some villager in some faraway “third world” country about this, who had never heard of such a thing - that people can’t even make babies normally & need scientists to do it for them - he would look at you like you came from Mars. I can’t wait for this sick culture of ours to implode (and it’s already started, but it can’t happen fast enough for me). Some things are just crimes against Nature and the Creator, and people who aren’t totally ruined (yet) are satisified with that.
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