DI is wrong and I'm not an ungrateful little brat!!

When I first discovered the online donor conception community in 2003 I was completely in awe that there were others out there created the same way I was.  I learned that there were sperm banks and clinics and there was a huge continuum of information which people had or didn’t have in regards to their paternal side.  I was shocked to find there were some children who had the luxury of meeting their biological father when he or she turned 18!! 

This revelation, however, came with the consequential reaction of the injustices being played out to the thousands of children each year who were the products of an anonymous donor.  Yet, the most shocking of all information I ingested in those first few weeks of “enlightenment” was that no one seemed to care that they were intentionally creating children who had severed biological ties and seemed to have little empathy or remorse for their choices.

On the infertility industry:

In the United States, they have taken a rather laissez faire frame of mind when it comes to the infertility industry.  Recent estimates state that the infertility industry jackpot is a whopping $2 billion dollar annually, with approximately 10% of couples facing fertility issues; not to mention the astronomical rise in single mothers and gays and lesbians taking advantage of the numerous assisted reproduction technologies.

The trouble with this laissez faire mentality is that the United States government is leaving the industry to regulate itself on matters based on record keeping, number of donations/successful pregnancies a single donor can have, advising clients, and long-term effects of the third-party “product” formed through these different transactions. 

Donor conceived persons have become one of the most sought after human commodities in modern times, as the infertile, the single, and the homosexual will risk any price to create that “miracle baby”.  The price tag on human life has skyrocketed to astronomical amounts as people become more and more desperate to have that coveted prize. 

The infertility industry has the ultimate authority over donor-conceived individuals; an authority that has absolutely no checks and balances and governs in a dictatorial and oftentimes tyrannical manner.  The infertility industry has set a standard for society, and has placed such a huge emphasis on having children, and primarily having genetically related children.  The multi-billion dollar fertility industry’s primary goal is to make money, full stop.  It is not to make people happy, although they may disguise their motives as trying to “help” the infertile.  They are not trying to help, only pry on these unsuspecting and most definitely distraught individuals, and con them out of money with the false belief that their miracle baby is a “cure” for their infertility.  Nowhere do they mention how these children may feel later on, and they divert questioning parents by saying that all donor-conceived children are happy.   

The infertility industry has ruined a great many people lives, and there seems to be no stopping the biggest baby-making business on earth.  They harbor on human insecurities for their own financial gain, not concerned about those lives they ruin the process.  They have most definitely ruined a great many donor-conceived individuals lives by tearing apart their family and denying them records.  They have destroyed marriages by placing such a huge emphasis on creating children and then advocating for parents to lie to their children about their conception.  Couples who continually refuse to disclose the conception are destroying their marriage from the core.  The rate of divorce in donor conceived families seem significantly higher, even among those who eventually disclose, however no conclusive research has been done in this.  The divorce rates of those families who do not disclose may not ever be known. 

Even the unsuspecting donors have been brainwashed by this unstoppable force.  The industry’s recruiting process encourages men (and women) to donate because they are “helping” people have children.  Yet they medicinalize sperm and egg so much that they never acknowledge to these men and women that they are actually creating biological children whom they will never know.   Comparing it to the likes of blood donation, where you can HELP create a life for someone else.  They are not "helping" to create a life, they ARE creating a life.  And I'm sorry, but this is no blood donation!!  On the contrary these men and women are paid for their "donation", and human life is not something which deserves to be bought and sold or be degraded to simply a financial transaction between two consenting parties.  The industry takes no responsibility for the "third party" created in this manner, and reduce us to common commodities.  They make it sound like the sperm is only a function of creating life and these children created are someone else’s children.  The donors are never told that their donations are creating children who are as biologically related to them as the children they rear, nor that their own children they raise could have upwards of a hundred half-siblings running around!

 

On lies:

We shouldn’t have to be demoralized and ridiculed by sperm banks and doctors offices each and every time we ask for answers.  We shouldn’t have to make tens of phone calls, mail hundreds of letters, and spend endless hours “goggling” names to find who we are.  Even our birth certificates are false, without the fact that we are donor conceived, let alone the name of our biological father, documented.  Our entire existence is comprised of lies.  The government and the infertility industry have made the ability for parents to continually lie to their children an art form.  There are no loopholes involved, and everyone but the child is protected in a shroud of confidentiality.  Women can not only lie to the public and their child about the child’s paternity, but also thanks to online sperm banks and home inseminations they can also lie to their doctors, extended family, and even their own husbands!!  Most DI offspring (about 80%) have no clue that they were conceived this way, and probably never will.  Their parents will take that secret to their grave, and generations of these children’s successors will be living a lie of who they truly are.

 

On existential debt*:

To make matters even worse, this predicament has been instigated deliberately by the very people who should have our best interests at heart – our parents.  The difference between our genetic disattachment and that of adoptees and others who are denied the opportunity to know a genesis parent is that our situation was intentional.  Our parent(s) made a conscious decision in which they knew we would be disconnected from our biological father, yet out of their greed to have a baby continued anyways.

One model that donor conceived individuals have had to succumb to is that of being grateful for their lives.  Children conceived in traditional methods are not expected to feel indebted to their parents for having them, yet donor offspring are told that because they were so desperately wanted that in order to validate their lives they must feel grateful to be alive because without that “generous donor” we would not be.  This existential debt is unheard of in any other situation.  Children conceived in taboo circumstances, such as rape, are not instructed by society that they have to confirm their righteousness of their conception because it gave them life.  In fact, a child who thought that way would most likely be sent straight to a therapist to be assessed!  Yet donor offspring are constantly drilled by everyone that they must be grateful.  Even complete strangers will argue that it’s such a wonderful thing to be so wanted, and discount you the second you say you’re not as happy as they think you should be.

When I disagree with the practice of donor conception around recipient mothers, it becomes commonplace for me to constantly validate that I do not hate my mother for having me and that I’m not ungrateful to be alive.  This constant reassurance is simply expected from me.  To the infertility industry and the DI mothers it seems impossible for someone to appreciate their life yet at the same time disagree with the method of their conception.  It becomes a Catch-22, where donor offspring are sent into this constant cycle of their existence versus their emotional wellbeing.  To search for our biological history gives rise to many different emotions.  Offspring many times feel obliged to not search because of the fear of hurting their parents, like their need to know their roots is overridden by their parents’ insecurities.

 

On genetics:

One tries to argue that having a social father makes up for the lack of genetic attachment, but it doesn’t.  While our social fathers might have raised us, we are not and never will be truly their children.  We will always have this mysterious man in the back of our minds that got paid to masturbate in a cup, and his services were then frozen in small vials to later be thawed out and injected into our mothers.  This man has no face, except for some indistinguishable characteristics that couldn’t tell him apart from “Jack”.  He may be an ambiguous number that seems to be pulled out of a hat.  Yet, this number or these features are all we have to console our inquiring minds, at least for the time being.

*term first published - R. Rushbrooke, Donor Insemination: The secret experiment, Bulletin of Medical Ethics (2004), 196, 13-22.