A DISGUSTING editorial out of the Boston Globe today calls for STRICT ANONYMITY for donors! This just makes me sick........
"Supreme Judicial Court Justice James McHugh, addressing the case of a mother seeking the identity of a sperm donor in order to obtain child support and genetic information, was right to call upon the Legislature to clarify these issues. The Legislature would be deeply remiss to allow a situation with such broad implications to be addressed through a patchwork of legal opinions. The state must act now to avoid uncertainty - and to preserve a fertility system that has worked well for the majority of those involved.""Any legislation must use as its starting point the reasonable terms - including a strong ethos of anonymity - under which all the parties entered into their arrangements, while imposing new common-sense requirements that address complications that may never have been envisioned when sperm and egg donations first became possible. A fair system of laws would impose some restrictions on all parties to the donation process.""Children born under this system will have a natural curiosity about their biological roots. For some, the curiosity could take on the force of an impassioned search for identity. But such quests emerge from many types of families, of all configurations, and often reach frustrating dead ends. While recognizing the desires of children to know all aspects of their backgrounds, the state should nonetheless ensure that the identities of sperm or egg donors remain such a dead end. A breach in the wall of privacy under any but the most dire circumstances could jeopardize the whole fertility system. The greater good is clearly in encouraging the participation of informed donors and preserving their anonymity.""Fertility advances have served to strengthen the bonds of parenthood and to extend the joy of family life. Anonymous donations have made many advances possible, and Massachusetts must do all it can to bolster a successful system. The happiness of thousands of families, and perhaps millions of children yet to be conceived, depend on it."
Honestly, the fact that they acknowledge the idea of identity and the child's need for that knowledge, they completely disregard everything by stating that "the state should nonetheless ENSURE that the identities of sperm and egg donors remain such a dead end" and that this is for the GREATER GOOD!!!! Whose greater good?!?!?! The infertility industry's. This article is such a bunch of BS that I simply can't take it anymore. With articles like this - who needs enemies.....
I think I am going to carry on BB Church's legacy of "Bad-Binky Awards" and award one to the Boston Globe for publishing such infertility industry lobbying crap that it offends not only donor conceived adults, but also adoptees, recipient parents who have done the right thing and chosen an open donor, and for the donors out there who have the heart and mind to open their arms to their biological children they helped create.
5 comments:
I think it's safe to say that anonymous donation will always be more easy to get by.
Personally, I think records should be kept for medical reasons, but not so that children can later track down their donor. Sorry.
I think it's a selfish and self-centered mentality that the infertility industry, such as yourself, hold. How should someone like YOU dictate the identity search of a person like ME and thousands of other adult offspring who are searching for answers??
How can you so blatantly ignore the voices of offspring, adoptees, recipient parents, and donors who are speaking out against anonymity?? There are over 20,000 members on the DSR --- if offspring aren't interested, if their parents don't want to help them, and if donors don't care about their biological children they sold, why are there so many people searching for each other?
If a donor and a recipient parent mutually agree they want to be found, why does the infertility industry so adamantly oppose this consentual meeting.....I know --- because you know that if you allow such connections to be made, sooner or later donors are going to think twice about selling their sperm and eggs because they realize what they are selling and how much of a loss that is to them and their families.
AND IF donors realize this your industry is tanked. As the BG said, the infertility industry cannot function without the lies and the deceit and the destroying of families that are carried alongside repro-tech procedures. So of course you believe that records shouldn't be kept for the offspring to find their BIOLOGICAL PARENT.
You know what though.....there's DNA and it doesn't lie, it's not deceitful, and it can repair these severed families, as much as you want it to stop, you can't make it. Offspring are using DNA, the Internet, and even more old fashioned resources to track down their biological parents.
Pretty soon your promise of "anonymity" to your donors is going to be a promise to the wind. What are you gonna do when an angry former donor comes to your door with a lawsuit b/c an offspring of theirs found them, and you guaranteed them anonymity???
Pretty soon thousands of offspring of sperm and egg and embryo donors that were brought up knowing their origins are going to be adults and they are going to be pissed off. VERY PISSED OFF.
And all I have to say is you better watch your back......cos we'll get you, and we'll get you back.
Incest is/will be a problem too. IF two DI-adults whose backgrounds are kept secret meet fall in love and have a baby - whoops incest! The "records kept for medical reasons" that the egg donation agency write about will not work in this instance; you've only got to look at the numbers of underage/unplanned pregnancies to see how stupid the kept medical records would be.
Yeah, it may be more easy to get by, but it's 'baby selling'.
Just heard an commercial on the radio for sperm donors, here in Boston asking men 18-38 with a college education or in college to apply to be a donor, at the last line was said by a young male voice 'help someone out and give the gift of a family'.
With the number of universities in the area and the large gay population, and number of couples and women who wait until their 40s to have children. Legislatures will not budge on this.
Anonymous,
While the possibility of incest is a slight concern, especially for a) those conceived during the days of fresh sperm where all the offspring of a given donor reside in relatively close proximation to each other, and b) those conceived from irresponsible US sperm banks that have hundreds of offspring of a single donor.
However, in general, it's not something to be THAT concerned about. In all honesty, incest does not mean having a baby with a relative, nor does it mean that a child created from that encounter will be defective. Incest is a recent social/moral issue, and is not backed in science, as much as in stigma. EVen just 100 years ago, it was very common for people to marry first and second cousins - think of the Royal families.
Now, the problems occur when this type of inter-marriage continues among the same kin for generations. A single instance of inter-marriage will likely not produce children with severe issues, unless both parents inherited from a common ancestor a troublesome recessive-linked disease, such as hemophilia. In this case, then the child(ren) of this related couple could in fact display this disease.
Incest has a HUGE stigma attached to it in western culture, mainly because it defies our norms of marriage, family, and relationships. The medical/science/genetic aspect is NOT the primary reasoning behind the stigma of incest, it is the prevailing attitudes of society.
HOWEVER, I think the point is, and what you were getting at, is that the increase in ridiculously huge numbers of offspring created from a single donor, will inevitably create problems. It won't just be siblings falling in love with each other, but niece/uncle, nephew/aunt, first and second cousins, etc!!
I've calculated the math before in other posts, using the recommended number of children/100,000 in population, to determine that in greater NYC alone, a donor could potentially have 600 offspring, based on what the American Association of Reproductive Medicine and the internal guidelines of the infertility industry have outlined as acceptable.
Guidelines that can potentially and LEGALLY allow such INSANE numbers are NOT GUIDELINES!!
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