Britain's fertility regulator is planning big changes to the strict rules governing egg and sperm donation in order to try to stop more childless couples from seeking treatment abroad.

The sweeping liberalisation would see the most significant shift in policy governing sperm and egg donation since the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) was established.

The changes could see the amount paid to women who donate eggs rise from £250 to several thousand pounds – but experts have warned the move would see women donating eggs purely for money.

Donated sperm could also be used to start as many as 20 families rather than the current limit of 10, despite fears such a move would increase the risk of half-siblings unwittingly marrying or having children together.

Labels: donor conception, United Kingdom

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In case you’ve been busy worrying about the economy, immigration, or a resurgent Taliban, let me draw your attention to Jennifer Aniston.

Promoting her new movie, The Switch, about a single, fortysomething woman who decides to have a baby with the help of a sperm donor, Aniston had this to say at a press conference: “Women …know that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child…Times have changed, and what is amazing is that we do have so many options these days.’” On his show, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly responded by calling Aniston “destructive to our society.”

Aniston hit back: “For those who’ve not yet found their [Prince Charming such as] Bill O’Reilly, I’m just glad science has provided a few other options.” The rest is P.R. history.

By “amazing” options, Aniston, who happens also to be a fortysomething single woman, was referring to sperm donation, an increasingly popular way to create fatherless families. O’Reilly’s charge to the contrary, most single women who have a baby through donor sperm struggle for years to find husbands so they could raise their children with fathers before finally concluding they had no choice but to go it alone.

Given the ranks of can’t-commit child men out there, you have to have some sympathy for their plight.

But choice mothers, as the older, more educated donor moms often call themselves, use a language of empowerment that lends some weight to O’Reilly’s accusation. Aniston herself is guilty of trivializing men’s role in children’ lives when she says that women “don’t have to settle with a man just to have a child.”

Labels: culture, donor conception, Fathers, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, single parenting

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In his days as a student at the University of Utah, Chase Kimball was known as number 007, donating his sperm at $20 a pop to help infertile couples.

He estimates that over a seven-year period during the 1970s and 1980s, he likely sired "hundreds of children."

At one point the clinic told him, "You've got too many kids locally and we can only use your sperm if someone orders it from out of state."

"For a long time, whenever I'd see crowds of children, I would look intently and wonder if one of these children was mine," said Kimball, now a 56-year-old lawyer in Salt Lake City. ...

Sometimes, truth is stranger than fiction.

One donor, Dr. Kirk Maxey, 52, of Michigan, said he may have sired at least 400 children after donating semen twice a week between 1980 and 1994.

"But he's nothing but another donor," said Kramer. "We have donors who have found 30-50-70 kids."

Sperm donors make about $1,200 month, donating three times a week for many years. "But that doesn't mean there are three potential children," said Kramer. "Every sample is broken out into eight to 25 vials for 75 potential children every week he donates." ...

"Make sperm distribution a mandatory non-profit activity, matching the status of all other traffic in living human tissue," said Maxey. "Disclose to all women all that is actually known about their prospective donor, and maintain a strict registry so that the knowledge base will be substantial. Make the information supplied by donors to banks legally binding, and obtained under oath. Make donor records indistinguishable from other medical records, but require them to be maintained a very long time I suggest 100 years would be a good start. Make them discoverable and subject to HIPPA."

To date, more than 28,000 people -- donor men, parents and offspring -- have registered and more than 7,500 have found their half-siblings and biological fathers.

Now, many at the center of this storm are calling for an end to anonymous donation, hoping to model government-sponsored programs in Australia, Britain and some other European countries to identify sperm donors.

Tim Gullicksen, a 43-year-old real estate salesman from San Francisco, donated for a decade after signing up as a college student at Berkeley. He said he was promised only 10 families would get his sperm but now, "it's pretty clear there are 80 or 90 kids out there."

"These kids don't know me from Adam," he said.

The first child to contact him three years ago through DSR was a 9-year-old boy in Texas whose single mother had chosen sperm donation.

"He had five years of stuff for me when I met him and right after that everything started to snowball," said Gullicksen.

"He had been pestering his mom about where his dad was since he was a toddler," he said. "He had no father figure and he actually kept a box under his bed where he kept all his school projects and wrote 'Daddy' on the box."

Since then, Gullicksen has connected with seven children, ages 9 to 16, who hail from California, Texas, Chicago and North Carolina.

"I started to feel kind of overwhelmed," Gullicksen said. "After that burst of activity, I pondered what I could afford to do. I am not going to marry mommy and move into the house, though that goes away pretty quickly. I have a life."

Labels: children, donor conception, Fathers, My Daddy's Name Is Donor

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The two sets of 15-year-old twins on opposite sides of the country share a lot of similarities.

Ask all four of them their favorite food, they will say sushi. Ask them about an annoying habit, they will say they bite their nails. They describe themselves as athletic, outgoing and open-minded. They have brown hair, full lips and broad hands.

They are also the biological offspring of sperm donor No. 1096.

Fifteen years ago, sperm donation enabled two mothers to give birth to the children they always wanted. Now the internet age has allowed their twins -- Jonah and Hilit Jacobson in Georgia and Jesse and Jayme Clapoff in California -- to find each other.

Their connection happened partly from persistence and partly from luck in 2007. The two families had joined the Donor Sibling Registry online, where they found their half siblings by searching for families with a matching donor identification number.

These aren't the most conventional sibling relationships, but the teens are gradually forming friendships and growing closer, the siblings say. Today, 12 offspring from sperm donor No. 1096 have connected through the site. ...

The Jacobson twins said they don't want to know or meet their sperm donor.

"I already have a dad," Hilit said.

Jonah chimed in, "I have no desire to meet him. Maybe I'd like to see a picture of him, but that's it."

A family isn't just about biological connections in the Jacobson household.

They said, "A family is what you make it." ...

Like many young men, the money from the donations went to pay for bills during school. He said he didn't think much about what happened to his donated sperm after he graduated.

Then three years ago, he received an unexpected e-mail from a child conceived from his sperm. The 14-year-old girl revealed to him the donor identification number from her file.

She had done some detective work on her own to find his e-mail. She was excited to learn that her donor identification number matched his.

Whitehurst was already the father of two children when he received the e-mail. Still, he chose to have a relationship with the 14-year-old girl. Over the years, Whitehurst has been contacted by two more of his donor offspring through the web.

The three donor siblings and Whitehurst have formed a bond. He takes the donor offspring and his own children on vacation together. He said the children all get along.

"They don't expect anything undue from me," said Whitehurst, now a 44-year-old physician, adding that, "They don't expect me to show up and become a full-time dad. I like to get together with them, and the great thing is my two kids like them, too."

But some reproductive technology experts said a generation of sperm donor children easily connected by the web comes with challenges. Not all sperm donor offspring want to get to know their half siblings or the sperm donor, said Susan Crockin, an attorney and reproductive technology expert in Massachusetts.

"What if someone and their family don't want to be a part of an unexpected family?" Crockin said.

Labels: culture, donor conception, Fathers, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, siblings

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...When the institution of something once called “fatherhood” falls apart, this is what happens. We leave each child to “define” the relationship of him or herself to the person who is his or her biological father. The children must “decide” what that person “means” to them. They should “think about the parameters” of what they want. They should “speak up.”

Probably some of them can manage this task quite well, at least on the outside. The 11 and 12 year olds quoted in the guide sound eerily mature, like people twice their age. The people in high school or college quoted in the guide sound like they are forty. Their parents make a lot of money (in this sample) and they’re impressively articulate and sound mature. Compared to the thick, complex negotiations of their childhood, the “real world” might not be so hard for them.

But what of the others? Two-thirds of the donor offspring in their sample are girls or women.[liv] Where are the boys? Where are the fumbling young people, the ones who are too confused to log onto a web survey, or too angry at their parents to take a survey their parents tell them to take? Where are the ones who got in trouble at school that day and are the last kids their moms would want to be studied by some researcher? Where are the ones who just aren’t gifted with emotional intelligence, who aren’t skilled at negotiating ambivalence and speaking up about their own needs in the face of their parents’ tender feelings, who have no clue how to explore and accept the limits of undefined relationships? When we ask children and young people to behave like little adults, what happens to the ones who can’t rise to the challenge? And what happens to the ones that do?

Labels: adolescence, children, donor conception, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting

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The family reunion has gone and past and I’m back in Brooklyn, trying to make sense of my time there. This trip was particularly stressful because I decided that I was going to finally tell my mom about all the work I’ve been doing in opposition to commercial conception. She knows that I’ve spent the last year and a half writing the script and assembling a team for a film about my sperm-donor father. She didn’t know it was critical of her decision to have me this way. She didn’t know I was blogging and interviewing about it. The conversation didn’t go so well. ...

The next day I decided to tell my mom about my blogging. I decided to explain to her how extensively I plan on combating commercial conception. “I want to prepare you. People will be asking me about you and our relationship and I want to be respectful of your privacy, but I also need to communicate the human story behind all of this so people understand the gravity of emotions involved.” She became upset. She wanted to know what I’d be saying about her. I described as calmly as I could the specific character traits I found in her that qualify her as a typical donor kid mom, and why they’re problematic. What came next was a wave of anger and threats with little to no understanding. “So you’re saying you wish you’d never been born?” she cried. “Well, not exactly. I’m saying this was a hugely unjust method of bringing me into the world and I don’t think either one of us got the family we really needed.” I told her I need to get personal and share my story because the fertility industry is selling egg and sperm as fake cures for baby cravings and there are some daunting correlative repercussions that aren’t being talked about. Parents are getting suckered. Kids are getting spiritually hijacked.

“You’re focusing way too much on the DNA,” she said, “It’s really not that important.” I asked her, “So you’re saying my biological father isn’t important?” “Yes,” she said. “He’s not important.” This was said right in front of my ten year old brother and my step-dad. Two men, one at the onset of a developing sense of masculinity. I thought about Gary and his tomb. And all the contradictions ....

“I need you to understand my loss,” I said to my mom. “I need you to recognize that I’ve been mourning my father for years now completely alone.” “What loss?” she said. “You have a father.”

The problem with that is my “father” keeps changing every time my mom gets remarried. And the men she fashions this title to are more interested in being her husband than in being my parent. I do in fact, have a father. But he wasn’t very interested in being my dad either, as his actions clearly defined.

Labels: donor conception, Fathers, fathers and daughters, My Daddy's Name Is Donor

VOTE

When you sit on the loo in Ed Houben's tiny bathroom, there's a postcard at eye level that says "Welcome to Maastricht". It's decorated with dozens of smiling tadpole-shaped creatures homing in on the words with cheerful intent. It's a little touch to make his visitors smile; after all, most of them are here for Ed's sperm.

Houben has been donating sperm for more than 10 years now, first at the local sperm bank and then, after reaching the clinic's legal limit, privately via the internet. Most of his donating is done in his neat, modest flat on an estate on the outskirts of the Dutch town. The T-shirt he's wearing, which declares "Anytime, anyplace, anywhere, anyway", is actually a bit misleading. "In the old days I would gladly travel, and my colleagues covered for me if I was late to work," he says. "But my job at Maastricht's tourism office has changed and I have to be around much more. Now I ask people to come to me."

And they do, from all over the world. Houben has biological offspring in Australia, Israel, Canada, Cyprus, Germany and Luxembourg, as well as at home in the Netherlands. His current tally of donor-conceived children stands at an eye-watering 62, with the 63rd on the way. It is by no means a world record – Houben once watched an episode of Oprah about a man who has fathered 200, a number he says he'll never catch. But he has been called Europe's most prolific sperm donor, and he's happy to accept the title until someone has the, well, balls to challenge him. ...

As it's illegal to sell your sperm in Europe, donation is a vocation rather than a career. Houben got the calling in 1999, after witnessing the trials and heartbreak of childless friends undergoing fertility treatment. Donor numbers were declining dramatically in the Netherlands (from 900 in 1990 to 200 in 2002) and those affected by the shortage, particularly lesbian couples, turned to the internet. With his state-sanctioned quota fulfilled, and much more to give, Houben started placing ads on the websites and online forums that were springing up. He scored with his very first attempt; the day we meet, that child is celebrating her seventh birthday. ...

And like many of the online donors, he is also an experienced practitioner in "natural insemination" – in other words, sex. Sperm donor forums bristle with terminology, but the most regularly used are AI and NI, and there is considerable debate in the community as to whether offering NI makes you a hero, an opportunist or a pervert. FSDW instantly bans any donors offering NI; Co-parentmatch says it recommends against donors who insist on NI only. But John says it remains an important option for those who want to hurry the process along "if they feel their fertility might be limited, or they want to keep the costs down".

Houben, who also offers NI, agrees. "From my own experience, statistically NI is faster," he says, and he has records to back up his claim. "I take off my hat to the guys who only do AI, but if people are coming all the way from Italy they don't want to be trying for three years." He only started offering NI when a couple specifically requested it – and he got a further shock when he discovered that the boyfriend expected to be present at the insemination. Fortunately his sense of duty prevailed.

Labels: culture, donor conception, Europe, Fathers, sex, United Kingdom

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On this Father’s Day, Lindsay Greenawalt, 25, is still searching for her biological father. “Are you xytex donor 2035?” she asks on her blog, “Confessions of a Cryokid.”

Greenawalt was conceived with the help of an anonymous donor from the Georgia sperm bank Xytex. She knows donor 2035 was born on Feb. 12, 1961, has green eyes, brown hair, is Baptist, and was a senior in college in 1982 when he began selling his sperm.

But she doesn’t know who he is. On a blog post, “Happy Birthday to my father,” she wonders, “Does he want to be found?? Does he want to look??”

Every year, an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 women conceive a child through sperm donation. Of course, for every woman who conceives through donor insemination, there is a man who sells his sperm, and in most cases in the U.S., does it anonymously.

But what sperm banks regularly fail to adequately communicate to these men — usually college students who, no doubt, are looking to make an extra buck — is that they are becoming fathers to as many as dozens of children. Just as they try to sanitize reality by saying that men who sell their sperm for as much as $1,000 a month are “donating,” so they obscure the reality that “donors” are biological fathers by pretending that they’re merely altruists helping a family out. ...

But there’s a contradiction here. Biology clearly matters for many of the would-be parents who choose to use donor insemination rather than, say, adopt. As Olivia Pratten, who was herself donor-conceived, says at the blog FamilyScholars.org, “If biological roots didn’t matter, we wouldn’t have a whole fertility industry whose priority is to maximize the genetic continuity of the parents using the technologies.”

According to a new study, My Daddy’s Name is Donor, biology also matters for the children who are conceived this way. Released by the Commission on Parenthood’s Future, the study surveyed 485 young adults ages 18-45 who were conceived through sperm donation. It found that two-thirds believe they have a right to know their biological parents; 44 percent agree, “It is wrong to deliberately conceive a fatherless child;” and 48 percent agree, “When I see friends with their biological fathers and mothers, it makes me feel sad.”

Labels: donor conception, Fathers, My Daddy's Name Is Donor

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In "The Switch," coming later this summer, Jennifer Aniston plays an attractive 40-year-old professional who has given up on finding Mr. Right for marriage and decides instead to move straight on to motherhood with a donor father. The movie offers a largely celebratory treatment of donor insemination, as do two other movies out this year, "The Back-up Plan" and next month's "The Kids Are All Right." Indeed, one of the bottom-line conclusions these movies are pushing is that the children turn out "all right" with donor dads.

Hollywood is not the only industry peddling the story line that flesh-and-blood fathers are an optional accessory in today's families. Plenty of academics—from New York University sociologist Judith Stacey to Cornell psychologist Peggy Drexler—also have been arguing that mothers can do just as well raising children with donor fathers as they can with real ones.

In her book, "Raising Boys Without Men," for instance, Ms. Drexler claims that "maverick moms," including single women who rely on donor insemination, are just as successful raising boys as mothers who opt for the older model of marriage and motherhood. All that is needed for parental success, according to Ms. Drexler, is a "caring and supportive" model of mothering.

Until recently, there was one primary challenge to the intellectually fashionable view that fathers are fungible. It came from scholarship showing that children did better—e.g., were much more likely to finish school, avoid teen pregnancy and stay out of prison—in intact, married families than in homes headed by a single parent, most of whom are women.

Yet scholars such as Ms. Drexler were able to retort that much of the research relies on a comparison of middle-class married families with poor single mothers, so that differences in how children fare might be largely the result of socioeconomic differences. In their view, middle-class women who have a decent income and a good education can do just as good a job as a middle-class married mother and father.

Labels: culture, donor conception, Fathers, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, single parenting, W. Bradford Wilcox

VOTE

Unlike either oocyte or embryo donation, sperm donation presents a massive PR problem - masturbation. At least since Onan came to a sticky end (1), masturbation (aka 'self-abuse') has both suffered censure and has provided a fertile source for low-grade humour.

Various tactics have been employed to attract men to donate sperm. In jurisdictions where there are no externally-imposed restrictions on the use of enticements, financial inducement seems to work reasonably well and major US sperm banks adopt what may best be described as a casual approach to recruitment. The website of Xytex entices potential donors with the less than eye-catching slogan 'become a sperm donor with Xytex' (2). California Cryobank is a little more imaginative with 'Give the gift of family' (3). The website of Cryos International, which claims to be 'the world's largest international network of sperm banks, [offering] our services to clinics and private customers in more than 60 countries', is the epitome of low-key, providing no obvious indication that it is seeking to recruit donors at all (4). ...

Recent sperm donor recruitment campaigns in the UK have tackled the masturbation 'problem' head on - most notably the National Gamete Donation Trust's (NGDT) 'Give a Toss' campaign (6) (for non-UK readers of this commentary the campaign title cleverly - if not tastefully - played on the twin British slang meanings of 'toss'. First, as a euphemism for 'masturbation' - as in 'have a toss' or to 'toss off' - second, to refer to 'caring', as in the negative rendition of the term 'couldn't give a toss', meaning 'do not care').

Labels: culture, donor conception, United Kingdom

VOTE

The Kids Are All Right, due out in July, is being praised for its honest portrayal of a lesbian couple, played by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening. But what seems most revelatory about the movie is its portrayal of their two teenage children who track down their sperm donor biological father and insist on forging a connection with him. Finally, we have an exploration of how children born from such procedures feel, because in fact it turns out that their feelings about their origins are a lot more complicated than people think. ...

Getting rid of the secrecy would go a long way toward helping relieve the pain offspring feel. But respondents to our study told us something else too: About half of them have concerns about or serious objections to donor conception itself, even if parents tell their children the truth. Our findings suggest that openness alone does not resolve the complex risks to which children are exposed when they are deliberately conceived not to know and be known by their biological fathers.

At the very least, these young people need acknowledgement of reality as they experience it. Donor offspring may have legal and social parents who take a variety of forms—single, coupled, gay, straight. But they also have, like everyone else, a biological father and mother, two people whose very beings are found in the child's own body and seen in his or her own image reflected in the mirror.

Labels: culture, donor conception, My Daddy's Name Is Donor

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...Many findings arising from our study reported in My Daddy’s Name is Donor came as surprises to me. One surprise was how many adults conceived through sperm donation said they were raised in a religious tradition and how many of them identify with a religion today.

Here is how we put it in the report:

We asked all survey respondents “What religion if any were you raised in?” and “What is your religious preference today?” Thirty-six percent of donor offspring [in our survey, adults ages 18-45] said they were raised Catholic, compared to 22 percent from adoptive families and 28 percent raised by their biological parents. (By contrast, persons from adoptive or biological families – and especially those from adoptive families – were far more likely to say they had been raised in a Protestant denomination.) This finding is especially striking given that Catholic teaching opposes the use of donor insemination.

As adults, donor offspring are also much more likely to say they are Catholic today. About a third of donor offspring – 32 percent – say Catholicism is their religious preference today. By contrast, their Catholic-raised peers from adoptive families or raised by their biological parents appear more often to have left the Catholic church.[i] As adults, 15 percent of those from adoptive families and 19 percent of those raised by their biological parents say that Catholicism is their religion today.

Finally, about a third – 32 percent – of donor offspring say that they are Protestant today, and nearly one-quarter of all three groups say their religious preference today is “none.” (Six percent of donor offspring say they are Jewish.) So while a minority of donor offspring do embrace a secular belief system, the majority of them are religious and they are over-represented in the Catholic church.

Labels: Catholic Church, culture, donor conception, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, religion

VOTE

...The caveat (and we say it several times in the report) is this: With 39 persons in the sample, we don’t know how generalizable these findings are to the broader population of sperm donor conceived persons born to lesbian moms. But every other researcher who studies these populations has the same problem.

How do the sperm donor conceived offspring of lesbian moms fare? The answer is, nobody really knows. But some pretty disturbing questions are raised by the study we released last week. Read My Daddy’s Name is Donor to learn more.

Labels: children, donor conception, gay parenting, lesbians, My Daddy's Name Is Donor, parenting

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...Briefly, describe the Michigan case, Ward v. Eastern Michigan University. What led to the lawsuit and what are the key legal issues involved?

In March 2009, Julea Ward, a student at Eastern Michigan University (EMU), was dismissed from her graduate-level counseling program when she refused to counsel a gay man about a same-sex relationship. The program, run by the University’s Department of Counseling and Education, aims to give students real world experience by requiring them to counsel several clients, who pay a small fee, over the course of a semester. After reading this client’s file, Ward asked a supervisor to refer him to another student counselor and to assign her another client. In making this request, Ward stated that her Christian beliefs about homosexuality would prevent her from affirming the client’s relationship with another man. The supervisor claimed that Ward’s refusal violated the ethical obligations of a counselor not to discriminate against clients based on sexual orientation or to impose one’s personal beliefs on clients. Based on this judgment, the school expelled Ward from the counseling program.

Ward filed suit in federal district court in the Eastern District of Michigan, alleging that the school violated her constitutional rights to free exercise of religion and freedom of speech. ...

Are we likely to see many more conscience-related disputes that involve sexual orientation? If so, how are these cases likely to be resolved?

As illustrated by the Michigan and California cases, future health care-related cases are likely to involve counseling for those clients who seek advice with respect to same-sex relationships and medical treatment on matters of fertility and reproduction. These are the areas in which some professionals who are religious may have difficulties because they do not want to facilitate or promote same-sex intimacy. In contrast, we do not expect to see cases in which medical professionals refuse to treat a patient for physical ailments or psychological problems solely on the ground of the patient’s sexual orientation.

Labels: culture, discrimination law, donor conception, gay couples, professional associations, religious liberty

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The line goes like this: "You’ve got millions to spare, we only need one."

There is such a critical shortage of sperm donors in Australia that one of the country’s major IVF companies has taken desperate measures — an advertising campaign targeting men’s ‘‘generosity.’’

In Australia, it is illegal to have a commercial (buy or sell) arrangement for human tissue, including sperm, eggs and embryos, so would-be parents rely on donations.

Michael Chapman, a senior fertility specialist with IVF Australia, said that over the past few years, the number of sperm donors had dwindled from over 100 in Australia to less than 30, largely due to changes to the law governing anonymity.

All sperm donors must agree to provide identifying information so that the child can contact them once they reach 18 — a change that has been gradually brought into force over the past three years in all states.

And doctors cannot bring in sperm from overseas that has been donated anonymously. Chapman said that about 15 percent of all sperm donations in Australia came from overseas.

However, some clinics in Australia import up to 80 percent of their sperm supply from the United States, which is legal as long as the person is not anonymous and not paid for supplying the sperm.

Labels: Australia, donor conception

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If you want to adopt a child in the United States, you’ll face an array of bureaucratic roadblocks and invasive interrogations. Adoption agencies will assess your finances, your relationships, and your fitness as a potential guardian. The interests of the child, not the desires of the would-be parent, will be treated as paramount throughout.

If you want to procure sperm or eggs, the process is completely different. You can shop for gametes the way you’d go shopping for a house or a car — buying ova from an Ivy League undergraduate, or sperm from a 6-foot-8, athletic, blue-eyed Dane. The person selling you the right to bear and rear their biological offspring can do so anonymously, with no future strings attached at all.

The result is a freewheeling fertility marketplace whose impact on American life keeps increasing. Sperm donations generate between 30,000 and 60,000 conceptions every year, and roughly 6,000 children are conceived through egg donation annually as well. About a million American adults, if not more, are the biological children of sperm donors.

Not surprisingly, these Americans have a complicated relationship to the reproductive marketplace that made their existence possible. Their inner lives are the subject of a fascinating study from the Institute for American Values, based on a survey of younger adults, ages 18 to 45, who were conceived through sperm donation. The authors — Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval Glenn and Karen Clark — depict a population that’s at once grateful to the fertility industry and uneasy about the way they were conceived, supportive of assisted fertility but haunted by the feeling of being a bought-and-paid-for child.

Labels: children, culture, donor conception, My Daddy's Name Is Donor

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Having emerged as the hottest destination for surrogacy, it is but natural for India to take the lead in evolving a law that safeguards the interests of all the parties concerned, including the child born through assisted reproductive technology (ART).

There is no precedent to the proposal under consideration that foreigners or NRIs seeking to rent a womb in India be made to give evidence that their country of residence recognized surrogacy and would give citizenship to a child born through agreement.

Both conditions are reasonable as they are designed to deal with the legal uncertainties thrown up by a couple of surrogacy cases that did not pan out in the agreed manner. In the Manji Yamada case, the baby was embroiled in litigation as the commissioning Japanese parents had divorced by the time it was born in India.

Labels: donor conception, India, surrogate motherhood

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Carey Goldberg ’82 has been writing about serious intellectual subjects throughout her career, from contemporary Russian art to how cancer metastasizes. Now she’s turned her attention to something different: magic sperm. Three Wishes: A True Story of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak, and Astonishing Luck on Our Way to Love and Motherhood is a laugh-cry-and-cheer book, co-authored by Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand. Goldberg spoke with Lenore Skenazy ’81, author of Free-Range Kids.

Y: What’s your book about?

G: The book begins when I turned 39 and was still single and decided to become a single mother. So I bought eight vials of donor sperm. But just as those vials arrived in my clinic’s freezer, I met the man who would become my husband and the father of my children. So I passed the sperm on to my friend Beth, who had just come out of a horrible divorce. But as soon as Beth got the sperm, she, too, met the man who would become her husband and the father of her child. So she passed the sperm on to our friend Pam, and the same thing happened! She met a man and had a baby. So it’s kind of a sisterhood of the traveling sperm. ...

Y: So is it a celebration of older motherhood or a cautionary tale?

G: When I was a single woman in my 30s, all the news I ever got about my prospects for marrying and having children was so gloom-and-doom. I really felt like it could be helpful to single women to hear that the outlook might not be nearly so gloomy. But the book makes clear that having a baby this late is no picnic. I had one miscarriage. Both of my co-authors terminated pregnancies because they had chromosomal disorders. Also, it’s clear that none of us chose to wait so long—it was just that the right man didn’t come along. The book’s message is that sometimes in life there comes a time when you have to stop waiting and take action. ...

Y: What advice would you give to Yale undergrads about dating, motherhood, and marriage?

G: My daughter Liliana is now eight. Recently I was playing the game of Life with her, and she reached the point on the board where your little car has to stop and you get married and put a spouse in. And my daughter said, “When I grow up I don’t think I’ll get married. I’ll just get some sperm.” And I found myself saying, “Well, that’s fine, but being married is really very nice too.”

Labels: abortion, culture, donor conception, Marriage, parenting

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Errors at fertility clinics almost doubled in 12 months, it was reported today. The number of mistakes at IVF centres in England and Wales rose from 182 in 2007/8 to 334 in 2008/9. Blunders included embryos being lost or implanted in the wrong woman, and eggs being fertilised with the wrong man's sperm.

The figures from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the IVF regulatory body, were obtained by BBC Radio Five Live's Donal MacIntyre show. The HFEA said the errors represented less than 1% of more than 50,000 IVF cycles.

Labels: Artificial Reproductive Technology, donor conception, United Kingdom

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SINGLE CHOICE: MANY LIVES explores single motherhood via donor insemination and its implications through the intimate perspectives of mothers, donor-conceived individuals, and donors, among others, to raise awareness about assisted reproductive technologies and the growing trend of alternative families. This relevant and timely film skilfully travels around the country--and the heart--to get to the bottom of the changing face of parenthood.

Labels: culture, donor conception, motherhood, single parenting

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