Who's the Daddy?
Daily I receive an update from Infertility Network bringing me infertility-related news stories. This morning’s issue included an article from the Weekly Standard titled “Who’s Your Daddy?” by a sociologist at the University of Virginia.
He begins with a statistic: Births to unmarried mothers are at a record high in the U.S.—almost 1.5 million in 2004 alone, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. But then he notes, “While the rising trend is of long standing, one novel factor driving up childbearing outside marriage is the growing popularity of single motherhood by donor insemination.” The procedure has more than doubled in the last decade.
“Most public discussion of donor insemination for single women,” he says, “has been carried on in a neutral, positive, or breathlessly celebratory tone. Isn't it great, the thinking seems to be, that these women are fulfilling their aspiration to be mothers?” He cites support groups like Single Mothers by Choice and articles in publications such as the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and the Washington Post or NBC's TV drama “Inconceivable,” in his examples of glamorizing the practice.
Yet European countries ban it: “Sweden and Italy bar single mothers from engaging in either IVF or use of anonymous sperm (or, in Italy, eggs), and Britain and the Netherlands prohibit anonymous sperm donation. Why? While the U.S. conversation focuses on adults (i.e., women finding fulfillment), the European conversation focuses on the children. Imagine: How would you feel if you had no identifiable father—by your mother’s choice?
The conversation with donor-conceived kids of single moms is sobering. There’s the child who asked, “Mommy, what did you do with my daddy? You know I need a daddy or I can't be a child."
Donor-conceived children check out men who are strangers to see if they match the physical traits of their donor dads. One put it this way: "It'll always run through my mind whether he meets the criteria to be my dad or not.”
A 23-year-old donor-conceived woman said, “I had to grieve. It wasn't till I was 17 or 18 that I got it. I felt very angry. How dare someone take my choice away from me? How dare the medical profession tell me it doesn't matter?"
Donor-conceived kids, it turns out, are deeply affected by father absence.
With all our stress on autonomy and our focus on “my” rights, the stateside discussion is sorely lacking. It may seem strange to consider the rights of someone who’s not yet conceived, but in failing to do so, we harm them. It's time we learned from the Europeans and considered the children.