Ending Anonymous Fatherhood
by Fr. Roger Landry - June 18, 2010
Last month, we noted the irony that Mother's Day fell on the 50th anniversary of FDA's approval of something that symbolizes the antithesis of motherhood, the birth control pill. This month, as we prepare for Father's Day, we do it in the context of a groundbreaking study published three weeks ago on what is, in some ways, the clearest antithesis of fatherhood.
The May 31 study was entitled, "My Daddy's Name is Donor" and was published by the Institute for American Values' Commission on Parenthood's Future. It looked at the issues faced by children whose fathers are anonymous sperm donors through the immoral process of artificial insemination. In the United States, anywhere from 30,000 to 60,000 children are conceived a year through secret fathers and it is believed that there are now about a million Americans who were brought into existence by these means. No one really knows the precise figures because there's no required reporting in the fertility industry. All that is known about these nameless fathers is what is listed in the consumerist catalogs that aspiring mothers can browse in order to select the physical, racial and intellectual attributes of the unidentified father of their future child.
The 140-page study looked at 485 offspring of sperm donors, ages 18-45, and compared them to similarly-aged control groups of 562 adults adopted as infants and 563 raised by their biological parents.
There were several notable findings. The study shows that young adults conceived through sperm donation experience profound struggles with their origins and identities. We live in a society that takes genealogy seriously and in which many seek to trace their genealogy back many generations; "donor offspring" cannot even trace it back one generation on their father's side. They may know the attributes of the designer dad their mothers selected in a catalog — if their mothers shared the information with them — but that's it. Half of them report that they think a few times a week or more about how they were conceived. The study documents that 45 percent are troubled that they were conceived as a result of a financial transaction, and that not even their mothers know the identity of their fathers. One out of ten confess that they believe they are a freak of nature and therefore substantially different than others.
Ignorance of their origins leads to other issues. Fifty-eight percent of sperm donor offspring say that every time they see somehow who resembles them, they wonder if they are related, compared to 45 percent of adopted adults and 14 percent raised by biological parents. Forty-six percent say that they're worried about becoming romantically attracted to or sexually involved with someone to whom they would be unknowingly related (compared to 16 percent of adopted adults and 9 percent of those raised by biological parents). Sixty-nine percent confess wondering what their sperm donor's family is like and whether they would want to have a relationship. Forty-eight percent say that they feel sad when they see friends with their biological fathers and mothers and 53 percent say that it hurts when other people start talking about their genealogical backgrounds. When asked for medical histories, they express anxiety that they simply do not know anything about their father's side other than what was listed in the catalog their mothers perused.
Other issues flow from this confusion and anxiety about their origins. Donor offspring are significantly more likely than those raised by biological parents to struggle with criminal behavior, substance abuse, depression. They are twice as likely to have problems with the law and with drugs and 1.5 times more likely to report mental health problems than those raised by biological parents. Those who were raised by a married set of parents also had to deal with the issues flowing from a much higher divorce rate: when a wife basically commits technological adultery with another man through the assistance of doctors, it is demonstrably unhealthy for her marital union; the study showed that 27 percent of the married heterosexual parents of the donor offspring divorce before the child turns 16, compared to 14 percent of those were adopted.
Children born through sperm donation believe they should have a right to know the truth about their origins. About two-thirds of them believe they should have the right to know the identity of their biological father and have the opportunity to form some king of relationship with him, to know whether they have any half-siblings and to have the chance to form a bond with them. At present in the United States, they have absolutely no such rights. Happily in recent years several nations — Britain, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland and some parts of Australia and New Zealand, all societies basically with permissive reputations with regard to bioethical mores — have banned anonymous sperm donations precisely in recognition of the rights of offspring to know their origins. They have also introduced other regulations, for example, limiting the amount of children sperm donors can genetically father, seeking to prevent one man with an attractive profile in a sperm catalog from becoming the biological father of hundreds or more children, as has happened in certain infamous cases.
The authors of the study state that the results warrant "nothing less than a national and international debate on the ethics, meaning and practice of donor conception, starting now." The lack of regulations for sperm donation flows from prioritizing the interests of adults without taking into consideration the legitimate rights of children conceived. The irony of the whole situation is that artificial insemination — and the whole fertility industry — is based on the premise that biological connections matter. The reason why a woman undergoes the painful and demeaning process of having a doctor inseminate her with a stranger's sperm via medical apparatus is because she wants to have a biological relationship with a child, and not simply adopt one of the millions of children worldwide awaiting a home. That a mother who values such a biological connection with a child would participate in a system in which that child would have no relationship whatsoever with her biological father shows the intrinsically contradictory nature of the whole industry. Moreover, the way artificial insemination reduces fatherhood essentially to an act of masturbation in a doctor's office, severed from any relationship with, responsibility for, knowledge of, or contact with his child and the child's mother, is something tremendously damaging to the notion of fatherhood as a whole.
It's time for the U.S. to start to stand up for the rights of these children. The authors of the study call on political leaders to end anonymous sperm donation and establish registries so that those born before the law is changed can find their biological relations, when mutually agreeable. They also urge that donor conception should be treated legally more like adoption, which has regulations to help it function in the best interests of children.
They advocate that health professionals discuss with potential sperm donors and parents the life experience of donor offspring, that limits be set on how many children a sperm daddy can father, and that, conscious of the genetic, heritable basis of disease, require sperm banks to track the health of donors and keep parents informed about the genetic diseases donor children may develop in the future.
They exhort religious leaders to help donor children address some of the difficulties the study shows they will have and to appeal to parents and donors to recognize the consequences of their actions in the lives of potential children. They entreat everyone to remember that such reproductive technologies generate not just babies but persons, to examine the sufferings experienced by donor children and ask, "Does a good society intentionally create children in this way?"
As we approach Father's day and publicly recognize the inestimable good of the relationship between children and their fathers, it is a time for all of us to appreciate how irresponsible it is — and contrary to the meaning of fatherhood — for society to continue to tolerate anonymous fatherhood any longer.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
