CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT, Pain, Profit, and Third-Party Conception
By Leslie Fain
July 31, 2013
The day after Stephanie Blessing learned she had been conceived with the assistance of a sperm donor and that the man she knew and loved as her father for 32 years was not her father, she went into shock. She remembers sitting in her rocking chair, staring into space. It was so bad, her husband had to remind her to do something as basic as changing their baby’s diaper.
“I was just catatonic,” she said.
The shock turned into depression, as she began to mourn what she had lost. “I was a daddy’s girl. I had a great childhood, and was the apple of my non-biological dad’s eye. [I] adored my dad,” said Blessing, a homeschooling mother of five, who lives in Tennessee.
“It really hurt to find out [my dad] wasn’t mine in the way I thought he was,” she said. “I grew up hearing about his dad being a cowboy. Everybody on dad’s side of the family could tool leather like nobody…my grandmother, who is about to turn 100…they aren’t mine anymore,” she said.
Then, she began to mourn the loss of her biological father. “As much as my dad adored me, it hurts to know that the man who helped create me chose to have nothing to do with my life,” said Blessing. “People are deceiving themselves if they think they can love somebody enough to make up for the person who isn’t there.”
She had never suffered from depression before, and her husband, an evangelical pastor, had no experience in dealing with an issue quite like this one.
Blessing was finally told her conception story due to concerns she had over her dad’s failing health from progressive supranuclear palsy, a condition similar to Parkinson’s disease. Once in robust health, her father was having an array of physical and cognitive problems, and his health appeared to decline more with each visit. Was Blessing genetically disposed to this disease? Would her husband have to take care of her the same way her mother now had to take care of her father?
The answer was no, yet much worse. Blessing learned she was conceived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in 1976. Following the procedure, “The doctor told my parents to ‘go home, have sex, and pretend like this never happened, and get on with your life,’” said Blessing. Four years later, Blessing’s parents conceived her little sister naturally. “This convinced him maybe I really was his daughter,” she said.
A DNA test she took proved otherwise.
Here is what she knows about her biological father: he is of Eastern European Jewish descent, and was a medical student or intern. She has no legal right to any of the paperwork created in Dallas, and her biological father was guaranteed anonymity. She eventually contacted her mother’s doctor, James Aiman, who never returned her calls. Aiman passed away, and she discovered all her mother’s records were destroyed. She may never find out who her father is, but prays she will.
“I think my mother wanted a child so badly, she couldn’t think beyond her own need,” said Blessing.
Sperm donation, along with egg donation and surrogacy, are booming businesses in the US. But because it is a largely unregulated industry and there is no central registry tracking births from surrogacy and egg and sperm donation, figures such as number of births and how much money is made are difficult to come by, according to Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network.
Current laws offer little if any avenue to address the harm done to donor children, according to Margaret Liu McConnell, a Washington DC-based attorney whose work has appeared in The American Conservative, Commentary, and National Review.
McConnell points out that the law does not look kindly on persons who walk away from their parental responsibilities, for example the proverbial “deadbeat dad.” We do not allow a man who had a one-night stand that results in a pregnancy to walk away from financial responsibility for the child, and McConnell believes there may be parallels to donor fathers and mothers.
“Such laws could be implemented through medical regulations and through laws specifying that any AFT (artificial fertilization technology) contracts that require a sperm- or egg-donor parent to relinquish parental rights and duties are void as against public policy,” said McConnell.
Unfortunately, implementing any law would mean going toe-to-toe with “a multi-billion dollar medical industry, with a legal arm of professionals who specialize in advising clients on how to sever the rights and duties of egg and sperm donors toward their biological children,” said McConnell.
Still, if a law could make it past this medical Goliath in a state or federal legislature, McConnell feels confident about the inevitable battle to overturn it in the courts. “We’ve just seen in United States v. Windsor (the DOMA decision) that the Supreme Court did not take the opportunity to expand the fundamental right to marriage to encompass the right to marry a person of the same sex. The Court at this time does not appear eager to expand fundamental rights in the area of family formation,” McConnell said.
There are some parallels between third-party conception and adoption, but there are also key differences. Adoption is an attempt to improve on a tragic situation involving a child, whether it is parental death, abandonment, neglect, or abuse. While a donor-conceived child and an adoptee may both experience the trauma of abandonment and kinship separation, with donor conception and surrogacy, these separations are intentionally caused by the parents. In cases of adoption, on the other hand, orphans are not intentionally created in order to obtain “wanted” children. Similarly, money is not used as a tool to coerce or persuade parents to abandon their children in order to give another person or couple a child.
What exactly have been the effects of artificial reproductive conception on the children who result from it? The reactions of those conducting studies on the psychological and sociological effects of offspring conceived by sperm donors have ranged from sanguine to deeply concerned. Although surrogacy has been around for 30 years, there is only one documented study on its long-term effects, which found that children born by this method often have emotional problems. Egg donation is much newer, and useful information on that form of reproductive technology has yet to emerge.
“Personally I am always a little reticent putting too much stock into studies of children’s views and outcomes,” said Damian Adams, a donor-conceived research scientist who works in the medical field and lives in Adelaide, Australia. “Some of these studies have been conducted in the presence of their parents, which may influence the results, as can those that use the parents for feedback on the child’s wellbeing.”
He added that donor-conceived offspring may also feel pressured to answer a certain way out of fear of hurting the feelings of their parents, adding that many donor-conceived people he has talked with have mentioned to him they feel protective of the parents who raised them.
Adams said since there are studies showing various outcomes of reproductive technologies, the best thing to do is apply philosophy and legal precedence to how we view and regulate third-party conception. He also said looking to other areas, such as adoption, can give us more evidence concerning the effects of biological separation on children. Although the debate up to this point has mainly focused on sociological and psychological effects on children, which he views as incredibly important, Adams says he would also like to see more debate on biological health history, physical outcomes for children from the actual procedures used in their conception, and knowledge of kinship to avoid consanguity.
The Catholic Church is opposed to any form of reproductive assistance that interferes with the marital act, reducing procreation to an activity directed by doctors and scientists and turning children into commodities. This includes gamete donation and the use of surrogates (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 2373-2379).
“Donor-conceived people are the guinea pigs”
Adams always knew he was conceived through sperm donation, as his parents began talking to him about it when he was three. “This was extremely rare in that era, as all parents were advised to keep it a secret,” he said.
Adams, like Blessing, had a happy childhood. “At that stage I was too busy being a kid and playing with friends than to worry about my origins. Also because I knew that I could not find out who my biological father was, I did not try and think about it too much, either,” said Adams, who is a Ph.D. candidate researching the welfare of donor-conceived people.
“I love my parents, and I find it sad that some people choose to view those donor-conceived people who are unhappy with their origins as coming from broken or unhappy homes,” he said. “That is simply not the case in all instances. While some argue that love is all that matters, we can see from my case that love does not conquer all.”
Once in favor of anonymous donor conception, his views changed after the birth of his daughter. “It was a moment not too dissimilar from the moments that parents often report experiencing when they hold their child for the first time and stare into their baby’s eyes,” he said.
“It was an acceptance and knowledge of a biological connection. That no matter what might happen in the world, we would always be father and daughter,” he said. “This biological connection made me think about how I would feel if my daughter grew up not knowing who I was.”
“This was a concept I could not bear to think about, but instead I applied it to how this notion did in fact mirror my own life. While events transpired that I do not know who my donor is, and I may never know, there will always be a biological connection that can never be broken. So instead of being an extremely joyous time, there was part of it that was incredibly dark as I reflected on what [I’d been] deprived of,” Adams said.
“I do experiments every day in a lab, and what I have seen and researched in the donor-conception field mirrors what I do in the lab. Donor-conceived people are the guinea pigs,” said Adams.