Where does your baby come from?

A recent article reports on where Japanese couples who needed third-party eggs or sperm got these gametes:

Of those who donated ova, 87 were the wives' sisters, including 3 sisters-in-law, 12 were relatives, including cousins, and 12 were friends and acquaintances. 23 of the men who donated sperm were the husbands' brothers, including 1 brother-in-law, 24 were fathers and two were friends.

How fascinating. How will the children feel when they learn that their real mommy gave them away to be raised by their aunt? How will they feel when they realize that their grandfather is really their father?

Parents and doctors don't let themselves be bothered by such disturbing thoughts. The children will be happy of course, because all they need is love! It doesn't matter who loves them - strangers are fully welcome to take on the parental role. A parent is whomever the adults INTEND to be the parent - and thinking makes it so! The children will be fine as long as they are cuddled and pampered and have appropriate role models of both genders.

Why would they want their "real" mommy and daddy? Puh-LEEEEZE. Biology is so passe.

Those little IVF brats should be grateful for their medical problems! Without them they wouldn't even be alive.

A new article reports on a study that children conceived via IVF are more likely to have health problems even later in life. It says among other things:

A study of 3,980 articles in medical and scientific journals between 1980 and 2005 has shown significantly higher risks of long-term medical problems for children conceived through artificial procreation such as in vitro fertilisation or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a method in which a selected sperm is injected into the ovum.

...Most recently, a study published in the June 21, 2007 issue of Human Reproduction showed that children conceived through IVF visit hospitals significantly more times (1.76 vs. 1.07 times) than naturally conceived children.

This is news which confirms what many who are involved or seriously interested in the industry already know. But when has the truth ever stopped us? After all, this kind of news would only be important if we really thought about the children more than about ourselves.

Of course, a "risk" is merely that; it is not a certainty. And we are already way past that. Today, we are INTENTIONALLY creating children who have problems. For instance, with the afore-mentioned intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), we are knowingly and intentionally creating children who are as infertile as their fathers - this is a proven fact and the doctors and the fathers know this, and yet they do it anyway. Moreover, ICSI may also pass on other genetic problems such as a predisposition to cancer. But who cares?

What I hear from the parents who do this is that well, creating children who have problems is still better than not creating them at all - after all, they get to LIVE, even though they are flawed! Isn't existence better than not existing? Isn't a life with problems better than no life at all?

Indeed, children are being tailor-made with disabilities that suit the parents. Children have already been intentionally created (through PGD and IVF) to be midgets, because their parents are midgets, and children have been intentionally created deaf, because their parents are deaf.

And all these parents are supposedly doing these children a favor by creating them, because a deaf life or a midget life or an infertile life is still better than no life at all. Those darn kids should be grateful! Right?

Egg co-parenting

The Seattle Times had an interesting article recently on two moms - the social mom and the "egg mom" who have maintained contact so that the twin daughters are growing up knowing the female source of their genes - the woman whom normal people would still call the "real mother."

Of course, this "egg mom" doesn't think of herself as the real mother of these girls - and of course, in our relativist, subjectivist world, that would indeed seem to "make it so," as Captain Picard used to say.

Except, there is a little glitch. Biology says that the "egg mom" is in fact the MOTHER, the ONLY one, regardless of what she may think of that or whether or not she agrees with it. Biology doesn't ask for personal opinions, and doesn't change based on social trends, opinion polls or political correctness.

And the girls may in time agree. They can't be expected to necessarily stick to the neat little story their "co-parents" have invented. Many donor-created children don't necessarily agree that their mother's egg is just a helpful little insertion into their social parents' reproduction - they know very well that the egg is identified with the person whose name in the real world is always "mother." They know very well that they have been half-adopted, and that they are being raised by a woman who is, in fact, a stranger. To quote "Son of a Surrogate", who explains how such children may feel:

What do we think about what you think? What you think doesn’t even make sense to most of us. It doesn’t make sense to the majority of people...Do you expect us to have this sort of delusional thinking that you do or do you expect us to think like 99.9% of the general population...

Read the article here.

I'm baaack

Though I have not been blogging for the past 3 months (family vacations, work comittments, etc.), I have not become less interested in the area of assisted repro tech. There is just so much to cover! And even though I've been away, I've noticed that quite a few people actually read this blog...so I want to continue getting the word out on children's rights!

Here is an interesting link: http://www.cbc.ca/toronto/features/infertility/index.html
CBC Radio One in Toronto did an extensive series on infertility and infertility treatments, and you can listen to the whole series online. Especially worth hearing is the interview with Olivia Pratten, who explains how the children of donor insemination actually feel - hello, is anyone listening?

I've also finished reading the Baby Business, and am making my way though Everything Conceivable by Liza Mundy. Both books are quite good. The Baby Business was a quicker read, but it had fewer stories. Everything Conceivable is a bit wordy and slow, but on the other hand, packed with individual portraits that are endlessly interesting - and disturbing. Both books are highly worth reading for anyone who is interested in this area.

Well-Known Writer Ends Quest for an Egg Donor

Dani Shapiro, an articulate and well-known writer and journalist, wrote an excellent article in Elle magazine in February about her experiences with searching for an egg donor. Her account is brilliantly insightful and honest.

Dani's article sheds a lot of insight into the consumerist mentality of those who search for egg donors. She writes shamelessly: "I became aware that I never would have chosen myself as a donor." She also reveals how egg donors are marketed like prized horses.

Dani also writes about her feelings of jealousy and being cheated on as her husband's sperm fertilized the eggs of another woman:

"At the very moment we sipped our drinks, Carly's eggs were in a petri dish being fertilized by my husband's sperm. I felt jealous, as if she were the other woman in our marriage. Michael's genetic material - his DNA - was cheating on me with the DNA of this blond, blue-eyed UCLA Law student. I imagined his millions of sperm swimming, tails wagging madly, toward her lovely, ripe eggs."

When the resulting embryos were being implanted into a surrogate mother, Dani felt similarly uncomfortable:

"Embryos that were half my beloved husband's. I felt nauseated as I accomapnied Sahakian into the room where Sandra was lying, her lower body covered by a white sheet, her feet in stirrups. All I wanted to do was shout, "No!" But I couldn't say a thing....I was acutely aware that I was watching something happen that I could never take back...."

As she pursued the goal of having a child through egg donation and surrogate gestation, it seems that Dani realized that the egg donor would indeed be the real mother of the resulting child. She also realized that to use donor eggs is, in a sense, to introduce infidelity (a third person) into the marriage forever - another person who will forever be the mother of her husband's child.

Dani ended her quest after the implantation of the embryos into a surrogate failed. She had realized too much about "the brave new world of assisted reproduction - a world, it must be said, that is many things, but normal is not one of them...The best - or perhaps the only - way to go through the process is to keep blinders on and run mainacally toward the finish line. Stop, and you may stop forever."

Highly reccommended! Read it here.

The Gay "Right" To Parenthood

A baby-making-and-selling clinic in LA has just launched "the first dedicated program for gay men wanting to become parents."

According to the article, the clinic says that it is "responding to huge demand from gay male couples around the world who want their own biological children but are often thwarted by prejudice and bureaucracy."

Ah, of COURSE...it's societal discrimination that prevents gay couples from having children!

Not to mention that ever-present, natural and maddeningly non-partisan obstacle: biology.

Well hey, if you're going to go the extra mile and buy a baby for $60,000 (the average cost at the clinic), why not choose the sex? "three-quarters of gay couples pay extra to choose the sex of their baby"(over 60% want boys). And why not choose the hair color and eye color? Wouldn't want baby to clash with the accessories. What about choosing the temperament and intelligence? Wouldn't want a baby that's too demanding and hampers the lifestyle. All the choices are available as the purchasing prospective parents sift through donor attributes.

So you see, when preparing to have a donor baby, there are so many things to mull over and worry about that are much more important than whether your future baby will have a mommy or not. After all, mommies are so passe and culturally imposed upon us. They don't really contribute anything irreplaceable or special, either because of their biological relationship or because of their gender - and neither do daddies. Everyone is replaceable and interchangeable, because all that matters is love, love, love...like in that song by the Beatles. It doesn't matter who loves you, as long as someone does.

And if you say anything else, then you're just plain being mean and discriminatory to those who can't produce their own children.

Notice for those who don't want to wear the big yellow star labelled "bigot and homophobe": better get on the bandwagon and support the elimination of children's fundamental human rights to know and be raised by both of their natural, biological parents.

Who cares about legal or human rights? It's about what's "compassionate"...

The myth of idyllic homosexual families with is being deflated bit by bit with each similar story of bitter post-love battle that makes it into the media. Recently I wrote about one such case, where the bioloigical mom was fighting against her ex-lesbian partner (biologically unrelated to the child) regarding visitation rights. Now another similar case has surfaced.

Sara Wheeler is a lesbian woman who in 2000 was in a cohabiting relationship with Melody Wheeler. At that time, Sara conceived her own son through artificial insemination with donor sperm. Two years later, Melody legally adopted the boy with Sara's consent.

Some years later, Sara and Melody split up, and Sara filed to have Melody's adoption invalidated.

Based on the law and legal reasoning alone, the right decision would indeed be to invalidate the adoption, since it appears to have failed the legal criteria from the very start. The reasons for this were clearly stated by Justice Carley of the GA Supreme COurt on February 26 ,2007, in a dissent in which he criticized the 4-3 decision of that court to refuse to hear Sara's case (his dissent was joined by two other justices on the Court). Read his dissent here.

However, when faced with the powerful gay lobby, who cares about the language and letter of the law? This is about political correctness. One openly gay state rep thus said of Carley's dissent that it "sounded very anti-gay and very anti-gay-family". It doesn't matter that Carley is right. What matters is that he shouldn't even try to be right. He should just give in, because to enforce the law is to be mean to gay parents. Indeed, that seems to have been the judgement of the majority of the GA Supreme Court.

And there we are. Anyone who wants to be a parent can be a parent, even to children that have no biological connection to them, and regardless of the law or the basic rights of the biological parents or children.

By the way, I am not "blaming" Melody for this situation. Sara and Melody are both equally to blame for this tangled mess. This mess comes directly from the mentality that parenting and biology aren't connected - and this is something they both believed. They decided to use donor sperm, as if the biological father meant nothing to their child. Since they so easily erased one biological parent from their child's life, then why should the other biological parent get any special treatment? Sara cooked her own soup in this case.