Everything Conceivable by Liza Mundy

Author:Liza Mundy [Mundy, Liza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

“I’m Glad It’s Daddy’s Sperm That’s Dead, and Not Daddy”

“The majority of youths felt comfortable with their origins and planned to obtain their donor’s identity,” notes a report conducted by researchers working with The Sperm Bank of California, the tiny but redoubtable nonprofit which, unlike lucrative private clinics and brokerages, has worked to track the outcome of the social experiment it set in motion. With the turn of the millennium, TSBC’s first generation of “identity-release” children were about to qualify to meet their biodads, in what was surely the world’s first planned release of sperm-donor identities. TSBC found that most of the children were looking forward to meeting their donors. The 2004 study, published in Human Reproduction, concluded that most children accepted their means of conception: “They felt very loved by their parents and very wanted, and also (positively) unique,” the report noted. About 25 percent referred to their donor as “the donor.” Roughly the same number said “biological/birth father,” and another 25 percent preferred “father/daddy.” One child referred to the donor as “him” or “that guy.”

The study found that children from single-mother families tended to feel more positive about their donor than those from lesbian-headed households, perhaps because the nonbiological lesbian partner tended to have cooler feelings toward the donor and the threat he represented. The most common feeling about the donor was curiosity. They wanted to know whether they looked like him, and whether he had changed since he filled out his papers. Half said they felt appreciative of the donor. About one-third were anxious or concerned about meeting him; one wondered “if he is a good person or not.” Another one-third felt excited. One felt angry and upset at the donor; another was “resentful that I haven’t known him and that I don’t know very much about him.”

No child expected the donor to pay his or her college tuition.

Eighty-two percent wanted to know what he was like as a person; also high on the list were what he looked like, and whether he had a family.

One youth wanted to know “whether he ever thought of them.”

The number one thing offspring wanted, in addition to the donor’s identity, was a photo. Several children simply wrote, “I want as much information as possible.”

Many thought meeting the donor would “increase their sense of identity.”

Parents tended to underestimate the likelihood that their child would want a relationship with their donor. Just 47 percent of single parents thought their child would, when in fact 82 percent of their children said they would like to have a relationship with him. Similarly, 40 percent of parents in heterosexual couples thought their children would want a relationship with the donor, whereas 67 percent of the children did. Most described the ideal donor as a “friend,” an unclelike figure “where we do some stuff but not see him all the time.” Another said, “Just someone to say, ‘hey, that’s my dad.’” Seventeen percent replied, reasonably, that the relationship would “depend on what [the donor] was like.” The children felt that being told early had made a difference to their well-being.

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