August 15, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:To tell or not to tell?
More women these days are using donor eggs to conceive, and apparently, most of them have decided not to tell their children about it. Elle has a long article about it, outlining the hidden and not-so-hidden costs:
�If they're not going to tell, they have to not tell a single soul. Ever. Because there is a real chance that if anyone knows, the child will find out, and if that happens the child will feel terribly lied to and violated�that we know from research. So they have to burn all the papers: the donor profile from the clinic, a picture they may have of her. They have to never talk about it, not even to each other. They have to lie to the obstetrician, the pediatrician, go to enormous lengths to make sure it isn't in any records. Let's say the mother's family has a history of breast cancer�she can't tell the daughter not to worry herself sick about it. It's an enormous secret to keep, lies on top of lies, and the fear of having the truth uncovered is with you every day.� (For most people, it's already too late to vow never to utter a word. According to Klock's data, about 80 percent of recipients have told others; these same people told Klock they regret having blabbed.)Mendell also boldly speaks the three words parents in this position dread most: home DNA testing. With paternity and maternity kits available on the Web for about $200, it's not hard to imagine a scenario in which a kid, already sensing there's something unsaid at home, puts two and two together and sneaks a hair from Mom's brush.
Marital strife, unrelated to egg donation, could also �out� a child who hasn't been told, Rosenberg says. �Imagine what's going to happen during divorces when men try to take the kids and can prove to the court that they're the only genetic parent.�
Not to mention the negative externality: all those forty-something celebrities parading their babies gives younger women the false impression that they can safely put off conceiving for another decade or so. Posted by Jane Galt at August 15, 2005 10:44 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
Why should one continue to perpetrate the nonsense that there is something shameful about being from a donor egg? Sounds like keeping adoption a secret or that Grandma has cancer.
If our culture allows such things as adoption that are a great boon to individuals, why hide the knowledge from our kids? Maybe parents are well-meaning - their kid won't be teased - but hiding such knowledge only assures us that "society" will continue to treat them as shameful, thus allowing teasing to endure.
Eventually society will make a distinction between birth mothers and biological mothers, but not for some time yet. And once we start tinkering with genes of eggs, whether donor or not, the biological mother side of the child will be of technical and medical curiosity, but of no real emotional importance.
This is surpassingly stupid, because it won't be about home DNA testing, but about health-insurance-mandated genome sequencing. Certainly within the kid's lifetime and within most of ours. NHGRI is moving on the $1000 genome:
http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/oct2004/nhgri-14.htm
The UK abandoned anonymity of Sperm Donors with two predictable effects.
A huge drop in public donors.
A new market in online delivery of fresh sperm.
"A new market in online delivery of fresh sperm.'
Great new euphemism for hooking up in a chatroom.
Women may be tempted to lie about this, but it's a bad idea for all the good reasons people have cited above. Concieving on someone else's egg is not shameful. Lying to husband about the real parentage of tour kids is a time-honored tradition, but it's not honorable, and now this would extend that kind of behavior to children.
"Not to mention the negative externality: all those forty-something celebrities parading their babies gives younger women the false impression that they can safely put off conceiving for another decade or so."
As someone who is in the last month of a (so-far) very easy first pregnancy at 38 years old, I want to reiterate what my doctor told me: Don't let 35 scare you.
I agree that the Holly Hunters out there give a false impression, but there is also sometimes too much emphasis on the risks of waiting. No one should have a child before they are ready, even if that means waiting until well into their 30s.
I think you are all failing to see one vitally important issue -- eventually, many of these children will be faced with the need to know where their DNA came from. If mom gets, for example, breast cancer at age 45, the daughter that came from a donor egg will need to make decisions based upon her genetic lineage --- without that information, she will end up making poor health care decisions. Eventually, the child at a minimum needs to be informed, just as the adopted child does.
Aggdoc,
Perhaps by then we'll have DNA testing and gene identification & function downpat and not need to know about the parents.
I don't think the tell/not-tell issue is quite so one-sided as it might seem. Personal experience has shown me that the simple knowledge of being adopted has an extraordinary effect in adolescence on a large fraction of the adoptees I have known (admittedly not that many, but enough to build some opinions). I'm not quite certain why, and the one I know who was told in adulthood didn't have a particularly extreme reaction.
Maybe the adoptees were going to go off the rails (or close to it) anyway, but for several of them, the ability to construct heartbreak or fantastical scenarios for themselves were a major push in the wrong directions ("my real mother would love me, etc.").
I'm not sold that withholding the truth is the right solution, but my limited experience with adopted friends and acquaintances seemed to show me that knowledge that your parents aren't your "real parents" can send people over the edge when they're close (i.e. in adolescence).
What about the danger of incest? By this, I mean boy meets girl who both share the same biological egg/sperm donor. Do increased numbers of children conceived from sperm/egg banks effect this in a meaningful way? Is there a level where the risk of incest (assuming that half siblings that 'mate' have a higher rate of children with birth defects) becomes a problem?
It's fine when it's a fringe activity, but if 10% of the population does it, is it still just a personal choice?
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