Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Baby Daddies by MARGARET DICKSON I recently saw a movie entitled The Kids are All Right with well-known stars Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. Thought provoking does not adequately describe this fi lm which addresses deeply personal and innately human issues revolving around what “family” really means. Some of them are too complex and too controversial to tackle in this column, but one has stayed with me in the weeks since I saw the movie. It is the practice of artifi cial insemination through anonymous sperm donation, which has been around since an adventurous Philadelphia physician successfully tried it out on one of his patients in 1884. In The Kids are All Right, a teenage sister and brother seek the identity of the man who made the donations that gave them life. They fi nd him, meet him and eventually bring him into their already non-traditional family, setting off a host of problems that threaten to blow up on all of them. This story line caught my interest because of a study released earlier this year by the Commission on Parenthood’s Future at the Institute for American Values. That study, My Daddy’s Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived Through Sperm Donation, surveyed more than 1,600 Americans between 18 and 45. Roughly a third were conceived through anonymous donation, a third were adopted into their families as infants and a third were the biological offspring of the parents who raised them. The participants in the study represented wide racial, ethnic and religious diversity, indicating that anonymous donation is an accepted practice throughout our culture. Our world today is full of dazzling technological achievements, including many in the area of assisted-human reproduction that have helped countless people have families they could not have had otherwise. Many of us know and love families that have been formed through such technologies, but our human ability to process all their ramifi cations — emotional, social, ethical and legal — often lags behind our ability to accomplish them. These technologies are only going to become more advanced and more accessible. They are not going away. The study points out that while we have fi gures on adoptions in our country and fi gures on births from egg donations — about 6,000 in 2005, we do not know how many children are born through anonymous sperm donations or how many half-siblings are born with DNA from individual donors. Karen Clark, one of the study’s authors, says the range is probably 30,000 to 60,000 annually, but “that is a guesstimate.” Obviously, then, we do not know who these people are, either as children or as adults, which raises all sorts of thorny and emotional issues. Like many adult adoptees, the study fi nds that young adults conceived through donation struggle with identity issues because they know nothing about their fathers. They wonder about blood relatives they do not know and worry about forming relationships with people to whom they are unknowingly kin. Almost 60 percent of the donor offspring in the study agreed with the statement, “When I see someone who resembles me I often wonder if we are related,” and almost 50 percent agreed that “When I’m romantically attracted to someone I have worried that we could be unknowingly related.” Also troubling are the problems donor offspring report having in their relationships with other people and in negative life choices. The study fi nds that they struggle more often than others with confusion, tension and loss in their family relationships including higher levels of divorce of their parents. They are at signifi cantly higher risk of juvenile delinquency, substance abuse and depression than the other groups in the study. Somewhat surprising to me, donor offspring strongly approve, by 76 percent, of artifi cial reproductive technologies, and 20 percent of them have already participated in such technologies in some way. Completely not surprising to me, almost 70 percent agreed that they “have the right” to know the identity of their biological father or at least non-identifying information about his genetic, social, ethnic and religious background. They also want to know about half-siblings. Many want the opportunity to know and form a relationship with their fathers and half-siblings. Whew! These are among the most personal and most profound issues any human being faces, and the answers to them are as individual as each situation and each family. But in our diverse and complex society, these are issues that need to be tackled as technological advancements are rapidly taking us places human beings have never been. The authors of My Daddy’s Name is Donor, one of whom is a donor offspring herself, put it this way. “We aim for nothing less than to launch a national and international debate on the ethics, meaning and practice of donor conception, starting now.” Indeed. MARGARET DICKSON, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com. CONSIGNED DE IG S CONS N D DESIGNS ACK AC WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM SEPTEMBER 22-28, 2010 UCW 5