Grandparents yearn to meet donated progeny

Carolyn Moynihan

We recently noted that would-be grandparents in Britain are paying for their grown-up children’s IVF treatments. Now we learn that Canadian women whose daughters -- and sons -- have donated gametes to other couples are pining for their unknown grandchildren. The grand-parenting urge is apparently very strong, especially when you know that the grandchildren are out there somewhere, and artificial begetting brings mixed blessings.

It's estimated that about one million donor offspring worldwide have been born, most of them through anonymous donations. In some cases grandparents and donor grandchildren do meet; in others not. A man who donated sperm for almost 10 years says he now sees that grandparents ought to be considered. "His own parents were delighted when two teenage donor daughters surfaced a few years ago." Imagine how many more there could be…

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/grandparents_yearn_to_meet_donated_progeny/

My scattered grandchildren

Their children may consider it a personal decision, but parents of egg and sperm donors rarely see it that way. Many struggle with longing for branches of the family tree they may never meet.
Alison Motluk

When Kathie Harris spotted a newspaper ad a few years back recruiting egg donors, she passed it on to her daughter. “I was kind of joking,” she says.
But her daughter, Melissa Braden, ended up donating six times. Now Ms. Harris, 53, has mixed feelings about it all.
“It's kind of hard,” she says. There are grandchildren out there that the family will never meet, she says. “They're a part of you. Because they're Melissa's eggs, they're a part of everybody in Melissa's family.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships/my-scattered-grandchildren/article1286201/

Babies have a right to a heritage

Brenda Almond
Fertility clinics are creating a new class of dispossessed human beings, says a British philosopher.
Baby manufacture is already big business. Recent ads targeting women college students in America have offered them free holidays in India in exchange for parting with their eggs during their visit, with Indian women teamed to become paid surrogates and return the product – the student’s child – to those who commissioned it. Do other jurisdictions want to follow this precedent and should Americans be more concerned about what is done in their name? The selling of slaves was considered offensive – should selling babies be OK?

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/babies_have_a_right_to_a_heritage/

Babies have a right to a heritage

NOTABLE QUOTE: "...equity in the preservation of personal identity has not received as much attention as the rights of adults to fertility treatment."

Brenda Almond
Fertility clinics are creating a new class of dispossessed human beings, says a British philosopher.
Baby manufacture is already big business. Recent ads targeting women college students in America have offered them free holidays in India in exchange for parting with their eggs during their visit, with Indian women teamed to become paid surrogates and return the product – the student’s child – to those who commissioned it. Do other jurisdictions want to follow this precedent and should Americans be more concerned about what is done in their name? The selling of slaves was considered offensive – should selling babies be OK?

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/babies_have_a_right_to_a_heritage/

Grandparents are funding their children’s IVF, finds Red magazine

Note: The success rate for IVF has risen in recent years but still only a minority become pregnant. For women aged under 35, the success rate is 28.2 per cent. It drops to 23.6 per cent for women aged 35 to 37, 18.3 per cent for women aged 38 to 39 and 10.6 per cent for women aged 40 to 42.

JRM's comment: where are they getting these success rates? Are these women who actually have a fertility problem? Or, are some of these women perfectly healthy women who have no male partner? It matters for understanding the success rates. I got these stories from mercator: http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/ I like their comemnt too: how mature are these people who are spending all their income until their 40’s?

Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent

Grandparents have been subsidising school fees and providing a free baby-sitting service for years. Now research shows that they are also footing the bill for the conception of their grandchildren.
A quarter of women over the age of 40, and 13 per cent of all couples undergoing IVF and other fertility treatments, are having them paid for by their own parents, anxious to have grandchildren. The average amount spent by grandparents is £5,413, slightly more than the cost of one cycle of IVF.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6737901.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084

The end of IVF?

Note from JRM: She is also keen to remind women that IVF still has a relatively poor success rate. “At one of the most renowned New York clinics, figures indicate that among women under 35, the success rate is still only 47%.”

Anita Chaudhuri
If you' re having difficulty conceiving, then help is at hand. it comes not in the form of expensive drugs, but in a new book that takes a simpler approach to the treatment of infertility.

It’s a sad fact of life that one in six couples will have difficulty conceiving. Those praying for a miracle will often try anything, from the estimated 75% who experiment with alternative therapies, to the 1 in 80 women who will eventually give birth to an IVF baby in the UK each year. Now, two leading fertility specialists have decided to bridge the gap between conventional and complementary medicine, and offer an alternative to rushing into IVF. “I estimate that 50% of women on IVF don’t need it,” says Dr Sami David, a doctor involved with the first-ever successful IVF procedure in New York 30 years ago. “They could get pregnant naturally.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6721741.ece

Messing with Mother Nature

Barbara Kay

The human species is changing but we're stuck on polar bears
The single 69-year old Spanish woman who gave birth to twins at the age of 66 died last Saturday. Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara, who thought she had every prospect of living to see her now two-year old boys Christian and Pau into adulthood because her own mother died at 101, claimed not to regret her late-motherhood decision, even though her doctors told her that "the powerful drugs used during her fertility treatment could have helped her disease [believed to be breast cancer] to spread."

Although at the time of the birth Ms Bousada de Lara's case attracted a few stalwart supporters of the "right" of a woman to control her own fertility destiny, the general reaction was one of dismay and recoil. The most commonly adduced argument was that her children's odds of growing up motherless were sharply escalated by her selfishness. And so it came to pass, which will doubtless serve to dampen the enthusiasm of other older women contemplating the idea of post-menopausal pregnancy.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/messing_with_mother_nature/

Welcome to the genetic supermarket

Michael Cook

The good news is that the male of the species will not be placed on the endangered species list.
It’s amazing how a simple press release can instantly capture the imagination of media around the globe. A few weeks ago British scientists announced that they had created human sperm cells from embryonic stem cells for the first time. This provoked snickers everywhere about a future when men are no longer needed to propagate the species.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/welcome_to_the_genetic_supermarket/

‘The doctor made you in a dish and put you in someone else’s tummy’

Carolyn Moynihan
There can’t be too many parents around these days who fumble the answer to their children’s “Where did I come from?” question. But there are now thousands in the United States -- and elsewhere -- who have to put a lot more thought than the average parent into their replies. Those are the steadily growing numbers who are using surrogate mothers to provide them with babies.
http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/the_doctor_made_you_in_a_dish_and_put_you_in_someone_elses_tummy/

No benefits for LA girl born from dead man's sperm

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- A 10-year-old girl conceived from the frozen sperm of a dead man cannot receive his Social Security benefits, a federal appeals court ruled.A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a lower court's rejection of child survivor benefits for Brandalynn Vernoff, who was born nearly four years after her father's death in 1995.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POSTMORTEM_SPERM?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US

'An embryo property case'

Sheila Liaugminas

That’s lawyer-speak in a lively debate over a bizarre case of implantation gone wrong in a UK clinic. “There really has to be a legal line on when life begins…” snapped the Fox News anchor who sometime during this debate corrected herself from calling an embryo a baby.
So though cases like this are stunning, they are probably logical extensions of the pervasive abortion culture. An invitro fertilization clinic in Wales implanted the wrong woman with the last embryo of another couple. The woman wrongly implanted then had an abortion.

http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/an_embryo_property_case/

The wrong cure for infertility

Bill Muehlenberg

Turning baby-making into a technology can have devastating results.
For some men and women, IVF can seem like a godsend. Inability is always felt as a grievous loss for loving couples. But the clinics which offer IVF and other "assisted reproductive technology" techniques are businesses, and offer services, not love. They make mistakes which devastate lives.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_wrong_cure_for_infertility/

A Donor Conceived Adult Weighs In

Recently a donor conceived adult responded to a question that outspoken donor conceived people hear all to often, “Aren’t you just happy to be alive?”. Many people think that donor conceived people should just be glad to be alive, because without donor conception, they would not even exist.

Karen answers in a way that can help us all understand the struggle that some people have with being donor conceived. She also gives her thoughts on donating eggs, openness and her wishes for the future of donor conception.

http://www.donorsiblingregistry.com/DSRblog/?p=66

What about those octuplets?

Jennifer Roback Morse

Government indifference to responsible fatherhood is what made the tragedy of OctoMom possible.

What are we to make of the case of Nadya Suleman, the California woman who gave birth to octuplets through IVF? The case has inspired lots of internet chatter and water cooler talk. I maintain that insurance and government funding are the least of the worries of this case. The case illustrates two deep problems with our current attitudes toward artificial reproductive technology (ART). First, no one has a right to have a baby. Second, the state should not be in the business of deliberately separating father from their children.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/what_about_those_octuplets/

'Octomom' spawns fertility legislation

Charlie Butts - OneNewsNow

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the single mom who recently gave birth to octuplets -- and the fertility doctor who implanted the eggs in her womb -- at least two states are actively working on laws to limit in vitro fertilization.

http://www.onenewsnow.com/Culture/Default.aspx?id=446320

Fathers Shoved Aside

I predicted that same sex marriage would further marginalize men from the family, and would result in the state determining, not just recording parentage. A report from the UK illustrates that I was not hyperventillating, but in fact, very sober-minded about this issue:

Single women having IVF will be able to name anyone they like as their baby's father on the birth certificate.
New regulations mean that a mother could nominate another woman to be her child's 'father'.
The 'father' does not need to be genetically related to the baby, nor be in any sort of romantic relationship with the mother.

This mean that "father" is strictly a legal term, not a name for a biological reality that exists independently of the state and its laws.

This raises the spectre of a legal minefield in which female 'fathers' will fight for visitation rights and be chased for child support payments if their fragile relationship with the mother breaks down.
The changes, due to come in on April 6, will apply to many of the 2,000 women a year who have IVF using sperm from anonymous donors.
The regulations are part of the controversial Embryology Bill passed by Parliament last year. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority said they will give lesbian couples in civil partnerships who undergo IVF the same rights as married heterosexual couples.

An unmarried man whose girlfriend has fertility treatment will also find it easier to claim full parental rights.

The new rules state: 'The women receiving treatment with donor sperm (or embryos created with donor sperm) can consent to any man or woman being the father or second parent.' The only exemption is close blood relatives.

Critics said the change would lead to the role of father being downgraded to the one of godfather and warned that the child would be the one to lose out.

I discuss this issue in Session 3, "Same Sex Marriage and the End of Gender" of my 4 part series, Same Sex Marriage Affects Everyone.
Get all my commentary, as it breaks, by signing up for the free Ruth Institute newsletter.

Sexual insanity

Bill Muehlenberg

Week by week the stories become more sensational. Blogs were still buzzing over California’s “octomom”, Nadya Suleman, when the story of Alfie Patten, a baby-faced British 13-year-old and putative father, grabbed the international headlines. In Australia, where I live, an appeal court has awarded a lesbian duo hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for getting two babies from IVF treatment rather than one.

Strangely enough, such dramatic consequences of the erosion of marriage and the explosion of out-of-control sexuality were foreseen -- in some instances long ago. In 1968 Will and Ariel Durant’s important book, The Lessons of History appeared. In it they said, The sex drive in the young is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/sexual_insanity/

Society and artificial reproduction

by Margaret Somerville

Should the state assist with conception where it would not approve an adoption?
Two cases -- one in California, the other in Calgary -- involving the use of new reproductive technologies have been the focus of intense media attention recently.

Nadya Suleman, a 33-year-old Californian single mother, just gave birth to octuplets. . .
Ranjit Hayer, a 60-year-old Calgary married woman, just gave birth to twin boys conceived from donated ova and her husband's sperm. She had been trying for decades, including using reproductive technologies, to have a child, but until now had been unsuccessful. Canadian physicians refused her access to IVF because of her age, so she underwent this procedure in India and returned to Canada for care during her pregnancy and giving birth to premature twin boys. Both required special care -- one, neonatal intensive care -- and serious medical complications ensued for Ms Hayer.

What ethical questions do these situations raise? And what insights or lessons might they provide?

Continue...

Surprised to be a Donor Conceived Person

I just looked at the video Betsy posted. A young man describes his reaction to finding out that his father is not his father. His mother was impregnated with an anonymous sperm donor. The young man is astonished and staggered. Wow. Money quote: "It doesn't change anything, and yet it changes everything."

A follow-up to the previous post

And this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH5fiHlYdIk&feature=related

A first-hand look at the effects of being a Donor's son.