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/

Great comment on "My Sister's Keeper"

Approximately 90% of all parents who learn their child will have Down Syndrome choose to abort, with the help of their closed-minded (and, in many cases, ignorant) doctors. With new testing, we will likely have even fewer of these special children and adults in our midst, just as we are beginning to learn how much they can experience and accomplish with proper support.

As a parent, I am aware of all the love and joy these kids bring to our lives and theirs. Its sad to see science playing God, whether its choosing who's worthy to live or using and abusing others for personal gain or life enhancement. Its sadder still that we let them!

Thanks for all you do to keep us aware and on guard.

-A Reader

My Sister’s Keeper

Jennifer Roback Morse

The screen version of Jodi Picoult's novel poses the question: how much are we entitled to use each other?
The use and misuse of artificial reproductive technology (ART) is a subject that deserves more attention than it commonly gets. My Sister’s Keeper is a thought-provoking dramatization of one of the most troubling ethical issues of the ART industry: the creation of “savior siblings”.

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

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/

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/

Octomom Nadya Suleman: "I screwed up my life and my kid's lives"

by Cristina Everett

It’s no surprise that when the media shifted its focus from Octomom to Kate Gosselin, Nadya Suleman wasn’t going down in the media circus without a fight.
After publicly slamming fellow multiple mom Kate Gosselin for being "desperate for attention" and "over-emotional,” Suleman has a few more choice words to say…about herself. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/06/04/2009-06-04_octomom_nadya_suleman_i_screwed_up_my_life_and_my_kids_lives.html#ixzz0HUnl4haQ&B

As Dr. Morse said in her article on "Octomom," artificial reproduction techniques are bad for children when they are kept from knowing and having a relationship with a biological parent.

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

Hillary Clinton clarifies what ‘reproductive health’ includes

Just like “family planning”, “reproductive health” is an innocent sounding term fraught with (deliberate) ambiguity. The things it includes tend to be in the fine print of NGO and UN documents where “maternal mortality” and “unsafe abortion” are juxtaposed to imply a need to legalise abortion. Those who do not see abortion as a health or family planning measure are left to ask the hard questions about the meaning of draft UN documents and the like. Does “reproductive health/services/rights” include abortion, or doesn’t it?

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

Risks to IVF Kids- Seton Hall

Tonight, I am in Newark, NJ, after debating same sex marriage at Seton Hall Law School. In the questions and answers, a student asserted that there are no developmental issues associated with IVF children being raised in heterosexual married couples, by one bio parent and one non-bio parent. I stopped her right there: do you assert that, or do you know that? She said she asserted it. My argument at the time is that no one has even asked the question of the impact on children's development in those households. Nor, has anyone asked about the divorce rate among married couples using one donor gamete.
Now, I just found a report from the UK that IVF children are at higher risk for medical conditions.

The British government's embryo research authority has warned potential parents that children conceived artificially through in vitro fertilization have a thirty percent higher risk of genetic abnormalities.

Reports of higher levels of birth defects among IVF children have been making headlines since at least 2003, but the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has only this week issued a warning on the matter. The HFEA said that parents should be told of the risks associated with IVF, but emphasized that not all the risks are fully understood and more research is needed.

That's nice: now you tell us. After using desparate infertile women and their children as human guinea pigs, you deign to inform us that women should be given more information. What kind of defects are we talking about?

The Daily Mail notes that research by the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, published online last month in the Human Reproduction journal, found that IVF babies suffer from heart valve defects, cleft lip and palate, and digestive system abnormalities due to the bowel or esophagus failing to form properly.

For years researchers have warned that IVF children risk complications such as Beckwith-Wiedemann syndrome; rare urological defects including bladder development outside the body; heart or central nervous system abnormalities, and dangerously low birth weight.

I'd say women have a right to know. They have a right to be informed while they are young, in their twenties, and before they make a plan that "oh, if I don't find a husband, I can always do IVF with donor sperm."

More on OctoDad

More on OctoDad here.

Where in the World is OctoDad?

asks Kay Hymowitz in today's Wall Street Journal.

Where is Octodad? Surely Ms. Suleman's babies have a father. Yet his role in the baby-palooza is barely mentioned. Not that this should surprise anyone. The reaction to Ms. Suleman and her brood typifies our cultural ambivalence about fathers, an ambivalence fed in no small measure by the fertility industry.
On first thought, Americans seem really keen on fathers. We fret about the emotional impact of father absence and insist "that responsibility does not end at conception," as then-candidate Barack Obama put it in a memorable speech last Father's Day. We excoriate "deadbeat dads" who fail to pay their share of their children's upbringing; in fact, the stimulus bill adds $1 billion to child-support enforcement. Married fathers who don't step up and share the burdens of diapers and pediatrician appointments are condemned, in the words of one much-discussed book of essays, as "bastards on the couch." After all, the argument goes, a father is just as much a parent as a mother.

Except when we decide he's not, as did Ms. Suleman and her medical enablers. According to media reports, the male friend who provided the sperm for all of Suleman's 14 children had begged her to stop after the first six -- to no avail.

I had an idea this must be the case: if there were an actual dad, making babies in the good old-fashioned natural way, by having an actual relationship with the mother, there wouldn't be a set-of-octuplets-born-to-a-single-mother-on-welfare story to talk about.

Having consented to the use of his sperm, he would have been expected to give up control over the future children created with them....
In recent years, medical science has also raised doubts about our frequent desire to wish fathers away. Every week, it seems, science confirms just how much genes matter. Everything from eye color, to propensity to high cholesterol, to a rotten disposition, to talent at math or tennis is encoded, to some degree, in the genetic material passed on from our two biological parents.

In Canada, donor children have brought a class-action suit demanding the same right to know their parentage that adoptive children there already have. For the same reason, Norway, the Netherlands and New Zealand have all banned donor anonymity, and Britain now requires donors to agree to be contacted when their children reach 18; unsurprisingly the country's sperm banks are now as depressed as its financial institutions. In the U.S., some sperm banks have begun to ask donors to volunteer to be identified to their children when they reach adulthood. Some agree; most do not.

And why would they agree? They know that even if fathers make good politics, they make dispensable parents.

read it all here.

IVF Success rates and the Suleman Octuplets

There is an interesting letter to the editor in today’s San Diego Union Tribune regarding the octuplets. An infertility patient wrote in to say that the mother of 14 IVF babies discredits the typically wonderful work done by the infertility industry.

As a former fertility patient, I'm outraged at the mother of octuplets and her fertility physician. I hope people will realize that she, without a doubt, is the exception to the rule in the world of fertility medicine and treatment.

I volunteered for years with a national infertility support organization and have met dozens of couples for whom treatment was expensive and miraculous when it was a success. The vast majority of people who seek fertility treatment are people who want to have one baby, possibly a second, but I find it interesting that my husband and I, both professionals, had to scrimp and save to pay for our in-vitro fertilization, and after five attempts, we were blessed with one healthy embryo that resulted in a healthy son born.

Our health insurance didn't cover it and because we were both hard-working and gainfully employed, we did not have state disability payments or welfare to supplement our fertility treatment, like the octuplets' mother. I am appalled that she has cast a negative light on the world of fertility medicine, which has helped so many thousands of women give birth around the world.

This brings up an interesting point: what is the success rate for infertility treatment for couples who are actually infertile?
The nice lady who is a mother of 14 was not in fact infertile. She had perfectly healthy eggs. She did not have, as far as I can tell, a history of miscarriages. She was using IVF, not primarily because of a medical infertility problem. She was using IVF because of a social problem: she doesn’t have a husband.
I view the fertility industry’s claims for success with great skepticism. They inflate their success rates by including people like Nadya Suleman. Her success rate has nothing to do with the success rate likely to be achieved for a couple who is actually infertile.

About the octuplets' Mom

When the sexual revolution began, we were all excited about having sex without babies. Now, we have come full circle: we are having babies without having sex. (That's a little bit like skipping dessert and going straight for the brussels sprouts, but, never mind.)
Anyhow, more is emerging about Nadya Suleman, who has had 14 children, without having sex.

It still isn't clear who their father is, or who fathered Suleman's other six children, who range in age from 2 to 7.

Suleman listed a David Solomon as the father on the birth certificates for her first four children but gave a different birthday for him on each certificate and listed both Israel and California as his place of birth. He could not be located for comment.

She listed no father on the birth certificates for her fifth and sixth children, twins born in 2006.

Suleman herself has been known by different names over the years, including Natalie Suleman, Natalie Gutierrez, Nadya Gutierrez and Nadya Doud.

Suleman was married to Marcos Gutierrez in 1996 and was divorced last year, according to public records. Gutierrez did not return calls to numbers listed for him, and his divorce lawyer, Roberto Gil, declined to comment.

Divorce papers state the couple split up in 2000 and had no children, although Suleman had given birth to her first six children by the time the divorce was finalized.

This is the stuff of which the bloggers howl: irresponsible, counting on others to help her, etc.
But some touching details have emerged that shed some light on her motives.

Public records show Suleman's father has used the last names Doud and Suleman. Her parents married in Las Vegas in 1974 and divorced in 1999. Suleman was their only child.

And in another interview, the most touching detail:

In her first interview since giving birth to octuplets, Nadya Suleman tells NBC she wanted a huge family to make up for the isolation she says she always felt as an only child.

In a brief excerpt of the interview released Thursday, the 33-year-old single mother tells "Today" show anchor Ann Curry she had a dysfunctional childhood and sought to erase that with the closeness children could bring. NBC says the full interview will air Monday.

This is reminiscent of the motives I saw among the teen mothers I met in Reno last month. This is what I surmised from the girls themselves and from their social worker. "These girls get pregnant because they want to: they want to be loved by their boyfriends, and by their babies."
I wrote about them here:
My cyberspace friend, Dutch Martin, wrote to agree with me, though I don't see that he posted about it.