The Child Of A Sperm Donor

SUPPOSE YOU decided that you wanted a child and you got yourself inseminated by anonymous sperm donor from a sperm bank. You’d be exercising your reproductive choice, of course, as guaranteed by a penumbra of the constitution.

There’s just one thing, and it’s something that we adults tend to forget as we forge ahead on our “sexual choices.”

What does the kid, the issue from such a union, think about having an anonymous sperm donor as a father?

Not much, according to Katrina Clark, the grown child of a sperm donor.

When she was 32, my mother -- single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family -- allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child.
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As long as [the] adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?

Well, not exactly. What about the kid in question?

Of course, she and her mother are proud liberals. Why wouldn’t they be, as a single-parent family? But there’s a question of rights.

I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.

So Katrina decided to try and find out who her sperm-donor father was, and quickly found out. Wonderful!

Only, of course, the sperm donor really didn’t want to be an actual “father.” After the excitement of discovering her father and sharing her feelings about being donor conceived,

I noticed that his enthusiasm for our developing relationship seemed to be waning. When I told him of my suspicion, he confirmed that he was tired of "this whole sperm-donor thing."

We humans wouldn’t be humans without our searing combination of ruthless selfishness and genuine caring. But wouldn’t a system of rational ethics have something to say about the ethics of having a child when one of the parents was just an anonymous cipher? Wouldn’t it at least recognize that every child wants a mother and a father: her mother and her father?

There’s one good thing. Katrina isn’t angry at her mother.

I've never been angry at my mother -- all my life she has been my hero, my everything.

Thank goodness for that.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: Nerdlips on 12/19/06 9:22am

Actually, I rather suspect she is, but like many caught up in situations like this, there is no one clear cut to blame, so she internalizes it. This is an unhappy situation to be sure, though I can think of worse ones. Recall the Spanish proverb: "God said take what you want, and pay for it." Of course, there is no way of talling beforehand how high the cost will be.