Whose name is on your 'birth' certificate?

Jane

When Lisa Phillips Stackman of Indianapolis gave birth to her daughter, Lola Jean, seven weeks ago, she expected that her spouse's name would appear on Lola's birth certificate. If Lisa's spouse had been Jack, instead of Jackie, it would have.

Under Indiana law, the husband of a woman giving birth is presumed to be the father and his name goes on the certificate--even if he's not the father. But because Lisa's spouse was a woman, Indiana officials have refused to put her name on the certificate. Lisa and Jackie are suing with six other same sex couples claiming their constitutional rights have been violated because Indiana officials refused to place both spouses names on the birth certificate.  Lisa and Jackie's case may be more compelling because Jackie is Lola's biological mother. She had embryos created with her eggs and frozen two years ago, before she met Lisa.

Even in 'modern families' the need to know biological heritage

Jane

Opponents of gay marriage often raise the specter of gays raising children they adopt or create through "modern fertility techniques" claiming that gays raising children would lead to the breakdown of the family, which would lead to the disintegration of civilization. Well, of course gays have been raising children long before recorded history. Those Greeks doing it in bath houses were often married with children. And gays like my late sister Helen married members of the opposite sex, had children, divorced, and taken up with a same-sex partner.

 Since the 1970's gays have adopted children both from foster care and as newborn infants. They have also created children through sperm and egg donations, IVF and surrogacy. With courts striking down gay marriage bans, it's likely that more gays will marry and acquire children. The critical question

Is it a 'Birth' Certificate or Certificate of Title?

Jane

Birth certificates have become legal instruments, reflecting ownership of children rather than parentage. In surrogacy-friendly California, birth certificates of children created in vitro with “donated” eggs and sperm, born to surrogates identify those who paid for the creation as the parents. In the Brave New World of “assisted reproduction” these children depend on the kindness of their legal parents and surrogacy clinic policies to learn whose DNA they carry.

The universal need to know who you are

Lorraine

"The sperm donors, they agreed, had no place on the family tree."

A couple will have four children: the first was conceived naturally; the second with donor sperm; two are in the process of being adopted. "All four of our children are 100 percent in our family tree....The genetic connection has never mattered." (Emphasis added.)

Sperm donors in the news again

looking to mate

In case you think that all sperm-donor daddies want to stay behind a closed closet door...a father in Australia is doing his best to do just the opposite: he is fighting to keep his name ON the birth certificate. The gay partner of the mother wants to put her name on the birth certificate in his place. We say, if birth certificates were not so critically important as both a real and symbolic document of identity, this would not be happening.

In the current dust up Down Under, Neil Richards, 58, of Sydney, answered a gay couple's magazine advertisement more than 10 years ago for a sperm donor and provided sperm to Jesse Star, 49, the Sydney Morning Herald reported. This is a man who wanted to have a child:

Anonymous baby making in British Columbia is outlawed

Lorraine

Sperm donors will no longer be allowed to be anonymous in British Columbia if a decision from a Supreme Court judge there today stands. Judge Elaine Adair wrote that anonymous donation, "is harmful to the child, and it is not in the best interests of donor offspring." The ruling found sections of the B.C. Adoption Act and Adoption Regulations unconstitutional. Anonymous sperm and egg donation is already outlawed in Great Britain.

Maness Moms Equal Fatherless Children, Part 2

A further clarification regarding donor children, and the research of the Institute for American Values, after Jessica left a comment at the previous blog: Manless Moms Equal Fatherless Children.  (It was too long to be merely a comment.)

We know that the ideal two-parent family is impossible for everyone; we also believe that women today ought to be given all the help they can to be able to raise their children, with or without fathers. We do not encourage adoption except in extreme cases, and then never with sealed records. We at First Mother Forum believe that whenever possible children should full knowledge of who each parent is. This is an unalienable, unassailable right, and to deny it to anyone is to commit a grave moral failing.

When Daddy's Name is Donor...

We're heading back into murky waters today taking another look at a report, "My Daddy's Name is Donor," from the conservative think tank, the Institute for American Values (just the name alone sets off alarm bells), but nonetheless, their findings are at least worth analyzing. One of the authors of the report, Karen Clark, is a child of donor sperm herself. One of the major findings is summed up here:

Children of anonymous sperm donors "are hurting more, are more confused, and feel more isolated

What's wrong with creating children with Sperm from Column A and Egg from Column B? Just about everything.

Today just a link to a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, about the perils of creating children-for-hire. It's a good read: The Birds and the Bees (via the Fertility Clinic) and do leave a comment.

And if you have been away from the blog over the weekend (and why not?) yesterday's post is about the end of a friendship with a friend whose opinion is that birth/first mothers who search are wrong, wrong, wrong. I think she would like to stone us because we are "disturbing" the  happy, non-troubled adoption that she is sure is in place.

This morning with family my husband and I went downtown for the annual Memorial Day parade in Sag Harbor and ran into one of Yvonne's friends, with whom we are also friendly. My husband (when I was not around) told her that Yvonne and I had a huge falling out and it was not going to be breached. I'm no longer even sad that the friendship ended; I am disturbed that so many people feel that it is all right to trample the feelings and sensibilities of birth/first mothers because after all, we did it! We got pregnant! We surrendered a child! We signed a paper that insisted on anonymity because we had no choice! Therefore, we ought to go quietly to our emotional graves.

Screw 'em.--lorraine

That's my niece (by marriage) and her two kids, Charlie with the flag and Anna peering from behind it.

Sperm Donor Children Should Have the Right to Their Whole Identity

Do children born of anonymous sperm deserve to know their fathers? Do they have a right to know their fathers?

When a lesbian acquaintance recently became pregnant I immediately wondered who the father was, but it was abundantly clear this was not a question one could ask. But the question nags still: Will the child, conceived and born in the United States, ever be able to know his father--next month, next year, next whenever? Unless the mother is hip to the idea that children need to know not only their maternal heritage--and I'm not nearly close enough to her to know--it's likely that the little boy will grow up with half his heritage missing, a blank where there ought to be connection, data, medical and cultural history, if not love and feelings.

Across the pond, once again the United Kingdom is way ahead of us on this one. Recently a columnist  in The Guardian, Veronica Lee, decried yet another acquaintance of hers having an anonymous sperm donor father a child:

Children have a right to know who their father is and, where at all possible, to forge a relationship with him. For a woman deliberately to have children alone is astonishingly selfish. Many children miss out on having a father through death, abandonment or other unforeseeable circumstances, but this is deliberate deprivation and treats the child merely as the mother's chattel. My friends would argue they have a right to bear a child, but what about their children's right to know their fathers?

Indeed. What about their children's right to know their fathers?

We at FirstMotherForum are all in favor of children knowing both their mothers and fathers, the ones without whose involvement they would not exist, aka their first/birth/biological parents. And recently (12/10/09) the Irish Supreme Court agreed. A 42-year-old man who had fathered a child for a lesbian couple with whom he had been friendly is opposed to their planned move to Australia, taking his now three-year-old son with them. Supreme Court Justice Susan Denham wrote:

There is benefit to a child, in general, to have the society of his father....I am satisfied that the learned High Court judge [who rejected the father's claims] gave insufficient weight to this factor.

Now over at The Huffington Post, Jacob M. Appel, has his knickers in a twist over this decision, calling it "noxious jurisprudential seed" [pun noted] and "a genuine challenge to reproductive freedom and familial integrity." Which right there is a little odd because he assumes that family integrity is anything you want to make it--and has nearly nothing to do with whose DNA you have, why you have blue eyes instead of brown, can't snap your fingers on her left hand, whistle off key, and have the annoying habit of say, twirling your hair when you are concentrating--just like, why just like dear old Dad! Appel  ought to look up the word integrity in the dictionary: "The state of being unimpaired; probity; completeness. See synonyms at honesty." We understand the concept of the modern "family," and in many cases, see no problem. That is life today, and we are not going backwards. We ourselves are part of a blended family. But family, at its purest interpretation, consists of mother, father, and child or children born of those two people--that is the "state of being unimpaired." I can imagine the hackles being raised as I write this, but give me this interpretation here if you can. I'm simply talking semantics now. But back to the column at the Huf Po (where you might want to leave a comment):

Appel is quite worked up, no doubt about it. He rails against Kansan Daryl Hendrix who brought suit against his former girlfriend, Samantha Harrington, who gave birth to twins using his "excess sperm." A divided state supreme court ruled 4-2 that in the absence of a written agreement, Hendrix had no rights. Hendrix pursued his case to the Kansas Supreme Court, but they refused to hear it. Who brings such suits, Appel posits are "men...who have missed the fatherhood train." There's more venom he spews:

Advancing the antiquated argument that every child should have a father, [italics decidedly ours] these forces have succeeded in preventing anonymous donation in Great Britain, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand. Great Britain and Canada no longer allow donors to be compensated. As a result, semen sources are drying up. The unfortunate consequence is that, without sperm, would-be mothers will not be able to conceive.

Our friend, Alison Ward, who alerted us to this story, comments that her favorite line in the screed was "semen sources are drying up." We like that sentence, we admit, but we find others that are just as amusing, to wit: ..."without sperm, would-be mothers will not be able to conceive." Yup, that's true. And we applaud those backwards-thinking countries that have ruled that sperm donation should not be anonymous, or for profit.

What is sickening throughout Appel's diatribe is the total lack of consideration and compassion for the children conceived with anonymous sperm. He is critical of those who are "pressuring sperm banks to identify their genetic 'fathers' [quotes his]. ...These trends also threaten to undermine the 'no-strings-attached' [quotes his] policies that make altruistic [italics mine] sperm donation possible." So the children who are interested in learning their paternal biology and identity are likened to ungrateful thugs who won't leave those fathers alone. Appel does not mention the DonorSiblingRegistry which has more than 26,000 donors, parents, and children conceived by donor sperm, and has connected 6,941 half-siblings and donors, according to its website.

He does concede that sperm donors who become aware of a fatal genetic disease (cancer? cardiac arrest?) should be "unmasked," but all other should be perpetually sealed, and that sperm fathers ought to be viewed no different from those who donate organs to others. "Why should society treat my donation any differently simply because it contains a germ-line cell rather than somatic tissue?"

Because somatic tissue does not carry the DNA that determines who and individual is. Because somatic tissue is not hereditary. Because one-half of one's makeup and identity is not contained in somatic tissue.

We wish Mr. Appel had told us a bit about himself. Is he a donor father himself who wishes the cloak of anonymity? Does he know his own biological background and genetic makeup? Was he a foundling who has no background on himself and feels that no one else thus has the right to know whence  she came if that is an issue? Does his sister/girlfriend/cousin have a baby conceived with anonymous DNA-rich sperm?

Because we do not hold the same  "progressive" view of conception and parentage as Appel, we are branded together with Christian conservatives and and other "naturalists." We are progressive on many, if not most, issues, but on a question so basic as the answer to Who Am I? we will argue that everyone has the right to know the full and complete answer, and that test-tube children ought to have the same rights as the rest of us: To know one's identity. If we are talking rights, let's start with the children. 
______________
If you do comment at the Huffington Post, please share it with us here.

Creating children without a full identity is a crime against humanity

So how rare are these screwups at fertility clinics, as Jane wrote about in her last post? Apparently not so rare as we have been led to believe. The Toledo (OH) Blade reports.

While doctors and fertility experts insist that the lab mix-up that impregnated a Sylvania Township (Ohio) woman with a Michigan couple's embryos was a rare occurrence in reproductive medicine, an attorney who has represented several women in similar circumstances believes otherwise. Nancy Hersh of San Francisco said she has or continues to be involved in four cases in three states against fertility clinics that botched or were allegedly negligent with in vitro fertilization procedures. From The Blade:

I think it's a pretty common occurrence and that it's covered up a lot," said Nancy Hersh, a San Francisco personal injury attorney who specializes in women's health issues.  

Ms. Hersh said she has or continues to be involved in four cases in three states against fertility clinics that botched or were allegedly negligent with in vitro fertilization procedures.

One California case resulted in a $1 million settlement from the fertility doctor in 2004, and later, the shared custody of the child between two sets of parents who have never met.

How did the case of the mistaken embryo occur? Human error. It's always something, isn't it? Both families used the same (and so far, unnamed) fertility clinic, probably located in the Detroit metropolitan area.

The Ohio woman (Carolyn Savage) was implanted with the fertilized embryo of a woman (Shannon Morrell) whose maiden name is Savage also. Carolyn Savage gave birth to a healthy boy last Thursday, September 24, 2009, and presumably has already turned over the boy to the Morrells, his genetic/biological parents. The Savages did consult an attorney who told them that in court DNA usually rules, and they graciously and simply went along with that, saying that they put themselves in the shoes of the other couple. Kudos to them for doing the right thing. Presumably there was or will be a healthy financial settlement from the fertility clinic for Mrs. Morrell's and her husband's pain and suffering.

In another botched fertility case that attorney Hersh was involved in, a 48-year-old woman was wrongfully implanted with a donor egg and the sperm of a married man who happened to be at the clinic with his wife at the same time as the woman seeking a fertilized embryo. The doctor--the evil doctor--who did the procedure knew about the mistake within minutes but did not tell the woman who had the child until ten months after the child was born. The man whose sperm was used later sued for joint custody and won. So now the father has a relationship with a child whose genetic mother is presumably unknown. However, there is some blessing for the child involved, for he at least has one link to his true past and heritage--he knows his father.

Given the way such sperm is typically anonymous today, the child planned by his "mother" would not know the identity of either set of his true parents. Sick, sick, sick. Who are these people who think it is permissible to create a child who has no knowledge of his or her biological heritage, medical history, cultural background? Or only half of it? They make me crazy.

“Anonymous sperm donation should be illegal,” said Kathleen LaBounty, 27, last year in Parade magazine. Ms. LaBounty has been searching for her donor dad for 10 years. “Couples choose sperm donation because they want a genetic link between mother and child, but children care about genetics too. They want information about their biological fathers.”

We need laws in this country as in England where anonymous sperm-for-hire (I refuse to call that a "donation") is no longer available. Without anonymous sperm sellers, England is experiencing a sperm-for-hire drought.

Yes, this is not about adoption per se, but related nonetheless because we are living in a brave new world that approves and encourages creating children whose real parentage will be unknown. You can call one's real, biological mother and real father "reproductive agents," as I, a reunited first/birth mother has been called to my face, but that does not help the individual who would has a need to know his or her real, biological, cultural origins. I am not against single mothers by choice or lesbian mothers, but I am adamantly opposed to willfully creating children who can never have full and complete knowledge of both of their actual, real, whatever-you-want-to-call-them parents. Anyone considering it who stumbles upon this blog ought to read the story that appeared last year in The Washington Post by a daughter who found her biological father: My father was an anonymous sperm donor.

Children of sperm donors have reunited through a website , www.donorsiblingregistry.com, which has more than 25,000 people registered--donors (biological parents), children, and their other parents. According to Wendy, who left a comment, more than 7,000 people have been connected. (See comment below.)

The lawyer who commented above, Hersh, goes on to say in The Blade that sometimes the stories don't make news because the financial settlements from the clinics preclude the parties involved from talking about the paternity/maternity issue publicly...but hey! What about the person cooked up in a Petri dish? Is this not akin to the laws that deny an individual the truth of his origins because someone else agreed to that dubious contract? In the kinds of cases involving--"wrongful births"--the person would presumably be told the truth of his or her origins by his parents, but I can't see how the individual so born could be coerced from suing the clinic--if it is still in business, sixteen or eighteen years later. He or she did not agree not to sue.

This kind of settlement contract (and the loophole that I hope someone someday walks through) shows how completely out of kilter, how unjust, how utterly inhumane are any contracts that seal an individual's birth record against his or her will. Forever and all time. Because someone might be embarrassed. Because someone has not told their husband. Because some social worker told a woman her motherhood would be a state secret permanently. But that individual who was born was not part of that diabolical agreement.

Sealed adoption records, as well as creating babies who can not have full and complete knowledge of their true identities, are crimes against humanity.Someday, even we in America, will come to realize the truth of this.--lorraine

Who's the IVF Daddy? Opps, I only have a 'second parent'

Rarely does FirstMother find ourselves in agreement with the religious right, but a law change in England brings us into rare, but direct, connect. As of April 6th, 2009, fathers will no longer be necessary in England, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008. Read about it at the UK's Sunday Times.

Well, of course some of that male sperm will be necessary, but men--not even "anonymous" men--do not have to be listed on the birth certificate. Single women undergoing fertility treatment will be able to name almost any other adult as their child's second parent on the OriginalBC. The individual so indicated as the "second parent" does not have to be a male or biologically related to the offspring. Now we are all for gay and lesbian rights, but come on! This falls into the theater of the absurd.

The Act excludes "close blood relations" from being so named on the OBC. I suppose this means that a woman's brother or father can not be a "second parent" (this sounds incestuous, just writing it), but what this ridiculous piece of legislation does is subsume the needs of the offspring to the preferences of the biological mother. And that offspring will then have an even harder time finding out whom he or she is descended from, when the day comes that curiosity springs in the heart, and come it will. Sound a bit like any other adoption legislation that was not written with the "best interests" of the child/adult in mind? I can think of one.

Critics claim family values are being further devalued, and though I am not a fan of what "family values" has come to mean, let's have some common sense and consideration of an individual's right to have a family tree--and the ability to find that tree--like the rest of us. For it is a given that this weird birth certificate will make it even harder for some individuals to one day figure out where their DNA came from, unless the "first parents" are willing to spill the beans about the true "second parents," ie, the fathers or sperm donors. This law is no more than a legal codification of a bad practice. It further strips the kids born at IVF clinics of a legal route to learn their complete and true ancestry. It is the legal obfuscation of truth in conception.

We do know--from many sources, including sister blogs--that some women/mothers are not willing to impart this vital information, and even go so far as to hide it. This weird legislation undoubtedly came about at the behest of the gay and lesbian community; we have pretty much stayed out of the fracas over such adoptions, since we at FirstMother are not fans of adoption per se, gay or straight, international or domestic. In fact, since allowing gay adoption further increases the number of all adoptions, we are against it in most cases.

England has some good rules in place--no more than two embryos can be implanted at a time (no octo-moms from implanted zygotes), sperm can not be a salable commodity or given anonymity (which has led to a huge decrease in the availability of anonymous sperm, figure that)--but this one oversteps the boundary of decency and common sense--lorraine

And here's a PS from Jane:

The only relevant Origins USA position is in a draft paper regarding gay adoption. The paper says that gays should not be denied the opportunity to adopt a relatives' child just because they are gay. So it's a pro-family preservation paper, not a gay rights paper as such.

Gay adoption of newborns puts increasing pressure on the adoption industry to supply babies which in turn increases pressure on women to surrender. For the same reason, Firstmother is opposed to women over 40 adopting.

This Heather Has Two Mommies nonsense is bad in another way. It re-enforces in the public's mind that genetics is irrelevant; that the legal system and medical technology can wave a magic wand and nullify the laws of nature. This can lead, and perhaps is leading, to the re-distribution of children from the have nots to the haves, from the undeserving to the government-sanctioned deserving. It bolsters the arguments of adoption promoters and social workers who want to terminate parents' rights at the drop of a hat.