Fatherless Father's Day

I have always known I wanted to be a mom.  After years of waiting - waiting to meet the man that I would marry, the man who would be the father of my children - I realized that I couldn't wait any longer.  I was going to have to become a mother by myself, a single mom by choice.  Deciding to use a donor to have my child was not easy nor was it a choice I made lightly.  I had thought about adopting and for years had planned to adopt if I didn't meet someone.  That was, until I realized just how hard it is to adopt, especially as a single woman.  After a lot of very disappointing research, I ultimately decided that if I wanted to become a mom, my best option was to try to have a baby on my own.

Before Finn was born, before he was even conceived, I wondered what he would think about not having a father, and more specifically, how he would feel about being donor conceived.  Most of the research I did reassured me that as long as I was open and honest with him about his origins, he'd be ok.  Some people even suggested that he might not miss what he never had.  I'm still not too sure I believe that, but in the end, I felt I was making a good decision.

Still, I wondered if he would want to know about his genetic origins.  Would it be a passing thought from time to time, or something he would be consumed with?  I have a baby picture, a voice recording and some essays - would that answer his questions?  I've connected with the mother of one donor sibling, and would be willing to search for more on the Donor Sibling Registry if he decided he wanted to meet some of his donor siblings one day.  Maybe that would be satisfy his curiosity.  I don't know, but I do know that I'll be open to those questions if he has them, and make sure he always knows he can talk to me about these things without hurting my feelings.

In the meantime, while he's too young to have these questions, I see my job as the same as every parent out there: to make sure that he feels loved, safe and secure.  To encourage him to explore the world and to make strong connections with our family and friends so he can start to understand who he is and discover his place in the world.

I've been very interested to read the essays on the new website AnonymousUs.org. It's a website created for both donors, children of donors and parents of donor children to post anonymously about their experiences.  I first heard about it when a single mom friend of mine posted this Huffington Post article by Elizabeth Marquardt on our discussion board.  Marquardt is one of the authors of My Daddy's Name is Donor, a study looking at donor conceived children.

This is a fascinating, albeit limited, study.  I won't pretend to have read it all, but I have read quite a bit of it, and have a few comments on what I've read.  Unlike the traditional scientific paper that reports their methods in a clearly marked section towards the beginning, you have to search through the report to find out exactly how they did the study, so I could be wrong on the details.  It appears to be based on a questionnaire given to donor conceived children (using adopted children and children raised by their biological parents as controls).  This may be the easiest way to a study like this, but it does have limitations.  Just because someone answered yes to a question doesn't mean it's something that they worry about all the time - but the authors think it does based on the subject headings of their 15 major findings.  Here's an excerpt:

2. Family relationships for donor offspring are more often characterized by confusion, tension, and loss.

More than half (53 percent) agree, “I have worried that if I try to get more information about or have a relationship with my sperm donor, my mother and/or the father who raised me would feel angry or hurt.” Seventy percent agree, “I find myself wondering what my sperm donor’s family is like,” and 69 percent agree, “I sometimes wonder if my sperm donor’s parents would want to know me.”
Nearly half of donor offspring (48 percent) compared to about a fifth of adopted adults (19 percent) agree, “When I see friends with their biological fathers and mothers, it makes me feel sad.” Similarly, more than half of donor offspring (53 percent, compared to 29 percent of the adopted adults) agree, “It hurts when I hear other people talk about their genealogical background.”

There's no mention of any possibility of answering anything more than yes or no to these particular questions.  So it's impossible to tell if these are thoughts that these children are obsessed with, or just passing thoughts that they have every now and then.  I believe that's a significant difference.  

Just as interesting is the section later on in the report that talks about how donor conceived children are more likely to be egg or sperm donors themselves, and that their attitudes about assisted reproductive technology and gamete donate are much more open than children of adoptive or biological parents.  If these children truly felt so cheated by being donor conceived, wouldn't the opposite be true?

This study creates more questions than it answers.  Good questions, important questions for those of us who have donor conceived children.  It's a good starting place for understanding how choosing to use a donor may affect future children, but drawing concrete conclusions from the results is impossible.  And being able to apply the results to every child or every family is impossible, too.  Impossible, but that doesn't stop Elizabeth Marquardt from doing just that.

Marquardt suggests that all donor conceived children are unhappy.  Her Huffington Post article leads with a few excerpts from unhappy donor conceived children, and goes on to quote more unhappy children.  What she doesn't mention is that many of those quotes are from children who didn't find out they were donor conceived until they were older.  (The most painful posts to read on AnonymousUs are the ones written by children who found out in their teens or later; it's clear they've been deeply wounded by the deception.)  She completely ignored the essays from donor conceived children who were ok with the decisions their parents made; she didn't even mention those at all. 

But worst of all, she concludes with the statement "Fathers matter. For everyone."  

Well, of course they do. By making the decision to be single mothers by choice, we aren't saying that fathers don't matter, or that men don't matter.  Most of us are keenly aware of the need for male influence in our children's lives and make every effort to find men to fill that role.  

Having a child via donor sperm as a single woman is not an ideal situation.  (Nor, I would imagine) is it an ideal situation for those couples who have to use a donor due to male factor infertility.)  But it is a choice that most of us who have gone this route have made after a lot of careful consideration and planning, and these children are deeply wanted, which is not the case for many children born to biological parents.  

It's a choice that is made out of love.  I look at my little boy and I'm so very happy I made the decision to have him.  He is the most important thing in my world and I'm so thankful to have him. I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure that Finn always knows that.  In the end, it's the best I can do.  And I think it will be enough.