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Strollerderby
Two-year-old Griffin is being raised in a perfectly modern family: his mom is a single mother by choice, who conceived him via IVF with sperm donated by a good friend. Her friend and sperm donor now lives with them part-time, though, and does a fair bit of day-to-day parenting. He puts Griffin to bed, feeds him breakfast and reads him stories. They share chores and other domestic tasks.
The rest of the time, “Uncle George” lives with his partner across town. On Sundays, they all have dinner together.
There’s a long profile of this odd trio in the New York Times this weekend, but it never seems to get at the important question: what is this like for the kid?
A premie baby like one of the quintuplets born of unusual circumstances.
Two women became the mothers of quintuplets, and it’s being called a world first.
Births of large numbers of multiples is still rare but ever more common with assisted reproductive technology. So that’s not what make this such an unusual story. And lesbian moms? They’ve got their own Oscar-nominated movie, so that’s hardly a head-turner.
What makes the situation for Australians Melissa Keevers, 27, and Rosemary Nolan, 22, is how the multiples came to be: Continue reading »
The path to parenthood used to be fairly narrow: get married, get knocked up, gestate for 9 months and Viola! You have a baby.
That’s a great way to get a kid if you’re married, to someone of the opposite sex, you both want kids and you don’t have fertility problems stopping you from getting them.
In other words, the old-fashioned approach leaves a lot of people out of the parenting party. Modern technology has done an end-run around the limits of the birds and the bees. Fertility treatments give us the possibility of making babies with a little help from a variety of donors: donors of sperm, of eggs, of wombs.
This leads to some pretty strange arrangements. In Modern Love this week, writer Jerry Mahoney writes about his decision to create a family with his boyfriend, Drew. Their search for the perfect egg donor led them to Drew’s sister. The twins born of that arrangement are now ten months old. They look a bit like both their dad’s, and a bit like their aunt. They have the beginnings of a secret language, and a very happy raising them.
Amidst the powerful love story of a sister willing to give anything to her much-adored brother, Mahoney asks questions no one knows the answer to yet: what will it be like for her to always be the kids’ aunt, and never their mom? What will it be like for the kids?
Probably just fine.
A new study from the Institute for American Values finds that teens and adults conceived using donor sperm will sometimes answer yes to leading questions about feeling confused about their parentage or distressed about not knowing their biological father.
That’s not the headline they’re touting as they promote the upcoming study. Instead they’re pushing the findings that make sperm donation look like a problem. Study authors Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquardt have an essay in Slate today in which they stress the suffering of kids conceived through sperm donation.
They don’t mention that those same kids are more likely than others to donate sperm, eggs or the use of their wombs, nor do they focus long on recent research that shows lesbian moms do the best job raising their kids.
Sorry, ladies, your conservative agenda is showing.
How attached are you to your eggs? Payment for a sperm donation runs about $100, but then, donation is quick and easy, relatively speaking. Some banks pay more if you are willing to donate openly, or for donors with graduate degrees. Egg “harvesting” requires a series of hormone injections and surgery under a local anesthetic, and it pays far more as a result: a study of ads aimed at potential egg donors reported in the New York Times found that ads at some colleges promise up to $50,000 (although ethical guidelines set by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommend that compensation not exceed $10,000).
Eggs cost more than sperm. They’re harder, just from a purely physical standpoint, to give up. But critics of egg donation argue that it’s emotionally fraught, and that young women considering egg donation may regret the experience–a proposition you rarely hear about sperm donation, in spite of reports that a single donor in California, for example, may have fathered literally hundreds of children (even the most prolific egg donor could scarcely manage more than a dozen in a lifetime). If an egg and a sperm each provide 1/2 of the D.N.A. that combines to result in a child, why would the donation of the egg mean so much more?
Technology is a wonderful thing in most ways — but it’s posing new challenges for sperm donors and their desire for anonymity. Rachael Lehmann-Haupt has an interesting piece up on Slate’s Double X today about how DNA testing and Google can lead to parents and children tracking down their sperm donor, whether he wanted to be found or not.
She follows the case of a donor from California who donated when he was young, and left a little bit of information in his donor profile — namely, that his father was in the Baseball Hall of Fame and his mother was a nurse, his birthdate, and his college major. Along with those things, he made it clear he didn’t want to be found. Continue reading »
A gay man is taking advantage of an Irish law that works against homosexuals to gain visitation with the little boy created with his donated sperm.
The AP reports the heavily conservative government in Ireland does not recognize lesbians as a valid family unit. So the gay man who helped them create their now three-year-old son retains rights even though he’s not a traditional father. Continue reading »
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