As someone who was adopted, let me assure you that the harm you speak of is overblown.
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So, mixed families, adoptive families, LGBTQA families, single parent families can just fuck right off? I sincerely hope that was not what you were implying.
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Welp, good to know everything works out then. /s
It counts for a lot, sure! Whether it counts for more than anything else is harder to say in advance. There seem to be a lot of people out there who are very bitter about the fact that sperm donation meant they were raised not knowing their brothers or sisters; or about about potential medical problems they would inherit; or that they missed out on being raised by parents who shared and understood their personality traits.
Of course, of course, there are caveats to the horizon in every direction here: not every biological family is better than any other family; transparency is key (though fraught in sperm donation); not all adoptive children feel the same; we can’t really know how things would have been if those who are embittered about their own situation had been raised by their biological parents; and, no, docosc, I am not saying that.
However, disregarding the right of children to have know those they come from – whose natures they share – seems pretty shabby. And the sperm donation industry has been particularly egregious here.
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Much of which can now be mitigated by DNA testing and the like. And of course biological families never lie about medical histories, ever.
There are plenty of cases where biological parents don’t understand their children and plenty of constructed families that mesh very well. Having a biological link to someone doesn’t necessarily mean that they will get along or be understood.
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The whole idea that there is one way to construct a family that is inherently superior to the alternatives is unavoidably offensive, and historically inaccurate. Life is never that simple.
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Also
- Families that sought medical intervention due to infertility
- Mothers who fled abusive relationships
- Women who kept a child conceived through an act of rape
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I think you’ve kind of dug yourself into a hole here. Again, as a person who was adopted, I am telling you that the things that you are describing, though certainly issues, are not as big a deal as you seem to think.
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We can.
People who adopt, or families with gay or trans or nonbinary members are equally as valid in their familial connections as the “traditional” heteronormative ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ conceit.
Ditto goes for all other kinds of nontraditional families.
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Yes, which is good, right?
Yes, which is bad!
Sure, and no doubt we could say the same about inherited medical conditions. Doesn’t mean it isn’t natural and proper for children deprived of those links and knowledge to feel aggrieved.
As I said, caveats …
And I am very happy that this is true for you! Seriously. The question is, how typical is your experience? It seems clear from the statistics that most adopted children want to know about and meet their biological parents and see the parent they look like.
But can we “deconstruct” families however we want? I think we would all agree here that a man cannot simply disown his responsibilities if he gets a woman pregnant and he doesn’t want the baby while she does. Biology still counts.
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Wanting to know and not knowing are an issue, but I don’t think it is an existential crisis that seriously affects quality of life.
Nobody has a perfect childhood. There are issues with every family and every set of parents. Children have a lot of shit to deal with growing up that follows them around as adults. Adoption is just another wrinkle in there, not the whole shebang.
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The family situations we have described above are not “caveats.” They are the vast majority of families in which a child grows up without knowledge of their biological parents.
Trust me, no one is trying to steal your sperm so they can raise your child in secret.
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Sort of like these guys, only in reverse?
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It is not destiny. It’s an aspect of life and in some cases, knowing the biological parents helps nothing and in fact harms people.
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Modern sperm banks do keep records about those matters, for the benefit of the families they help create. The problem is not with families created by sperm donors in general, but with informal sperm donors like the ones in the FPP who don’t follow the rules.
Part of that biological process is that the man and woman are both responsible for the pregnancy and also that the woman carries the product of that reproductive process in and as part of her body, which is hers (and no-one else’s) to do with as she sees fit.
Any man who can’t accept these facts and the resulting responsibilities (e.g. MRAs) isn’t much of a man in my books.
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You have set my mind at ease.
All true. But it is a reality. And sometimes it is destiny too. Just sticking to the examples from the newspaper articles below, It is destiny…
– for the children who find themselves haunted by their unknown biological family;
– for the biological father who suddenly starts feeling like he has abandoned his children;
– for the man who gave sperm but is now forced to pay maintenance;
– for the lesbian couple are dragged through the courts by the sperm-donor who can’t let go.
Again, we can make new families, but unmaking the old ones (or selectively ignoring biological realities) is much more fraught.
I think you are being (to put it mildly) overly generous to the industry here. This openness of which you speak – where it exists – is mostly something that has been forced on them. Their whole business model was premised on the idea that well meaning (or greedy or egotistical) men could safely share their seed anonymously without the expectation that their offspring would come knocking. It created a conflict of rights right from the start but people didn’t have enough imagination to see it until the kids got old enough to started demanding to know where they had come from. And once the means to unveil these men became available the industry still fought it.
In my own city there has been quite a seachange in the legislative balance of rights with this and it has been a good change. But there has been a lot of pain all round for the people caught up in it. Here are a few articles from our (generally progressive) Melbourne Age:
These two are fascinatingly linked:
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No. It’s not.
That’s a shitty thing to do. It’s just another form of misogyny, if you ask me.
Quite a lot of people would have had much better lives not living with their biological parents, who horrifically abused them. And it’s common enough to be a cliche that parents don’t understand their biological children.
ALL families are LEGITIMATE AND VALUABLE. Saying that we should give greater moral and legal weight to biological families, when that often enough fails the children, is missing the point. There is nothing magical about biological ties.
Also, you seem to have a mistaken notion that we’re all arguing that adopted children or children from invtro or whatever should not have access to the records of their biological parents, which no one here has argued. We’re arguing that family isn’t some how inherently better when it’s the “traditional” family. Many people have the experience of that very much not being the case.
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For every one of those cherry-picked points, there are dozens where biological parents abuse their kids or are otherwise less fit for the job than non-biological parents. Your last point even isn’t a valid criticism of a nonbiological family unit, it’s a giant waving red flag that if that sperm donor had been responsible for actually raising that kid, they would have done a shitty job.
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That’s quite a sweeping statement to base on a handful of articles. All that those stories tell us is that it would have been nice if a stronger and more formalised framework for sperm and egg donation were available before the 1990s. They also suggest that there’s room in the current system for further refinement further to provide the child with adequate genetic and family medical history from the donor while balancing out the donor’s anonymity. The story of the lesbian couple actually cites the case as a reason anonymous donation should be an option if not the default.
None of these anecdotal stories suggest that sperm and egg donation or the families that emerge from them are invalid or harmful to the children in and of themselves*. Of course, children of sperm donation are going to be curious about their biological father. However with the support of their actual family and a well-regulated structure as described above (perhaps with an option for the child to petition the bio-father for the removal of anonymity with no financial or legal consequences for him) it becomes a lot less traumatic.
Also, none of the stories see sperm donation as part of some plot by “ideological enablers” (whoever they are) to diminish the role of nuclear families in society or to take away the rights of biological fathers – those are the fever dreams of Xtianists and MRAs.
Finally, none of this has to do with the completely unregulated black market in or informal variants of sperm donation (e.g. the story where the donor had to provide child support, or the story in this topic’s FPP).
[* and to be clear, I don’t give a damn about the adults who had “regrets” about donating or later changed their minds about not being a part of the child’s life.]
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Can you elaborate on the biological realities of which you speak? It almost sounds like you are getting into the “nature vs. nurture” debate, but the “nature” part is baked into a person at birth, meaning that the question of who raises children after birth is necessarily a question of “nurture.” Aside from the possible (and highly debatable) advantages of breast milk, I really cannot see any biological advantages to biological parents (as opposed to adoptive parents) raising children.
In addition, since this thread is specifically about sperm donors, we are talking about situations in which one parent (the mother) still is the biological parent of the child (which also resolves the breast milk issue). This part seems to have been glossed over, but can you please kindly explain why both of the parents raising a child must be biological parents (as opposed to just one, as in the case of sperm donation)? I fail to see any biological advantage here. Your argument from biology does not seem to make much sense unless you can explain the biological significance of biological fathers raising their biological children.
Here, you seem to be arguing simply that “Men should not just go around spreading their seed willy-nilly” (no pun intended). If that is your argument, perhaps you should focus in on this point. The point (at least the way that you have phrased it) seems like unnecessary moralization (because we are decidedly not talking about a man who goes around getting women pregnant and then skipping town, which is a separate phenomenon that I think everyone here will agree is an awful thing to do); and, further, the issues in terms of genetic diversity and the possibility of accidental incest are already being addressed in this thread.
If you merely want to argue that people have the right to know where they came from, then fine, but you can make that argument without going into genetic determinism or the morality of a single person producing “too many” offspring.
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