A seven-year old child tells students she had no father when being asked, “What does your daddy do?” She replies instead, “My mother was artificially inseminated.”
Today Katrina is a wiser child, now 18 and a freshman in college, she reports, “Her mother told her that the man who had donated the sperm to make her was probably a college student.” She says when she was 12, she realized she did have a father and he was alive. She then started observing friends with their fathers and that there might be something wrong with her fatherless situation.
Katrina is among the first in her generation old enough now to speak out about growing about in “the brave new world of alter family models.
One psychologist has termed these situations children are forced to grow up in as “family constellations,” from chosen single parents and group parenting, to same sex parenting all made possible with new reproductive technologies.
There are new concerns that there is too little data out to show the effects on children, let alone what happens to them as adults.
Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute of American Values, and author of a new 2006 report, “The revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s needs,” where she reports governments around the world are pushing aside age-old family identities such as “mother” and “father” in favor of legal terms elastic enough to accommodate everyone.
In Spain, for instance, where same sex marriage is legal, the legislative voted to replace the terms “mother and father” with “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B.”
This has all complicated parents rights to the point of what seems to be the Twilight Zone, going through a maze of complex issues that include child planning, financing, conception, carrying, bearing, rearing, and genetics of a child to determine which adult holds parental rights. Commissions in New Zealand and Australia have tried to resolve this problem by allowing donor-conceived children to have three legal parents. In the U.S. same-sex parenting and divorce cases to declare that non-relatives “Psychological parents” even when a fit biological parent wanted the child. Even in Vietnam, a state-supported hospital is considering setting up a community sperm bank due to demand from single women who want a baby but wish to remain unmarried.
Katrina’s mother was a pioneering woman in the world of artificial insemination. She coped with her not having a father that either he was dead or too young to raise her, not thinking he was growing old as she grew old. She realized that even kids who were babies during a divorce, still had a chance of meeting their dad if he was alive, something that had actually happened to one of her friends when Katrina was in middle school. She realized that could never happen for her.
W. Bradford Wilcox, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, wrote in The Weekly Standard that children without fathers have higher rates of suicide, teen pregnancy, and criminal behavior. He mentions the following:
Princeton University / University of California studied 6,000 boys from single family homes and found they were twice as likely to wind up in prison.
A study of 750 girls in the United States and New Zealand, University of Arizona psychologist Bruce Ellis found that those who saw their father leave the family before age six (6) were six times more likely to become pregnant as teenagers than those whose fathers stayed in the home throughout their childhood.
A 1991 – 1998 study of Swedish children found that those in single-family homes were twice as likely to attempt suicide and 50 percent more likely to succeed in committing suicide than those in two-parent families.
A 2005 University of Chicago literature review, students living with married parents score higher on reading comprehension, compared to students living in stepfamilies, with single mothers, and in other types of families. Living in a single-parent family is linked with decreases in children’s math scores.
But Katrina does not argue that donor-conceived children are not seen as a gift. She said that is not the issue. “The issue,” she says, “is adults making life-altering decisions for their children that are in the adults’ best interests as opposed to what’s in the best interests of the child.” Katrina says the best experts in what happens to children are not the adult experts, but the children themselves as they grow up, and that these children do not have an outlet so they can be heard.
Katrina said, “My generation is the first to be studied and no one has really looked at us. I’d rather not have been a guinea pig, but I was. Still, a lot of people in the medical, scientific, and legislative communities are not listening to us. I don’t know why. Maybe they can’t relate to our pain.”
Dawn Stefanowicz echoes Clark’s complaint. A Canadian author and speaker whose father was gay, Stefanowicz, 43, grew up with a parade of male partners marching through her home. Some stayed for years, others only for hours. “My father could cruise during broad daylight and get someone to have sex during the lunch hour.” Stefanowicz said. “By the time I was 10 years old, I had been exposed to a sex shop, a gay nude beach, and a bathhouse. She said growing up in this home she found it difficult to receive love or be appreciate her own womanhood. She has chronicled her experiences in an auto biography, “Out from Under; Getting Clear of the Wreckage of a Sexually Disordered Home.”
Stefanowicz reflects the same concerns as Clark, saying, “The reality is that the children are not being heard. You’re a dependent; you can’t speak up. You can’t say, ‘I’m 6 years old and this is the third partner my daddy has had.’ The children are completely silenced and have to pretend it’s fine and OK.”
The author reports that public schools nationwide have embraced “What Makes a Family,” a photographic exhibit and film that includes same-sex parented families as part of one great big mosaic of “normal.” And the mainstream press rarely questions the social and clinical wisdom of same-sex parenting, preferring to explore its internal challenges instead. For instance, the Los Angeles Times on October 29, 2006, ran a positive front-page feature on Chad and David, a pair of white-collar homosexuals struggling to become co-fathers through surrogacy.
Stephanowicz, on the other hand, has already received physical threats and profane e-mails for going public with her very un-PC account of growing up in a gay-parented household. “That is why so few of us will ever go public. It is not a big, safe, supportive, and ‘happy’ family that surrounds us as children-something the media portrays.”
However, the views of unhappy children continue to come to the surface calling themselves “queer spawn,” according to Elizabeth Marquardt’s research, while some donor-conceived young people refer to themselves as “lopsided” or “half-adopted.”
While adopted people come from difficult situations, they have an opportunity to find healing from the loving home that has taken them in. Donor conception kids, on the other hand, can’t escape that they were purposely created in the process a crop of biological rootless kids.
Clark says that the donor concept “robs the birthright of a person to know who their parents are. Ethically, I see something wrong with that.”
While “cryo-banks” prevent these kids from finding their fathers, Clark found a “donor and offspring” registry on the Internet in February 2006, where donor-conceived children could connect with un-named donors willing to reveal their sperm contributions. That is where Clark found her father, who after a single e-mail sent her several pictures of himself. Clark said, after looking at his resemblance to her, “I just started to bawl. I knew that he was my father.”
In March, after a DNA-matching test came back 99.9902 percent positive, the man revealed his name along with his basic medical history, information Clark was looking for.
While Clark and her donor father talked on the phone several times, he eventually backed away not knowing how to tell his parents or siblings.
Clark took it well as a teenager. She hopes that one day he might change his mind, but for now she says, “I’m trying to understand his perspective, but it’s very difficult to do that. I’m not a donor.”
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