Who's Your Family?

The Convolutions of Artificial Insemination

By Father John Flynn, LC

ROME, APRIL 27, 2008 (Zenit.org).- With in-vitro fertilization (IVF) becoming more and more popular, an increasing number of children are at risk of being separated from their fathers.

Ireland’s High Court recently ruled against giving any parental rights to a father whose sperm was donated and used in an artificial insemination, which resulted in the birth of his son.

The father, a homosexual, donated sperm to the mother and her female partner, who are a lesbian couple. On April 17 the Irish Times reported that Judge John Hedigan held that the lesbian couple could be regarded as a de facto couple with rights under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Consequently the judge de nied guardianship or visiting rights to the biological father, who had initiated legal action to obtain these privileges. Newspaper reports noted he might appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

In a press release issued the same day the Dublin-based Iona Institute, a nongovernmental organization active in family issues, said that a child has a right to know his parents, and to be raised by a father and a mother.

“The fact that the man in this case, known as ‘A’, is a sperm donor, in no way lessens the fact that he is the child’s father and that the child has a right to know his father and to have some measure of contact with his father,” commented David Quinn, the institute’s director. “This right inheres in the child and it is extraordinary that this should be overlooked at the very time we are considering a children’s rights referendum."

One of the problems with not knowing your father was highlighted in an article published April 19 by the Irish Independent. The story recounted how Kirk Maxey fathered an unknown number of children through sperm donation over a number of years, which he roughly calculates at between 200 to 400.

Now with a child of his own, Maxey is faced with the dilemma of knowing that there could be up to 100 young girls in the vicinity of his home who are close to his son’s age and have the same father, but who have no idea who he is.

Orphans

In a commentary written for the April 19 edition of the Irish Times, Breda O’Brien noted that in past decades children had been taken from their parents and put in orphanages when authorities felt the family was not going to be able to look after the kids.

In more recent times, she added, this policy was recognized as being a mistake in most cases. “Why, then, are we so unwilling to see that we are in danger of creating new injustices and making exactly the same mistakes in new situations as were made in the past?” she queried.

“We need to proceed with extreme caution, especially given how badly we have understood the needs of children in the past,” O’Brien recommended.

Ireland is far from being alone in creating such problems. In England a woman recently gave birth to her husband’s baby almost four years after he died, reported the UK’s Telegraph newspaper on March 20.

Lisa Roberts said she was sure that her late husband, James, would have approved of the birth of their daughter. Her husband’s sperm was frozen after he was diagnosed of cancer in 2004; he died later that year.

According to the Telegraph, a number of children in the United Kingdom have been born years after their father’s death, following a court case in 1997, when Diane Blood sued in order to be allowed to use her deceased husband’s sperm.

Meanwhile, in the Australian state of Victoria, proposals are under discussion to loosen laws on IVF, including those on sperm donation. A Feb. 16 article published in the Australian newspaper detailed the objections to sperm donation by Myfanwy Walker, herself born as a result of IVF and donated sperm.

Only when she was 20 did she discover the truth about her parentage. She subsequently was able to make contact with her biological father, but says that even if kids can eventually do this it is far from being an acceptable situation.

Searching in vain

Even though a number of countries have now abolished donor anonymity, allowing the children to contact their biological parents once they turn 18, Walker observed that often the contact data is not kept up-to-date by the clinics. As well, donors can also actively evade being found. Thus, when the children reach an age when they can start to look for their father the search can often be unsuccessful.

The U.N. Convention on the Rights of a Child, Walker told the Australian, declares that children have a right to their identity. Such a right is not respected, she added, when one parent is a donor, and who can remain anonymous for the first years of a child's life.

Walker’s position is shared by many other children born through donated sperm, affirmed ethicist Margaret Somerville, writing in the Canadian newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen on Sept. 17 last year.

A growing number of these children, now adults are speaking out forcefully against the way in which they were brought into being, she said. Somerville said they feel like “genetic orphans.”

We run the risk of disintegrating parenthood into its genetic, gestational, social and legal components, Somerville noted. This seriously harmful both to children and society, she warned.

Another Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, reported Nov. 13 about how Liza White discovered that her daughter Morgan, fathered by a sperm donor, has 6 half-siblings by the same father.

The six families and seven kids are spread out through the United States, from Washington state to Washington, D.C. No less than six of them were born within a half-year of each other, and at the time the article was published, they were all in kindergarten.

The mothers, all lesbians according to the Globe and Mail, still do not know who the father of their children is or how to contact him.

Identity crisis

IVF techniques are also being employed to create ever-stranger types of family relationships. At least six British mothers have frozen their eggs to be used by their infertile daughters, the Sunday Times reported Feb. 10.

The daughters, who will thus be in a position to give birth to a half-sister or brother, are able to do this given that new freezing technology means that their mother’s eggs can be frozen for long enough to be used once the daughter has reached adulthood.

“The child could feel a crisis of identity trying to work out their relationship with relatives,” Josephine Quintavalle of Comment on Reproductive Ethics said to the Times in a critical reaction to the news.

Another British case was reported by the BBC last Oct. 5. An anonymous 72-year-old man agreed to become a sperm donor for his own "grandchild." The man has offered to donate his sperm to his son and daughter-in-law who have yet been unable to conceive a child through IVF.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks out against the dangers of IVF, referring among points of the child’s right to be born of a father and a mother and to know them. (No. 2376)

“A child is not something owed to one, but is a gift, the ‘supreme gift of marriage’” the Catechism adds (No. 2378). Therefore, the text continues: “A child may not be considered a piece of property, an idea to which an alleged ‘right to a child’ would lead.” Principles only too often ignored, to the detriment of children and society as a whole.