Australia - Is the law failing children of anonymous donors?

July 11, 2015 20:28 by PrideAngelAdmin

Something happened over the weekend in Melbourne which has never happened anywhere before in the world. This is the future come home to roost. For decades, medicine has created miracle babies, while pretending that biology doesn't matter. The time for that pretence is over. Now it's time for the truth. On Saturday, donor conceived offspring gathered from all around Australia – and some came from overseas – for the country's first National Conference for Donor Conceived People. (We call ourselves 'DC', which is a less socially awkward shorthand for 'people conceived using donor sperm or a donated egg'.) It's the first time in the world that such a gathering has been organised by DC people themselves. You know what that says? The experiment has grown up. Forty years after this industry really got going, we're no longer just donor conceived children. We are donor conceived children, teens, and adults, some with children of our own. Just like adoptees, we want to know who our biological families are, and what our medical history is. We want to know whose genes we have. We have a right to it.
This desire to know the truth shouldn't threaten anyone. We love the people who raised us. They are also our families, and for many of us, they are the most important families we will ever have. But it's utter nonsense to say that donor conceived people have a finite amount of love to give. Finding out you have a lost half-sister doesn't mean you love your other sisters less. And I've been told I could have up to 20 half-sisters to find.
I'm one of the many Australian donor conceived people created under an anonymous donation regime. Anonymous donation has now been outlawed in my state of NSW – but that only happened in 2010. At a national level, there are no laws regulating donor conception at all, and half the states and territories have no laws either. It's estimated that there are around 60,000 donor conceived people in Australia today. No one knows for sure.
Not all donor conceived people want to find their families straight away. Some may need counselling through the process. (Believe me, while living such a distressing mess, DC people already act as counsellors for each other.) Some may prefer written contact to start with. Some may only want family medical history. But the point is that, like adoptees, all DC people have a right to identity. We have the right to know who our family is, whether we choose to make contact or not.
We had no say in the circumstances of our conception, but governments, doctors, nurses and businesses did. They decided, without us, that we were not allowed to know our family. But our biological families are ours by birthright. That should, and must, be respected in law.
Article: www.dailylife.com.au 30th June 2015

Should you opt for anonymous or open sperm donors?

Should you opt for anonymous, or non-anonymous sperm donors? And should you tell your child how they were conceived? For most it’s an agonising decision, writes Helen O’Callaghan. “Anonymous means the donor will never know who you are and you will never be able to contact or communicate with him. A non-anonymous donor will never be able to track you down but your child can make contact through the sperm bank when they reach 18,” explains Declan Keane, senior embryologist and director of ReproMed. Last year his clinic (most Irish clinics source sperm mainly from Denmark) saw a 49% increase in women going for IUI (intrauterine insemination) using donor sperm. Of donor sperm cycles, three out of four involved lesbian couples and single women. “The majority of single women and lesbian couples go for known donors. They want their child to at least have the choice to communicate [with donor in future]. Fifty percent of heterosexual couples reserve that choice too — the other half say ‘no, this is our child’.” Ann Bracken, counselling psychotherapist at Sims IVF — where 157 women used donor sperm last year — says those opting for non-anonymous donors want to give the adult child choices in the future around accessing their genetic heritage. “Some parents feel there’s nothing to hide.” Helen Browne, co-founder of NISIG (National Infertility Support and Information Group) hopes most parents of donor-conceived babies tell children about their origins. She recalls the mum who envisaged secondary school science sufficiently advanced 12 years hence for her daughter to discover the truth in the classroom. “She could take her father’s and her mother’s hair from the comb and do DNA at school,” this mother told Browne. “She’s so right!” exclaims Browne. “This is why honesty is so important.” So why don’t parents tell? “They fear rejection as a parent. They fear their child will be picked on at school. There’s an element of getting on with life and ‘putting it behind us’. They’ve carried the baby, it’s part of them and they forget,” says Browne, who believes it’s in the child’s best interests to be told “and so it’s not a secret that parents hold all their lives”. In the UK, anybody born through donation after April 2005 is entitled to request and receive their donor’s name and last known address, once they reach 18. Read more... Alternatively many more people are choosing to find known sperm donors through connection websites such as www.prideangel.com

Babies from donor sperm in USA are big business

Todd Whitehurst was a young grad student at Stanford when he began donating sperm to pay his way through school. “I went about 3.5 years, two or three times a week,” said Whitehurst, who estimated he’d raked in more than $12,000. Then six years ago, Whitehurst, 48, married with children and living in Los Gatos, Calif., was contacted by a 14-year-old girl who said she was his daughter and that she had obtained his information from the cryobank he’d visited. “My first reaction was just to be stunned,” Whitehurst said. “I would say I was kind of shocked at first but really happy about it overall.” With more than 300 sperm banks expected to rake in a third of $1 billion this year, sperm donation births are a big business in the United States. ABC News learned of at least five individuals who had fathered more than 100 children and one individual who had fathered nearly 200. “It’s the wild, wild west of regulation,” said Deborah Spar, president of Barnard College and author of “The Baby Business.” “There’s essentially no sheriff in town. There’s virtually no regulation in this area, which has become quite large, quite lucrative and is literally involved in the most intimate area of people’s lives.” Sperm banks test for about a half-dozen diseases, including HIV, but there are many more, such as diabetes, that they don’t. There is no genetic testing and there is no limit on the number of children a donor can father, Spar said. In other countries, however, there are legal limits on the number of children a sperm donor can have — in the U.K., it’s 10 — and children have a right to know who their biological fathers are and be able to obtain his health records. “In England and most of Europe, it’s illegal to have anonymous sperm donation,” Spar said. In the U.S. where there are more than 2 million children born from donated sperm, there are no official records that connect them to their biological fathers. The private Donor Sibling Registry allows them to connect to their fathers and to their half-siblings, with their permission. In 13 years, the registry says more than 10,000 donors and children or siblings have connected to one another. Article: 6th November 2013 www.abcnews.go.com Read more about known sperm donation in US, Canada, Europe, Australia and UK at www.prideangel.com

Seeking out my anonymous sperm donor father

I did once seek out my biological father. A front-page article had hit The New York Times, and I was suddenly spammed by 6,000 well-meaning friends emailing me about DonorSiblingRegistry.com, a website that helps people track down sperm-donor fathers and potential siblings. Back when I was conceived, my moms chose to keep their sperm donor anonymous, in both directions, feeling that doing so best protected the family they were starting, in particular R's position as the non-biological mother. Nowadays there are scores of people reeling in their genetic line on the fishing wire of the Internet, trying to fill in the gaps of parental choices (sound as they may have been). I was intrigued. Suddenly my natural interest in finding my father intersected with the tools to maybe do so. After all, 6,000 friends spamming your inbox about a new website can't be wrong! I knew that my window of opportunity was closing with each year. My sperm-donor father, if he hadn't already been hit by a falling piano or bitten by a venomous snake while hiking, could well be dying of more natural causes. I was also propelled by a haunting scene: an image of my grandchildren, sitting out in front of me on an old person's shaggy carpet, asking, "So, did you, like, make any effort whatsoever to find your dad?" And my disappointing response: "Well, listen, I was busy. Never got around to it. Here, have a cookie and leave me alone." I would imagine the grandkids, all three of them, repulsed by me and my laziness. I had made not one iota of effort not so much to bring them a genetic match of a great-grandfather but at least to make my own life story exciting by way of a Maury-style dad hunt: paternity tests, cussing, muffin tops, everything. I thought maybe I owed them this. I signed up for the website and put in lots of details about myself and the exceedingly minimal info I had on my donor father and the fertility clinic and hospital that my moms had used. I then rather ashamedly told my parents that I was interested in doing this search. This brought up embarrassment for me and initial discomfort for R, who had spent the parenting portion of her life building a parental identity from scratch, not as a biological mother, not as a father, but as a "co-mother," as she was called on my school forms. I would cross out "father" and write "co-mother," and suddenly my emergency contact form would be as political as a burning flag. We talked candidly about how this search should in no way threaten us as a family, and about how my desire to at least casually attempt to find my father was something I needed to do for myself and certainly not as an act of destruction or rebellion. Despite their initial apprehension, my parents soon rallied around this project (as is their custom with projects of mine). It seemed also that my moms had had their own latent curiosity about this mystical sperm donor, and that I was giving them permission to air it. The search quickly yielded a sweet, nerdy man, a member of MENSA, whose donation timeline and basic background (Jew) fit mine. If you can believe this, my family and I actually sat down with him at a brunch place in Greenwich Village called Jane. We liked him. We talked about all sorts of things while silently puzzling over his forehead, his nose, his shoulders, to see if, as a man, I might be him. He was so nebbishy, the sort of guy who practically begs to be shoved into a locker. He kind of seemed like he needed a family. The Maury moment came when he agreed to a paternity test. The days waiting for the results were fraught and exciting. When the results came and he turned out to be just some guy, I realized how deeply entrenched we'd all become in this fantasy. I had let myself believe that this itch could be quickly scratched, failing to see it for what it was: a needle in a haystack and, more specifically, a needle that, very likely, actively didn't want to be found. But on the heels of defeat, I felt peaceful. I had tried. Now my grandkids could shove it. I had made one nominal attempt, and it had been a rather gargantuan expenditure of emotional energy for my moms and me. I had wrestled with the sense that by taking the bait to go on this search, I was delegitimizing my family. Admitting collectively that we were curious, all three of us, was a weight off my shoulders. Article: 19th September 2013 www.huffingtonpost.com

Penelope Cruz's sister turned to anoymous sperm donor to get pregnant

Penelope Cruz's younger sister Monica has admitted that she turned to an anonymous sperm donor to get pregnant. Monica, 35, was worried that she would not meet the man of her dreams in time to start a family and so sought help through artificial insemination. The model revealed the truth about her pregnancy on her web based blog for Spanish newspaper El País. Monica, who models for luxury lingerie brand Agent Provocateur, said that she would have preferred to wait for a perfect match but feared 'it would then be too late for motherhood and [I] could not wait'. She wrote: 'I am going to be a mother! I have managed to fulfill the dream of a lifetime. 'Because of that I want to share with all of you this special journey and to be able to tell you about all my experiences during this fascinating time.' Monica decided to speak publicly about her pregnancy to address the inevitable questions she would get about the identity of the father. Keeping an air of dignity she deliberately 'isolated' and hid herself away from the world during the first few weeks of pregnancy in order to avoid making money from her private life. She said: 'I wanted to avoid, above all, that they spoke about possible fathers or the possible candidates to be it. 'So I have decided to tell all. To become pregnant, I turned to artificial insemination. 'I want to tell, also, so I can have the opportunity to show my thanks to all those anonymous men that help to give many women like me, the dream of their lives.' Monica felt uneasy about hiding the manner in which she was able to get pregnant but is happy to be helping make the topic less taboo. Article: 11th January 2013 www.dailymail.co.uk