Sperm Donor fights for right to be a Dad in California

The actor Jason Patric wants to be a Dad. The mother of his biological child, 3-year-old Gus, wants him to just be a sperm donor. Who wins? If I taught family law, I’d make this case my last class of the semester, because it’s right at the edge of a frontier of parenthood that courts and states haven’t settled yet. It also scrambles the usual assumptions. Traditionally, it is fathers who have run from parental responsibilities and mothers who have tried to hold them accountable, often to win child support. I’m not talking about most fathers, of course, just the ones who essentially say they got tricked—they just gave sperm, or they just had sex, and didn’t intend to become fathers at all. In this case, Patric wants a relationship with his biological son, and it’s Gus’ mother, Danielle Schreiber, who is asking the courts to turn him away. It’s a different entry point into an old fight. But Schreiber’s stance shouldn’t change the underlying rule: Unless both biological parents agree before birth that the father has no rights at all, courts should presume that he is indeed the father, not just some guy who ejaculated into a cup. Patric and his ex-girlfriend, Schreiber, conceived Gus via in vitro fertilization. Patric says he spent time with Gus after the boy was born, until Schreiber cut him out. He has pictures to prove it. “I want my son back,” he told Katie Couric. He says he was there from the start and signed a document stating that he was Gus’ “intended parent.” Schreiber say that Gus was conceived after she and Patric broke up, and that neither of them intended him to be the boy’s father. “It's not about him having a relationship or contact with Gus. This is just about rights,” she said, also on TV. “Me preserving my right to be a sole legal parent, not having to share that with someone who has never intended to and never raised Gus.” So far, Patric is losing. A California court ruled that he has no parental rights. The judge interpreted state law to provide that if a man isn’t married to the mother of his biological child, and gives her his sperm, then the general rule is that he has no paternity rights. It doesn’t matter whether he spent time with the baby afterward—or what might be best for the child. If you think about it, that’s pretty shocking. Usually, family law presumes that two parents are better than one, University of Florida law professor Lee-Ford Tritt pointed out when I called him to talk about this case. That way, a child has two sources of love and income. The two-parent rule doesn’t apply to anonymous sperm donors—no one would donate if it did. Also, if the sperm donor is someone the mother knows, the parents should be able to contract away his parental rights if that’s what they want. Otherwise, it will be harder for women to go to men they know for sperm, and that’s not a good outcome. Sometimes children are better off knowing who their fathers are, even if the fathers aren’t legally responsible for them. The law should allow for different kinds of donors and family constellations. But if there’s no clear agreement between the parents, then the law should go back to presuming that the genetic father should be treated as the real father. The judge who ruled against Patric did the opposite. He’s saying, in effect, that Schreiber gets to decide to bar Patric from any kind of parental involvement. We’re not talking about whether Patric gets to raise Gus—that’s a separate custody issue—just about whether he has any leg to stand on in court proceedings about Gus at all. Why should this decision about Gus’ parenthood be up to his mother alone, without any consideration of how Patric behaved toward Gus, and whether Gus would be better off with Patric in his life? Courts should, and often do, ask a different question: Has the father “held out” a child as his own? That’s the legal term of art for a test that looks at the father’s relationship to the child. Did Patric spend time with Gus or pay for any of his care? Did he acknowledge him as his son? “Holding out a child as one’s own is huge in the courts for determining parental rights,” Tritt says. That’s not how current California law works, however. It provides that a sperm donor, to a bank or for IVF involving a woman other than his wife, “is treated in law as if he were not the natural father of a child thereby conceived, unless otherwise agreed to in a writing signed by the donor and the woman prior to the conception of the child.” Article: 14th August 2013 www.slate.com

Donor conceived story 'My dad was a sperm donor'

Sperm donation is often seen as a gift to thousands of infertile couples, who find joy and completion in a child that might not otherwise exist. But their children sometimes find that joy bound with longing, loss and lifelong confusion about their true identity.
Narelle Grech knows the details by heart: his code name is T5. He is brown-haired and brown-eyed with O-positive blood type.

He's probably in his 50s and attended university. He stands about 173 centimetres. His surname starts with T and he is likely to be Maltese.

These scant points are Narelle's only information about the man who is her biological father, a man who has occupied Narelle's thoughts and deeds for much of the past 13 years since her parents revealed that she was conceived with sperm donated to a fertility clinic.

"When I was a teenager, I carried that information around with me on a scrap of paper, the way other kids carried a photograph of their dad," she says. "It was my way of keeping a link to him because I had nothing else."

Narelle remembers her parents sitting her and her older sister down at the family dining table one Sunday afternoon, her mother telling her that she was conceived with the help of another man's sperm and how much they loved her.

At first, she laughed it off, thinking it was cool to be different. "But, later that night, I was washing my face in front of the bathroom mirror and I realised that everything I thought I knew about myself had vanished," she says.

"The man I thought was my father wasn't and half the family I thought was mine wasn't related to me. I started crying uncontrollably. Almost from that moment, I wanted to find him. Not because I wanted another father, but because I wanted to discover who I really am."

Narelle is one of the hidden generations of Australians given life by our ever-expanding technological and scientific expertise. She was born in 1983, at a time when donor conception was still in its relative infancy and donors gave their sperm anonymously. She is one of hundreds of people Australia-wide who are today searching for their biological antecedents, but may never find them.

At the heart of the dilemma is a delicate balancing act between the competing rights of offspring and their donors. Offspring feel they have an emotional and medical right to know their biological history. Yet, while many donors are happy to be contacted, others gave their genetic material in a spirit of goodwill to childless families, in the belief that their identities would remain anonymous.

Rightly or wrongly, they fear a knock on the door might tear their families apart or lead to claims on their estates. There is another even more pressing reason why Narelle needs to find her biological father.

In May, doctors diagnosed her with advanced bowel cancer, which doctors say may kill her within the next five years. Her cancer, discovered after she suffered severe abdominal pain one morning, is the most aggressive kind and, though she is just 28, is already classified at stage four.

"The galling thing is that doctors suspect the cancer is genetically linked," says Narelle. "My mother's family has no history of cancer. The possibility is that I've inherited a genetic predisposition from my biological father." The diagnosis is a nightmare come true for Narelle. For more than a decade, she has sought, without success, the identity of the man who helped her parents conceive her.

While that has eluded her, she has discovered something else, something that now keeps her awake at night. She has, she says, eight half-siblings scattered around Victoria and possibly Australia, all created with her biological father's sperm. "I have eight brothers and sisters out there who I've never met, but who all share some of the same genetic building blocks as me and that terrifies me," she says, curled up on a sofa in her suburban Melbourne home.

"Each one may be a genetic time bomb waiting to go off and it's probable that they don't know anything about it." An unfortunate combination of disparate, sometimes contradictory laws across state boundaries, poor record-keeping and bureaucratic inertia means that Narelle and others like her may never find the answers they are seeking so desperately.

Article: 5th October Australian Women's weekly aww.ninemsn.com.au

This story shows how important it is for donor conceived to be able to receive more information about their donor, something which Pride Angel strongly supports. If you are considering conceiving using donor sperm or eggs, why not think about the option of finding a known donor through a connection service. This will not only enable you to discover more details about the donor such as their characteristics and personality, but most importantly you will have more information to pass onto your child and even have the ability of maintaining a level of contact, between donor and child.

Donor mum: The children I've never met

Documentary about about egg donors and sperm donors making contact with their genetic children. 'Donor Mum' can be seen tomorrow: BBC1 10.35pm Tuesday 30th August.
In 1991, Sylvia was one of Britain's first anonymous egg donors. After donating as a one-off at the London Fertility Centre in Harley Street, all she asked to know was whether her donation had been successful. But she soon found out more than she had bargained for.

Sylvia was struck to discover an article in the Daily Mail six weeks after she donated, telling the story of a woman called Joan who had successfully become pregnant using en egg donor. The clinic, the dates and the fact that they were twins, coincided exactly with Sylvia's story. She felt sure that Joan was her recipient.

Joan had a tragic story - her two boys were killed in a car crash when they were on holiday in Crete, and in her mid- 40's she desperately wanted to start another family. When she successfully used an egg donor, there were countless press reports that covered her moving story of tragedy transformed into happiness, and even a BBC documentary in 1994 that showed the twins as toddlers.

Sylvia felt tormented by seeing children who were genetically hers, but were in fact strangers who she wasn't supposed to know. She was tempted to make contact, but terrified of upsetting a family who had already suffered so much. But once the twins turned 18 she felt it was right to take the bold step of contacting them.

Alongside Sylvia's story is the story of her son Eliott. Sylvia wanted a child when she reached 33 but hadn't found Mr Right, so she decided to go it alone. Eliott was conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, and was born six months before Sylvia donated her eggs. Now 19, Eliott is ready to search for his sperm donor father.

For Eliott, born in 1991 when all donors were anonymous, his only hope is to search through DNA testing with the help of an organisation called UK Donorlink.

For Sylvia, contact with her recipient is at her fingertips. The film follows her turmoil as she decides how and when to make contact with Joan and the twins - and the extraordinary consequence of her decision.

Donors is a warm and moving film about a new kind of family emerging from the interventions of science. This film is also a snapshot of a future following the removal of donor anonymity in 2005, where more and more people will discover who their donors are after they turn 18.

Donor Unknown: Film and DVD review

BEING a child is hard enough. Being a child conceived via sperm donation can be even more difficult.
If the child discovers they were born this way, is it easy enough to carry on regardless or will they go down the road of finding out who their real father is?

It's a dilemma faced by JoEllen Marsh which turned her life around in more ways than one. Donor Unknown follows JoEllen as she reveals everything she went through meeting her half-siblings and, ultimately, her donor father, Jeffrey.

It all happens thanks to website the Donor Sibling Registry - it brought JoEllen and Danielle together.

But a New York Times article about the girls sparked an online search that resulted in dozens of 20-somethings coming forward because they were conceived from the same man.

Describing her first meeting with half-sister Danielle as 'weird', this is a heart-warming look at a subject rarely discussed in public.

In it we meet JoEllen and her half-brothers-and-sisters as well as 'Donor 150' aka the sperm donor, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey likens himself to a 'fringe monkey' - someone who lives on the fringes of society, protecting others from danger. He loves dogs and pigeons and lives in a rusty old camper van on Venice Beach.

A self-confessed hippy who pursued acting and modelling in his younger years, his decision to donate sperm was the result of being chatted up by a woman looking for a donor.

It brings a smile to the face listening to the 'family' talk about the similar traits they share - piano playing, same large toes, the way they push hair behind their ears.

Geoffrey's views on life and government would be considered those of a conspiracy theorist, but in truth, he is harmless.

In the end, Donor Unknown is a light-hearted look at a side of life rarely revealed and avoids focusing on the negatives and firmly shows there can be a positive outcome.

If you missed the showing of Donor Unknown 28th June on More4, why not watch the DVD, due out 11th July.

Film review: by Garry McConnachie 29th June 2011 www.dailyrecord.co.uk

Read more about known sperm and egg donation and donors keeping in touch with their children at www.prideangel.com