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But we also share the same favorite novel: Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety. I share many physical traits with my biological father–his blue eyes, fair hair, pale skin, tendency to blush his small hands and high forehead. It carries with it something that all the science in the world can’t make sense of: I’ll call it the soul. But men and women donating their reproductive material today–listed in catalogs with cute handles (“Tall, Dark, and Handsome,” “Positive Vibes,” “Fit and Fun”)–need to think about the living consequences of their donation.ĭonating sperm or eggs is not the same as donating a kidney, a retina, a liver, a heart. He was 78–a retired physician and medical ethicist–and I can imagine how stunned he must have been to receive my email with the subject line Important letter. It took just 36 hours from the time I learned that my dad was not my biological father until I found the man who was. If the donor’s brother, niece, cousin or granddaughter has submitted DNA to one of the testing sites, it makes it that much easier for him or her to be findable. People donating sperm or egg (and while we’re at it, donate is a misnomer, as the transaction usually involves payment) must now know that they cannot–they will not–remain anonymous forever.
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The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas has called this “the unthought known”–what we absolutely know but cannot allow ourselves to think.Īnd then there is the matter of anonymity. I felt it, picked up on it, but had no name for it. The air in my childhood home was thick with the unsaid. I was filled with longing, but for what I did not know. I looked nothing like my dad and was constantly told that I didn’t “look” Jewish. I grew up feeling “other”–different from my family in ways I didn’t understand. More difficult to quantify are the profound psychological effects of such nondisclosure and secrecy. I confidently told his pediatric neurologist that there was no family history of seizures.
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When my son was an infant, he was stricken with a rare and often fatal seizure disorder. It’s one matter to have an awareness of a lack of knowledge–as many adoptees do–but another altogether not to know that you don’t know. The secret that was kept from me for 54 years had practical effects that were both staggering and dangerous: I gave incorrect medical history to doctors all my life. Though science has evolved at a stunning rate, the human capacity to understand and wisely use those advances has limped along. And that’s a great thing, but it isn’t a simple thing. In vitro fertilization, surrogacy, donor eggs, cryogenic technology and the capacity to test embryos for genetic markers have allowed many more of us–straight or gay, married or single–to make families.
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Now advances in the field of assisted reproduction are also far beyond what could have been imagined at the time of my birth. The idea of a future in which DNA results would become easily accessible through a popular test would have been unimaginable. It seemed fail-safe that the procedure would remain forever secret. Nine years earlier, TIME ran a story about the legal status of donor-conceived children with the lacerating title Artificial Bastards? Records were heavily coded, then destroyed. In 1954, a court ruled that donor insemination constituted adultery on the part of the woman, whether or not the husband had granted consent. The trauma and shame surrounding infertility was intense. Once a woman had become pregnant, the couple might be told that her blood levels showed she must have already been pregnant when she first came to the institute, furthering the possibility that two otherwise rational people could bury the truth from their family, their friends and themselves. Couples were told to have sex before and after the procedure to further the sense that the (often completely sterile) husband could be the father. Back then, the medical establishment took great pains to allow couples to believe what they wanted about what they were doing. There was a commonly used term for this: confused artificial insemination.Ĭonfused is right. A practice of the day was to mix donor sperm with the intended father’s sperm, in order to keep alive the possibility that the child was biologically his. There, they were told that a “treatment” was available to help solve my dad’s infertility. They went to the now long-defunct Farris Institute for Parenthood near the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. My mother, nearing 40, was desperate to have a child. My father was part of a large family that took seriously the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. In 1961, my parents, Orthodox Jews who married later in life, were having trouble conceiving.