Type “The Kids of Donor 5114” into your YouTube browser. The nine-minute video that appears follows a young boy named Nathan as he and his single mother travel to Taos to meet five of Nathan’s 17 half-siblings: the children of sperm donor 5114.
The video is intended to be a positive portrayal of donor conception. Nathan’s mother gives the closing line:
“There’s all kinds of families. There’s husbands and wives, there’s single moms, there’s lesbian couples…If you’re a single person and you want a baby, I think it’s a great idea to use a donor because you have choices and it’s safe.”
But from the first awkward side-hugs to the instinctive bonds they begin to form with one another, the kids seem to recognize that something is not quite right. One brother, Nick, senses the disconnect: “At first, I was really nervous. I didn’t really know what to say because like, we’re brothers and sisters, but we’ve never met.”
I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry watching these siblings compare facial features and personality traits, trying to form a fuzzy image of a dad with full lips and thick eyebrows. For these kids, meeting each other provides a clue to the missing halves of their identities. Nick notes, “It’s hard to not be able to think of who your dad is. My friends can just talk about their dad and know who they are and I can’t even picture him in my head.”
While the kids are trying to fill the holes in their very identities, the mothers think this experience affirms their decision to raise their children with that hole in the first place. What is going on?
The truth is, the practice of donor-conception has made children and parenthood commodities, not gifts. And it means that family is driven by the parents’ desires, not the sense of responsibility for the child’s needs. Nathan’s mother believes that it’s a right for anyone, single or married to have a child, so donor conception provides “choices” and it’s “safe.” But is it?
Is it “safe” for Natasha Pyper, a donor-conceived child who wonders “if someone [a father] who is meant to love you unconditionally won’t, who really could ever love you?”
Is it “safe” for the donor-conceived children who, according to a report by the Institute for American Values, are twice as likely to have had problems with the law before age 25 as kids raised by their biological parents? Or the 45% of donor-conceived respondents in the same report who expressed being disturbed by the fact that money was involved in their conception?
Is it “safe” for the women in third-world countries who are being paid almost nothing (if not forced) to carry a child who, upon birth, will be shipped off to a wealthy family in a first world country or sold to a human trafficking ring?
One might argue that that last example has nothing to do with the perfectly legal solution of obtaining sperm through a legitimate sperm bank and raising a child in a loving home. But as Alana S. Newman writes in Public Discourse, in third-party reproduction, “the child becomes an asset to be bought and sold, rather than the precious begotten family member who deserves intimacy, protection, and inclusion.”
When children are seen as a commodity in any sense, even as a legal solution to infertility, there will be no boundaries to their treatment as commodities. If selling sperm to fertilize an egg and produce a child is acceptable, then selling children and women’s bodies to carry those children is acceptable. Newman is very straightforward: donor-conception is just a “new form of human trafficking.”
The report from the Institute for American Values describes the literal “catalog” of choices available to adults who want to buy a baby through donor-conception. Potential parents can view both sperm and egg donors’ physical traits and ethnic backgrounds as well as their educational, professional, and athletic accomplishments.
Parents can literally “shop” for the traits they hope to see in their child, once again displaying a self-centered attitude towards parenting.
We know that children thrive best being raised by their natural father and mother together. It’s the responsibility of parents to provide this out of self-giving love for their child. In many situations, we consider it a tragedy and hardship when fathers abandon their children. It should not, therefore, be acceptable to voluntarily remove the fathers at the very beginning of their children’s lives.
Even for the kids of donor 5114, who all seem to be growing up happily and healthily, the gap is ever-present. Nathan’s half-sister, Alexis, the one who first began looking for her siblings, looks into the camera thoughtfully and says:
“I want our donor to know that yeah, we really want to meet him. We know that he probably has a life of his own now, that he might have a partner, and kids that he’s raised. We just want to know who he is and we don’t mean to barge into his life and take over. We just want to have some identity.”
Parenthood is a privilege, not a right. The rights in question here are those of the children to know their identity and be raised by the parents who gave it to them.
