Grandparents yearn to meet donated progeny

Carolyn Moynihan

We recently noted that would-be grandparents in Britain are paying for their grown-up children’s IVF treatments. Now we learn that Canadian women whose daughters -- and sons -- have donated gametes to other couples are pining for their unknown grandchildren. The grand-parenting urge is apparently very strong, especially when you know that the grandchildren are out there somewhere, and artificial begetting brings mixed blessings.

It's estimated that about one million donor offspring worldwide have been born, most of them through anonymous donations. In some cases grandparents and donor grandchildren do meet; in others not. A man who donated sperm for almost 10 years says he now sees that grandparents ought to be considered. "His own parents were delighted when two teenage donor daughters surfaced a few years ago." Imagine how many more there could be…

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/grandparents_yearn_to_meet_donated_progeny/

My scattered grandchildren

Their children may consider it a personal decision, but parents of egg and sperm donors rarely see it that way. Many struggle with longing for branches of the family tree they may never meet.
Alison Motluk

When Kathie Harris spotted a newspaper ad a few years back recruiting egg donors, she passed it on to her daughter. “I was kind of joking,” she says.
But her daughter, Melissa Braden, ended up donating six times. Now Ms. Harris, 53, has mixed feelings about it all.
“It's kind of hard,” she says. There are grandchildren out there that the family will never meet, she says. “They're a part of you. Because they're Melissa's eggs, they're a part of everybody in Melissa's family.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships/my-scattered-grandchildren/article1286201/

Great comment on "My Sister's Keeper"

Approximately 90% of all parents who learn their child will have Down Syndrome choose to abort, with the help of their closed-minded (and, in many cases, ignorant) doctors. With new testing, we will likely have even fewer of these special children and adults in our midst, just as we are beginning to learn how much they can experience and accomplish with proper support.

As a parent, I am aware of all the love and joy these kids bring to our lives and theirs. Its sad to see science playing God, whether its choosing who's worthy to live or using and abusing others for personal gain or life enhancement. Its sadder still that we let them!

Thanks for all you do to keep us aware and on guard.

-A Reader

My Sister’s Keeper

Jennifer Roback Morse

The screen version of Jodi Picoult's novel poses the question: how much are we entitled to use each other? The use and misuse of artificial reproductive technology (ART) is a subject that deserves more attention than it commonly gets. My Sister’s Keeper is a thought-provoking dramatization of one of the most troubling ethical issues of the ART industry: the creation of “savior siblings”.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/my_sisters_keeper/

Babies have a right to a heritage

NOTABLE QUOTE: "...equity in the preservation of personal identity has not received as much attention as the rights of adults to fertility treatment."

Brenda Almond
Fertility clinics are creating a new class of dispossessed human beings, says a British philosopher.
Baby manufacture is already big business. Recent ads targeting women college students in America have offered them free holidays in India in exchange for parting with their eggs during their visit, with Indian women teamed to become paid surrogates and return the product – the student’s child – to those who commissioned it. Do other jurisdictions want to follow this precedent and should Americans be more concerned about what is done in their name? The selling of slaves was considered offensive – should selling babies be OK?

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/babies_have_a_right_to_a_heritage/

Grandparents are funding their children’s IVF, finds Red magazine

Note: The success rate for IVF has risen in recent years but still only a minority become pregnant. For women aged under 35, the success rate is 28.2 per cent. It drops to 23.6 per cent for women aged 35 to 37, 18.3 per cent for women aged 38 to 39 and 10.6 per cent for women aged 40 to 42.

JRM's comment: where are they getting these success rates? Are these women who actually have a fertility problem? Or, are some of these women perfectly healthy women who have no male partner? It matters for understanding the success rates. I got these stories from mercator: http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/ I like their comemnt too: how mature are these people who are spending all their income until their 40’s?

Rosemary Bennett, Social Affairs Correspondent

Grandparents have been subsidising school fees and providing a free baby-sitting service for years. Now research shows that they are also footing the bill for the conception of their grandchildren. A quarter of women over the age of 40, and 13 per cent of all couples undergoing IVF and other fertility treatments, are having them paid for by their own parents, anxious to have grandchildren. The average amount spent by grandparents is £5,413, slightly more than the cost of one cycle of IVF.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6737901.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=797084

The end of IVF?

Note from JRM: She is also keen to remind women that IVF still has a relatively poor success rate. “At one of the most renowned New York clinics, figures indicate that among women under 35, the success rate is still only 47%.”

Anita Chaudhuri
If you' re having difficulty conceiving, then help is at hand. it comes not in the form of expensive drugs, but in a new book that takes a simpler approach to the treatment of infertility.

It’s a sad fact of life that one in six couples will have difficulty conceiving. Those praying for a miracle will often try anything, from the estimated 75% who experiment with alternative therapies, to the 1 in 80 women who will eventually give birth to an IVF baby in the UK each year. Now, two leading fertility specialists have decided to bridge the gap between conventional and complementary medicine, and offer an alternative to rushing into IVF. “I estimate that 50% of women on IVF don’t need it,” says Dr Sami David, a doctor involved with the first-ever successful IVF procedure in New York 30 years ago. “They could get pregnant naturally.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6721741.ece

Messing with Mother Nature

Barbara Kay

The human species is changing but we're stuck on polar bears The single 69-year old Spanish woman who gave birth to twins at the age of 66 died last Saturday. Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara, who thought she had every prospect of living to see her now two-year old boys Christian and Pau into adulthood because her own mother died at 101, claimed not to regret her late-motherhood decision, even though her doctors told her that "the powerful drugs used during her fertility treatment could have helped her disease [believed to be breast cancer] to spread."
Although at the time of the birth Ms Bousada de Lara's case attracted a few stalwart supporters of the "right" of a woman to control her own fertility destiny, the general reaction was one of dismay and recoil. The most commonly adduced argument was that her children's odds of growing up motherless were sharply escalated by her selfishness. And so it came to pass, which will doubtless serve to dampen the enthusiasm of other older women contemplating the idea of post-menopausal pregnancy.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/messing_with_mother_nature/

Welcome to the genetic supermarket

Michael Cook

The good news is that the male of the species will not be placed on the endangered species list. It’s amazing how a simple press release can instantly capture the imagination of media around the globe. A few weeks ago British scientists announced that they had created human sperm cells from embryonic stem cells for the first time. This provoked snickers everywhere about a future when men are no longer needed to propagate the species.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/welcome_to_the_genetic_supermarket/

No benefits for LA girl born from dead man's sperm

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- A 10-year-old girl conceived from the frozen sperm of a dead man cannot receive his Social Security benefits, a federal appeals court ruled.
A panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday upheld a lower court's rejection of child survivor benefits for Brandalynn Vernoff, who was born nearly four years after her father's death in 1995.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POSTMORTEM_SPERM?SITE=FLTAM&SECTION=US

'An embryo property case'

Sheila Liaugminas

That’s lawyer-speak in a lively debate over a bizarre case of implantation gone wrong in a UK clinic. “There really has to be a legal line on when life begins…” snapped the Fox News anchor who sometime during this debate corrected herself from calling an embryo a baby. So though cases like this are stunning, they are probably logical extensions of the pervasive abortion culture. An invitro fertilization clinic in Wales implanted the wrong woman with the last embryo of another couple. The woman wrongly implanted then had an abortion.

http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/an_embryo_property_case/

The wrong cure for infertility

Bill Muehlenberg

Turning baby-making into a technology can have devastating results. For some men and women, IVF can seem like a godsend. Inability is always felt as a grievous loss for loving couples. But the clinics which offer IVF and other "assisted reproductive technology" techniques are businesses, and offer services, not love. They make mistakes which devastate lives.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_wrong_cure_for_infertility/

Octomom Nadya Suleman: "I screwed up my life and my kid's lives"

by Cristina Everett

It’s no surprise that when the media shifted its focus from Octomom to Kate Gosselin, Nadya Suleman wasn’t going down in the media circus without a fight. After publicly slamming fellow multiple mom Kate Gosselin for being "desperate for attention" and "over-emotional,” Suleman has a few more choice words to say…about herself. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/06/04/2009-06-04_octomom_nadya_suleman_i_screwed_up_my_life_and_my_kids_lives.html#ixzz0HUnl4haQ&B

As Dr. Morse said in her article on "Octomom," artificial reproduction techniques are bad for children when they are kept from knowing and having a relationship with a biological parent.

A Donor Conceived Adult Weighs In

Recently a donor conceived adult responded to a question that outspoken donor conceived people hear all to often, “Aren’t you just happy to be alive?”. Many people think that donor conceived people should just be glad to be alive, because without donor conception, they would not even exist.

Karen answers in a way that can help us all understand the struggle that some people have with being donor conceived. She also gives her thoughts on donating eggs, openness and her wishes for the future of donor conception.

http://www.donorsiblingregistry.com/DSRblog/?p=66

Hillary Clinton clarifies what ‘reproductive health’ includes

Just like “family planning”, “reproductive health” is an innocent sounding term fraught with (deliberate) ambiguity. The things it includes tend to be in the fine print of NGO and UN documents where “maternal mortality” and “unsafe abortion” are juxtaposed to imply a need to legalise abortion. Those who do not see abortion as a health or family planning measure are left to ask the hard questions about the meaning of draft UN documents and the like. Does “reproductive health/services/rights” include abortion, or doesn’t it?

http://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/hillary_clinton_clarifies_what_reproductive_health_includes/

A creation myth for the 21st century

By Lea Singh

Did anyone ever ask IVF children whether they wanted to go through life as genetic orphans?

This month, a court in British Columbia, Canada is expected to certify an important class action that was launched near the end of last year by a gutsy 26-year-old journalist. Her name is Olivia Pratten, and her lawsuit is likely to become a major thorn in the side of the booming fertility industry. Olivia was conceived with the sperm of an anonymous donor, and she is supposed to not care about her genetic origins -- after all, she was wanted and loved by her "intended" parents. But Olivia compares herself to adopted children, and like them, she wants the law to recognize her right to information about her biological parent.

Continue...

Follow-up to the previous post

And this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH5fiHlYdIk&feature=related

First-hand look at the effects of being a Donor's son.

Who am I?

Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wclrM4pdEwc

It's depressing that so many children don't know WHO they came from.