Donor insemination – the needs of the children

by Dr. Petra Thorn, PhD
Spring 2007

In the last edition of this magazine, I wrote about the needs of couples considering or undergoing donor insemination (DI). I concluded by emphasizing that confidence is an important ingredient necessary for couples who build their families with the help of DI. Children, no matter how they are conceived, will need confident parents. And they need more: they need love, support as well as stability and a trusting relationship to their parents. One of the issues that has been debated for many years is the question whether children conceived by DI (or any other type of gamete donation) have the need to know about their conception and their biological origins. In the last years, this question has been debated from psychological, social, medical and legal viewpoints and an increasing number of professionals nowadays support information sharing. I will not go into these debates, but describe why, from a child’s perspective, I also support information sharing and why I consider it important that this need of children is fulfilled.

All children need to develop a coherent self-image, they need to know who they are; this is their identity. A child’s identity can be made up by many different parts, such as the culture of the country he lives in and the particular family he belongs to. For many people in our culture, the knowledge of our biological origins forms an important part of our identity. This is the reason why many are interested in drawing up family trees and finding out names of and linkages to ancestors. We can all imagine how surprised - in a positive or negative sense - we may feel if we find out something very unusual about an ancestor. In a way, this has something to do with us, even though there may be generations between us and this person: it has to do with the way we see ourselves, with our identity. If what we find out is very unusual, we have to change and adapt our identity to this new information. Depending upon the quality of the information, such an adaptation can be more or less smooth, more or less challenging. For those conceived with the help of DI, learning about their conception and the involvement of another man at a young age can avoid the necessity to undergo such changes. If children grow up with the knowledge that their parents used DI, they experience stability in the way they see themselves, they know who they are in this respect. For this reason, more and more parents talk to their children at an early age. A father, sharing his intention to talk to his 4-year old daughter, explained that he wanted to avoid such disorientation for his daughter:

“I think it is like learning a language. If you learn it from a very young age, you become fluent and it is not like learning, not a strenuous process. But if you have to learn a language when you are an adult, it is hard work. The same goes for learning that your parents used DI. As a young child, you just accept it and it becomes part of you. As an adult, you really have to work at this ‘different language’ in your family. So why should I make it difficult for her?”

We know from research, stories and anecdotal material that learning about DI at a later stage in life can result in what is called an “identity crisis”. This describes the situation where children or adults are confronted with new information about themselves and their family which requires a major shift of how they see themselves. A young adult, for example, who has always assumed that his father was also his genitor, can experience a lot of turmoil if he learns that his parents used the semen of another man to conceive him. This is how a young man explained his reaction:

“I had always assumed that my dad was also my biological dad. I never doubted that because I had no reason to doubt it. We look pretty similar and we get on well. When my parents talked to me about the fact that I was conceived by DI, this was a great shock. Not so much about the DI conception, but because I needed to re-orientate myself in terms of who I was, in terms of where I came from. This took some time and I think it would have been much more helpful if my parents had told me as a young child. Because then I would have grown up with this knowledge, and that would have been the way things are.”

This shows how his self-image was based on the assumption that his father was also his genitor. Once confronted with his conception by DI, this self-image was not valid any more. He had to alter and adapt this part of his identity and clearly, for him this was a challenge. His suggestion that it would have been easier for him had his parents shared the information about DI earlier indicates that it is much easier to have continuity in your self-image than being required to adapt your identity and in a sense having to rewrite this part of your life story. Children need to have a stable sense of who they are and leaning about the fact that they were conceived with the semen of a different man than their father at a young age can help them to retain this stability for their identity and the image they have of themselves.

Another import issue in family is trust. Children need to be able to trust their parents and of course, parents also want to be able to trust their children. Many parents believe that honesty and truthfulness are important values in their family’s life. They want to be good role models and want their children to learn that family members can rely on each other. In an increasing number of families built by DI, parent want to be open in order to foster a family atmosphere of honesty and in order to maintain the feeling of trust between the child and themselves. Being open about DI from an early point on supports such family values. This is what one mother explained:

“If I expect my child to be open and honest to me, I have to be open and honest to her. We want to be good role models. We cannot have contradictory standards in our family: we do not tell her the truth about her conception, but we expect her to be honest to us as parents. That wouldn’t be fair and therefore, we have to be honest about her DI-origins. We want her to be able to trust us, but if we did not talk to her, and if she found out by accident, she would certainly not trust us anymore. And therefore, honesty for us is the only option and the way we want to live as a family.”

Teenagers and young adults may not only become very annoyed at their parents if they find out about their DI conception later in life or from others than their parents or by accident, but they also feel that they can not trust them anymore. After all, children wonder if parents who do not say the truth about such an important issue, may have lied about other issues as well. This can undermine the relationship between children and their parents and can also affect the feeling of respect, as one teenager describes:

“Some time ago, I looked through some documents of my parents because I was looking for my passport. I found some medical document about sperm donation from many years ago, in fact the year before I was born. I assumed this was what my parents did so they could have me and confronted them with the documents. They admitted that they had used DI. I was furious because they had never mentioned anything like that and I had always assumed that my father was also my biological father. All of a sudden I was wondering whether there were other secrets in our family my parents had never talked to be about and whether I may be completely unaware of them as well. It took me a long time to trust my parents again and to really believe them that there were no other lies.”

In some cases, adults conceived by DI, on reflection, remember that they seemed to sense that something was different in their family when they were children. Sometimes, they had the impression that they were adopted or were conceived as a result of an extra-marital affair but their parents did not want to talk about this. In other cases, they just sensed that something was different but were not able to put this into words. It is interesting what issues result in children developing such ideas. They can be triggered by the realization that there are few physical similarities between their father and themselves or by the fact that they do not share the same hobbies and interests. They can also be triggered by what is said and what is not said in a family or by restrictions parents may put onto their children. Children, because of their cognitive skills, may not be able to verbalize what they take in, but clearly, they have “finely tuned antennas” and realize a lot, like one woman remembers:

“I remember vividly that I was always compared to my maternal grandmother. We look very similar and we are very similar. But I also remember that there was never anything said about me or my brother and any similarities to my father’s family. As a child, I thought this was strange, but I did not question it. Somehow, it seemed dangerous for me to ask my parents ‘why do you never say anything about dad’s dad?’ Now I understand but I think it is sad because in a way, this made my father’s family less important. But I liked them a lot when I was a child.”

This last example indicates that children sensing something is different may not have the courage to raise this with their parents. In many cases, this is because children feel that the issue is a sensitive one and the fact that parents don’t talk about it can send children the message that it is better if this is not discussed. Sometimes, this makes them wonder whether they have done anything wrong, whether, in one way or another, they have contributed to this difficult or uneasy situation. This is quite a normal reaction which we adults can also have under certain circumstances: if something goes wrong, we wonder whether we may be responsible. As adults, we have the possibility to reflect, we can base our judgement on a wide range of experiences and evaluate whether such self-blame is appropriate. Children, because their cognitive skills are only developing, cannot reflect in this way and therefore, the risk of self-blame is much greater. It is important to make children feel confident and avoid situation where they may blame themselves for something they are innocent about.

Last year, I had a phone call from a mother who had three adult children conceived by DI. She and her husband had agreed that the children should not be informed about their conception. Her youngest daughter was considering becoming a doctor and the mother was extremely worried that during medical school, her daughter may take blood samples from family members and find out about the DI conception. The mother was wondering whether she should try to convince her daughter to study something else than medicine. I discussed with the mother what reasoning she may use in order to convince her daughter to study something different. In the end she said that no matter what arguments she may use, her daughter could get the feeling that she would not be clever enough to study medicine. She realized that this could undermine her daughter confidence and belief in herself and clearly wanted to avoid this.

I would like to raise one further issue. In some cases, children may have a medical need to know about the person who provided the semen for their conception. This does not happen often, but can occur in any family. This may happen if the child is ill and knowledge about the donor’s health can improve medical care for the child. Children, who are only informed about their conception with DI when they are ill, can experience a double traumatisation: they are not only confronted with their disease but also with the new information about their biological origin. In other cases, the father may suffer from a hereditary disease and children worry unnecessarily about being affected by this disease. Being open and honest from an early age on can avoid such difficult situations.

So what children need is stability, trust and confidence about themselves. It is important that all parents provide this for their children. Those parents who have used DI can foster and encourage the development of a stable, trustworthy and open family climate by sharing information about DI with their children at an early age. In countries where English is spoken, you are in a privileged situation as there are several books and resources you can use. Last year, the Donor Conception Network in England has published a series of four booklets which provide assistance for parents who want to talk to their children about DI. The booklets “Telling and Talking about Donor Conception” can be downloaded from their website free of charge (www.dcnetwork.org). These booklets also include a comprehensive list of material for further reading, including books for parents who want to talk to young children about DI. Unfortunately, in many other countries, such material is currently not available. In Germany, such a book was only published at the end of last year and there is little other educational material available. However, we do have a very active group of families who meet twice a year to support each other with all issues to do with DI. All parents feel confident that openness is the best option they can choose for their children. There are a lot of children at these meetings, usually more than adults, and the older children in this group (above the age of four years) are all aware of their DI origin. Interestingly, the parents in this group not only feel supported by sharing with other parents, but also think that the children profit from meeting other children with the same family background – they find out that they are not the only ones conceived by DI and thus can make the experience that this can be quite normal. This seems to fulfil their need of being “just a normal child” as one 7-year-old girl expressed.