Seed of Doubt
Who Am I? Experiences of Donor Conception
foreword and afterword by Dr. Alexina McWhinnie
Idreos Education Trust, 2006
(72 pages, $12.95, paperback)
reviewed by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
This little but groundbreaking book gives us the life histories, in their own words, of three women who were conceived by anonymous donor insemination (DI) and lament that they were deliberately kept in the dark about their natural father’s identity and his family history.
In her afterword, Alexina McWhinnie, research fellow in Social Work and Law at the University of Dundee, notes that DI was first used in animal husbandry and then used with humans on the assumption it would prove equally “problem-free.” This turned out not to be the case.
Bewildered Children
Joanna Rose won a major court battle in 2002, when the judges decided that donor offspring had the right to know their genetic father. With the guarantee of anonymity removed, the stock of donated sperm suddenly fell to an all-time low. Evidently, paid gamete-donors feared being tracked down as fathers.
DI, writes Rose, who is pursuing a doctorate on the ethical issues the technology raises, was first brought in “by stealth, in the face of public opposition, as a secret practice, and then it uncloaked itself and demanded acceptance on the basis that it existed and is expected by some.” She was “one of the guinea-pigs” of this technology, lamenting that she was “made to order” and “objectified as something to which someone else had a right.”
As is usual in such cases, her birth certificate was falsified to hide the manner of her conception. When she found out the truth at age 22, she began to search for her father and discovered that he had been a student who regarded “his reproductive material as on a par with blood to be donated” and had likely fathered up to 300 children.
DI, she notes, involves a double standard. The infertile want to have “genetic continuity,” yet expect the children they make to have “minimal regard for their own genetic continuity.” The infertile thus intentionally create an “underclass” who are intended to “serve the utility and desires of others.”
If the offspring complain, they are told they should be grateful to exist. Nine out of ten children produced by DI are never told about their origin. Yet long before she knew the truth, Rose says she experienced what she calls “genetic bewilderment,” in that she realized she had nothing in common with her “social father.” Her experience is all too common among those conceived by DI.
Christine Whipp, who has been married for thirty years and has two daughters and five grandsons, sensed from the start that her “life was misplaced.” Her mother was at first “critical and controlling” and later openly hostile. Whipp now realizes that her behavior “stemmed directly from the way that she related to me as an acquisition.”
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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