There was a piece on the radio about donor babies this morning. It was about how the law may change and what implications that has for donor kids. It was so woefully researched though. I kept yelling "genetic donor, not biological donor" at the radio! I'm the biological mother of these kids not the egg donor. She is the 'egg' donor and according the scientific labeling that makes her the 'gamete' donor.
Bad program research aside it got me thinking.
How would we handle the kids trying to find the donor? The donor kids on the radio spoke about how they wanted to know their biological family: dad, cousins, etc. Somehow, I can see that direct connection with sperm donor but not with egg. When they interviewed an egg donor she was adamant about NOT being found or contacted and it made me relieved. Clearly I'm not as sorted about all this as I thought I was!
Luckily we got great counselling before we started on this journey so we are reading "mummy was your tummy big?" as one of the bed time books and plan to have the conversations early on. We don't have any information about the donor other than health and her records will be destroyed by the time they are old enough to go searching for her. This makes me glad and uneasy at the same time.
Its just something we will have to deal with when the time comes, I guess.
Bad program research aside it got me thinking.
How would we handle the kids trying to find the donor? The donor kids on the radio spoke about how they wanted to know their biological family: dad, cousins, etc. Somehow, I can see that direct connection with sperm donor but not with egg. When they interviewed an egg donor she was adamant about NOT being found or contacted and it made me relieved. Clearly I'm not as sorted about all this as I thought I was!
Luckily we got great counselling before we started on this journey so we are reading "mummy was your tummy big?" as one of the bed time books and plan to have the conversations early on. We don't have any information about the donor other than health and her records will be destroyed by the time they are old enough to go searching for her. This makes me glad and uneasy at the same time.
Its just something we will have to deal with when the time comes, I guess.
If our kids ever have a desire to go searching for their gamate donors, I suspect it will be out of mere curiosity rather than a desire to see whether their "other mom" is "better" than we are. That said, I myself have wondered what our gamate donors look like. Does my son have his sperm donor's eyes? When my son smiles, I wonder whose mouth it looks like. Just curious. On another note, I actually hope that when he is (much) older, he and his full-blood siblings have a desire to find each other. I hope they are able to establish some sort of relationship. But that's just me.
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