Posted on 01/31/2019 8:58:12 AM PST by Red Badger
Danielle Teuscher's 5-year-old daughter Zoe is one of thousands of children conceived with sperm from an anonymous donor. When Teuscher wanted to know more about her daughter's ancestry and possible health issues, she and other family members decided to get DNA tests from 23andMe and added one for Zoe. What turned up appeared to be one of the anonymous donor's immediate relatives. She was shocked.
The donated sperm had come from Northwest Cryobank, which offers donors anonymity, but Teuscher said the apparent relative she found on 23andMe listed themselves as open to messaging.
"I said 'I don't want to cross any boundaries. I just want to let you know that we are out here and we are open to contact if you are,'" Teuscher said.
The relative responded "I don't understand," so Teuscher said she let it go. But then she got a "cease and desist" letter from Northwest Cryobank, telling her not to contact the donor or "learn more information about his identity, background or whereabouts." The sperm bank warned it could "seek $20,000 in liquidated damages." Worst of all she said, it took back "four [4] additional vials of donor's sperm that" she "purchased" – sperm she'd planned to use to have Zoe's genetic siblings.
"Devastating. I mean … I was shocked, I was crying for days, I could barely eat," Teuscher said. "I felt embarrassed almost. Here I thought I was doing this thing I thought was in the best interest of my daughter … And then it just came back on me in just such a harsh way that made me feel like I did something terrible, like I was a criminal."
Northwest Cryobank told CBS News it does not prohibit DNA testing, but said "concern arises when one uses DNA test results to contact a donor and/or his family." The bank said clients like Teuscher have "contractually agreed to not independently seek the identity or attempt to contact these individuals." According to Teuscher, the contract was online.
"I mean, you just click the boxes," Teuscher said. Plus, she said, it's not all about her.
"My daughter is an actual living, breathing, feeling human being who did not sign that contract," Teuscher said.
Contracts or not, many donor-conceived children and their families are finding each other. Wendy Kramer runs the Donor Sibling Registry, a group that connects donor-conceived children and their families. Her own donor-conceived son has found 18 half-siblings, most of them through DNA test matches.
"All of us, thousands of us, have made these connections," Kramer said. "It's a right for everybody to know the truth about their own DNA, their own background, their relatives and their medical histories."
Northwest Cryobank said not all donors will want that opportunity. It said "there is a human being on the other side of the gift who may have a partner, parents, job and children of his own" and uninvited contact "could jeopardize these relationships and families."
But experts say in 2019, that contact may simply be unavoidable. He said despite our best efforts, it's impossible to promise anonymity anymore.
"The problem we have now is that the science has kind of overstepped where we are, in terms of legality," said Dr. Peter McGovern, an infertility specialist.
But Teuscher said with the loss of her vials, the promise of more children could be ended for her.
"They literally took my babies. My future babies," she said.
After we contacted Northwest Cryobank for this story, a representative sent Teuscher an email saying the bank would refund the money she paid for those additional vials of her donor's sperm, but did not offer to give her vials back.
The representative we spoke to at Northwest Cryobank told us that this is the only letter threatening legal action that they've ever sent to a client, to his knowledge.
Thank you. It bears repeating.
Maybe they already destroyed that sperm.
So in this case, Doctor FrankenSTEEN should send EYE-gor to get some more, and he would come back with Abby Normal’s sample.
It is evil. Not just evil in your mind, but objectively evil. Deprives the child of a hugely important natural right.
Children may be fatherless by chance. (Father dies.)
Babies should NEVER be fatherless by choice.
More like, "If you're in the market for a cold cash transaction, don't be surprised when it's treated like a cold cash transaction."
Man + Woman, PIV intercourse, with the Man and Woman being married and staying married, supplies something the child has a natural right to: a full-fledged double-constellation of natural kinship ties, a secure natural identity, and a secure mom-day environment to grow up in. That corresponds to what the child needs.
No other system does.
Sometimes, God knows, this pattern breaks down in a no-fault way. Dad dies, mom dies, both die, whatever. Then others have to step in to supply what they can, as well as they can. As in adoption.
But it's wrong to intentionally bring a child into being, into a preplanned broken situation. As in these morally defective gametes-for-sale schemes.
Don't "harvest" eggs and sperm for commercial transactions. Men, women: don't sell gametes for reproduction.
Exactly.
Well, almost exactly. I'd change one thing.
It's not "donation," it's "vending." These are not eg/sperm donors. They are egg/sperm vendors.
Thank you...I think that’s why my tears were so spontaneous at the time...this was @32 years ago...
But what the people who created and then froze that embryo did, was child abandonment.
You got involved to save the child. You treated the child as a child. Lord love your good heart!.
But the genetic parents treated the child as a frozen kidsicle. Their choice was not noble. It was morally objectioable, because they intentionally exposed the child to risk, disposal, extinction.
You “get it”. Most nonadopted, nondonor conceived don’t “get it”. Most fall for the “love is all you need”, “DNA doesn’t matter” bs.
I agree that third party reproduction comes with great moral responsibility. So do a lot of things where children are involved. But the family from whom we got her embryos I cannot say one negative thing about. They treated their left over embryos with the greatest possible respect as the potential human begins they are. (They are only potential because as we know many fertilized embryos are aneuploid and not going to become babies or even fetuses.) They made sure each one got a chance at life.
Thanks for your lovely compliments. It is a wonderful way to add to or start a family for infertile couples. It is adoption, in a way, but you also get to carry and nurse the baby, which for infertile woman is life changing and satisfying.
The legal and practical reality of that hits you when you read that there are over 1,000,000 frozen embryos in this country, and in most states they have no more legal worth than a prized pet.
Once human life is created in a laboratory, in bulk, ownership ---and disposal ---is suddenly an issue. So who owns human embryos once they are created? The people who commissioned their existence. But what happens when those people disagree on how to dispose of their “property”?
I remember the landmark Marysville TN frozen human embryo case: two divorced genetic parents, Davis Vs Davis, wrangling over who gets the ownership of their offspring-on-ice. When they are wanted, they are more priceless and precious than anything in the world; when they are unwanted, they are like half a can of paint in the back of the garage: a disposal problem.
That's what happens when these tiny embryonic humans are generated anywhere but in their mother's womb.
It's not a matter of feelings. t's a matter of fact.
Any inheritance questions?....that would be my first thought when faced with such insistence that I be DNA tested. You can begin to ascertain motive if your husband says to his sister...”You know...it might be interesting to find out my DNA markers but I’m not telling you what those results are!” It might get her to shut up about the whole thing.
Better yet, he pretends to have done it and tells her that he seems to be related to a Kenyan and a Caucasian female of Irish descent.....;)!
Cheers!
Poor kid.
Twice now she has over stepped the privacy and legal boundaries.
Then she acts like a victim and contacts the media to try and guilt trip the donor. Because that is what she is doing. Rationalizing and guilt tripping.
Using her daughters photo shows just how little common sense she has. She had no business having any other children with this behavior.
I’m sure she’s been banned from every donor bank around.
It sounds like the sperm bank will return the $, but not the sperm.
It was a business transaction which the mother freely and desired to partake in. No one raped her.
Don’t argue with him. Some people feel big and tough saying ‘they should be shot’ to back up their opinion. This is his opinion. But, he doesn’t make the rules or the laws, so he’s wrong. Period.
Well said. She probably hoping to be one big happy family - smh.
What really would have been ‘shocking’ would have been if the anonymous donor was HER immediate relative!................
Not to mention that little Zoe might meet the man of her dreams one day who turns out to be a half brother. I’ll bet the mom never thought about that either.
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