Posted on 08/17/2019 2:12:17 AM PDT by Morgana
The world of IVF and assisted reproductive technology has been a massive social experiment, designed under the pretext of giving couples struggling with infertility the ability to have a family. While helping people get pregnant is a worthy and laudable goal, has the experiment gone too far? Most of the attention has only been paid to the parents, while the effect this has on the children conceived through these methods is largely ignored. More and more of them are speaking out — like one man who was conceived through a sperm donor… and learned he has over 30 siblings.
Eli Baden-Laser told his story to the New York Times, explaining that he always knew he had been conceived via a sperm donor. His lesbian parents were open with him about his origins, giving him the questionnaire filled out by his biological father.
“I remember carrying the form with me in my backpack, taking it to school and studying it occasionally when I remembered I had it,” he said. “There was this sense of touch — this person had used his hand to answer these questions; I could see where he had crossed things out. It wasn’t that I was so desperate to imagine who he was; it was enough to have proof that he was real, entangled with who I am and yet, as that document showed, totally separate. The form made him concrete, if inscrutable. It also gave me the sense that there was this larger world, this process and this bureaucracy that my existence was built upon. It was a way to help me understand myself.”
No one had considered the possibility that Baden-Laser might have half-siblings somewhere, though his parents had chosen a donor who had already produced another child. Then, at a camp, some of the campers realized they were siblings, after having known each other for several years.
Baden-Laser said he believes no one ever “stopped to think about the implications of the huge, inadvertent social experiment they were joining.”
The camp experience led Baden-Laser to begin investigating. And, unsurprisingly, he discovered one sibling… and another, and another. The first sibling he found was someone he already knew, a friend of his, and he described it as “a moment of glee but also of horror.” It was this first sibling who led him to find their other siblings: 32 in total.
“The sheer quantity of them gave me a feeling of having been mass-produced,” Baden-Laser said.
He soon launched a photography project, hoping to document all of his siblings, some of whom were also quoted for the New York Times article. And many of them had similar feelings.
“I got in touch with the group about a year ago,” 18-year-old Sydney said. “I learned that there are so many of them it’s hard to feel included. I’m an only child and was expecting a sibling relationship, not just like, ‘Hey, cool, we have the same blood, whatever.’ I told myself that it wasn’t a big deal that I had siblings, just to numb the pain.”
Twenty-year-old Alexis said, “When I first found I had half siblings, it was a source of comfort. But as more and more half siblings were introduced into my life, it made me feel like a statistic rather than an actual person. I feel drowned out with the numbers.”
One sister, Julia, even mentioned her mother warning her to take a DNA test before she got married, to make sure she wasn’t related to her future husband. Twenty-year-old Sadie originally was excited to find siblings; now, she says, “[W]hen we find new ones, I’m kind of numb to the fact that there are more siblings. How is it going to be now? How will I be close to everybody?”
Some of the siblings were able to obtain an audio recording from the sperm donor, who merely said of his children, “I wish them all luck.” The flippant response was, not surprisingly, less than comforting for Baden-Laser.
“One sibling scribbled that on his bedroom wall during high school in colorful chalk as if it were an inspirational quote,” he said, adding, “I heard it more as an irreverent provocation: My job here is done. May the odds be ever in your favor.” Baden-Laser contacted the donor to see if he would participate in the sibling photography project, but he refused.
To this day, none of the siblings know how many of them there are, with Baden-Laser describing a “paranoia” that “we might be walking by siblings all the time without knowing it.”
The story told in the New York Times is one that is sadly becoming more common as people grow up in the age of IVF and start questioning where they come from. Children are being conceived in a way that robs them of their humanity, their identity, and their heritage. They are being commodified, turned into products to be bought, created, and sold. While the desire for a child is understandable, at what point do we stop this commercialization of human beings? A child is a privilege, a gift — not a right to which everyone deserves simply because they want one. And perhaps it’s time that the best interests of the children being conceived take precedence, rather than the feelings of the parents and the unchecked greed of an unregulated fertility industry.
There’s something else with Timothy Hutton, who fathered a bunch of sperm donor babies. I’m pretty sure he’s a doctor.
Sperm donors are adulterers. As are the women.
The sperm donor agreement is between the woman and the man. There is no agreement between the child and the man. I seem to recall that one such case went to court and the child won.
Now if I were a long range thinking NBA owner I would be propositioning LeBron and WNBA stars for contributions to my team 18 years from now. NBA players seem to have done pretty well on their own with the multiple father thing.
Okay, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it will, eventually, be a trend.
Damn..... 23 siblings
That’s almost as many as the bastard Jesse Jackson son
Wouldnt the place he donated have enough sense to stop using the same donor?
I’ve worked hard at marriage and family, and only have three kids to my name.
This guy is a genetic success story. As the saying goes, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
And, he came by his success relatively honestly... at least in contrast to the IVF doctor who secretly used his own sperm on his patients, regardless of who they selected from the donor catalog.
“So, at these donor places, what do they do when a guy with no arms shows up?”
I’m sure Epstein could find a way to deal with that problem.
It all starts with artificial contraception.
The sex act becomes recreational, separated from procreation, and procreation can be accomplished mechanically, without emotional attachment.
The Catholic Church has long warned against this, for exactly these reasons.
Children have the right to a mother & father who are present & involved in their upbringing.
Sadly, this young man has discovered that his "father" wasn't even thinking about children. He did what he did for the quick cash.
It was never a secret in my house that I was conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. For a majority of my childhood, I never really thought about him. But when I was around 11, I went through a period of having questions. My parents — I have two mothers — gave me a photo copy of a questionnaire that was sent to them from the sperm bank they used, California Cryobank. The donor filled it out in 1996, two years before I was born.
At the age of 11, puberty, this boy sensed something in his life was missing in his life.
What was missing was a father.
A boy needs a father and knows this instinctually.
Even the most loving mother can't replace a male role model for a young boy. (Likewise for young girls and female role models).
There is a profound emptiness in his soul because he didn't have a father.
That's what this boy is talking about in his original essay.
He's deflecting this issue by talking about being 'mass produced'. This is a mask for having been denied growing up with a mother and a father.
I'd bet most children who are the result of sperm donation but have a mother and a father in the home do not think of themselves as mass produced.
Every story I've seen about this issue of multiple unknown siblings but grew up in, dare I say, a 'traditional home', the kids were happy to know they had brothers and sisters.
The FUNDAMENTAL issue for this young man is that he was the product of a lesbian couple who believed they could rear a male child WITHOUT A MAN.
He likely loves his two mothers and therefor can't emotionally direct his anger towards them.
His inner conflict is that although his two mothers may have loved him very much and gave him a good life, they also denied him a father.
The side articles to this article are... no words. None at all except that just the summary captions will haunt me for many days and it only took less than seconds to read them. They physically hit me.
More likely that a great percentage of them were raised by lesbians, and the rest by infertile male+female couples.
While helping people get pregnant is a worthy and laudable goal.
For some strange reason it sounds like Chicago to me.
It’s all a horribly tangled web, with children as the main victims.
Thanks, sexual revolution.
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