Posted on 12/18/2006 5:26:26 AM PST by shrinkermd
...I'm 18, and for most of my life, I haven't known half my origins...
...That part came from my father. The only thing was, I had never met him, never heard any stories about him, never seen a picture of him. I didn't know his name. My mother never talked about him -- because she didn't have a clue who he was.
When she was 32, my mother -- single, and worried that she might never marry and have a family -- allowed a doctor wearing rubber gloves to inject a syringe of sperm from an unknown man into her uterus so that she could have a baby. I am the result: a donor-conceived child....
...I was angry at the idea that where donor conception is concerned, everyone focuses on the "parents" -- the adults who can make choices about their own lives. The recipient gets sympathy for wanting to have a child. The donor gets a guarantee of anonymity and absolution from any responsibility for the offspring of his "donation." As long as these adults are happy, then donor conception is a success, right?
Not so. The children born of these transactions are people, too. Those of us in the first documented generation of donor babies -- conceived in the late 1980s and early '90s, when sperm banks became more common and donor insemination began to flourish.. I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
She's not writing this for her own benefit. She's writing it for others. Surely you can see that.
What an incredibly cold-hearted, callous remark. If you can't feel sympathy for this young woman after reading this article, you need to look deep inside and ask, "Why not?" This young woman was born into an emotional cauldron that would be difficult for any sensitive person to come to grips with. You should be ashamed, especially during the Christmas Season.
I don't know, but I think it's probable she would, since it's a congruent concern: she evidently wants children to be respected in the manner of, and at the moment of, their conception.
I don't see this as merely whining, I think it speaks eloquently of how fathers have been marginalized in this culture, as if they aren't important. I think these kids have a right to speak out about how they are affected by these unilateral parenting situations. Many parents have to raise their kids alone due to being widows, divorces, etc., and that's hard enough. But they need to think closely about how their decisions affect their children. And the children need to put it in perspective and carry on, but it isn't always easy, I'm sure.
The mother's mentality: I'm a selfish twat and I'm gonna have myself a baby even if it means cheating the child out of a father! What a loving mother....
No babies should be fatherless by choice
*****
My point exactly, and the point of the writer, who so eloquently - at the age of eighteen - is willing to use her own history to illustrate the point.
"Wouldn't want to offend *ANYONE* now would we?"
The OBVIOUS and acceptable politicly correct solution is to take ALL children from thier parents, and have them raised by the State, so these test-tube children won't be scarred for life by other children asking them "Who's your Daddy???"
After all...
It's for the CHILDREN!!!!!
maybe she should quitherbitchin. she could have had a drunk,abusive father who was present all the time.
Exactly. I see her glass as half full, she obviously sees it as half empty.
If she had adopted a child by herself, it would have been a lot better. It's not "raising a child" that's wrong. It's deliberately, of set purpose, begetting a child to be half-bereft: that's wrong.
In adoption, you're supplying all that an existeng, needy child needs, to the best of your ability. In this single-woman sperm-vendor scheme, you're deliberately begetting into brokenness.
Incidentally, my husband and I are adoptive parents, too. We know our own needs were involved, as well. But we didn't create our adopted son's bereft, orphaned condition. We simply responded to it--- imperfectly, but as well as we could. And I'm sure your adoptive situation is the same. God bless you.
That tells me the person has lapsed into victim-hood. It is only in modern times that people had the luxury to think of the circumstances beyond their control. "Oliver Twist" was a good story because, as an exception to the norm, he found family in the end.
Poor me, poor me doesn't put food on the table or bolster the fortitude needed to survive.
Your focus is still on the mother, mine is still on the child. Let's all be grateful for what we have. Merry Christmas!
No, that doesn't follow. As others have pointed out, most of us come into existence with some burden: we were an untimely or difficult pregnancy, or our parents didn't get along, or there was alcoholism or addiction or something twisted or cold or weirdness of some kind. And yet we live and do our best with what we have.
The point is, these things that can "burden" an existence, may be borne as happenstance, but they shouuldn't be inflicted deliberately. People don't go around promoting parental brokenness. But that's just the situation with single-woman vendor-insemination: the brokenness is deliberate.
Katrina here may deal with it thoughtfully and creatively and constructively, and I think she's doing so.
But she wants the world to know that children do have a need for wholeness. And that in her case, the brokenness was deliberate. And that it hurts.
I think she's just trying to sensitize us to the long-lasting cost of intentionally broken begetting. Read the article: she IS getting on with her life. She's a college student. Thoughtful one, too.
Prayers are a good thing! Sometime in the future I am certain that there will be a knock at the door or a phone call and Rebecca will be looking for her 'Dad' that raised her. We need to be in prayer for that girl who can never find her father and may try many other things to fill the void.
Oh COME ON! All she is saying is, she wished that she had a dad...not a biological father about whom she knows nothing! It doesn't seem to be asking a lot. I think we all deserve to know from where we came.
In adoption, you're supplying all that an existeng, needy child needs, to the best of your ability. In this single-woman sperm-vendor scheme, you're deliberately begetting into brokenness.
%%%%
I am goig to adopt your word "begetting" for this topic.
I have dearly loved adopted nieces and nephews - who love their parents; I also have a friend whose husband was killed while she was pregnant. Although her daughter has been raised in a very loving home, and knowing all of her extended family on her father's side, she still lacked the love of her father, and it has made a difference in her life, through no fault of her mother's actions. It is the conscious 'begetting' of a child 'half-bereft' (another great word) that is the issue.
PS: As I post this, it has become the topic of a talk show that I just turned on.
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