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The Anonymous Us Project : A Story-Collective on 3rd Party Reproduction
What Are the Rights of Donor-Conceived Persons?
Alana Newman and Ralph Buchalter join David Blankenhorn to explore the intricate ethical and moral issues surrounding third party reproduction and the anonymous practices of an industry often hidden from public view.
Are Women Easy Bake Ovens?
In addition to the identity issues such complex forms of parentage force upon the children, egg donation is a risky business, luring mostly college-aged women into rounds of hormone shots and surgical extractions that are a documented risk to their own health. In this climate, it is disturbing but h...
Gay Marriage and the Test-Tube Tidal Wave
I am the daughter of a sperm donor. For a long time I didn't understand how this had negatively impacted my life, until I read David Blankenhorn's Fatherless America. It was like stepping into a series of scenes from my adolescence. Never before had someone so eloquently and acutely described my per...
Anonymous Father's Day
This issue first surfaced two years ago when a report was published, "My Daddy's Name Is DONOR," by Elizabeth Marquardt, Norval Glenn and Karen Clark by the Institute for American Values in New York... Marquardt's study asked a million households if their mother used a sperm donor. Result: 485 adu...
Are You My Mother? The Changing Norms of Adoption and Donation
...just last month, Marquardt wrote an article in the Atlantic, titled "Do Mothers Matter", which turned her lens on the children conceived using egg donors and womb surrogates. Wouldn't they have the same questions and rights as adoptees, or children conceived with donated sperm? she asked. Or, mor...
The Kids Are Not Always Alright
In 2010, Elizabeth Marquardt and a team of family scholars produced a deeply disturbing 140 page report entitled, "My Daddy's Name is Donor: A New Study of Young Adults Conceived through Sperm Donation." According to the report, "on average, young adults conceived through sperm donation are hurting ...
Do Mothers Matter?
Today we are witnessing an equal opportunity run on deliberately conceiving motherless children. Men, alone or in pairs, can buy eggs and rent wombs, too. A child can be denied knowledge of and a relationship with his or her generally fit mother simply because other adults — the child’s pr...
Is intentional parenthood good for children?
...the value of intentional parenthood is not a settled question, but rather a hotly contested one. With growing numbers of children being deliberately denied a relationship with at least one of their parents, the stories of today's donor conceived adults are just the tip of the iceberg.
Family structure said to trump 'wanted' as key to a child's outcomes
Already, leaders in family law and family diversity are calling "intentional parenthood" a good thing because all these children "are planned and wanted," said Elizabeth Marquardt, principal investigator and author of "One Parent or Five: A Global Look at Today's New Intentional Families." But what ...
New report criticises devaluing of biological parenthood
Entitled 'One Parent or Five? A Global Look at Today's New Intentional Families', the report challenges assumptions that "intentional parenthood", resulting from surrogacy and sperm or egg donations, is good for children "simply because it is planned in advance of the child's conception." The author...
One Parent or Five? : A Global Look at Today's New Intentional Families
The Rights of the Donor Conceived
Like many donor offspring, young Colton Wooten worries about many things: that his sperm donor biological father might be dead; that he himself might accidentally find himself in a romantic relationship with an unknown half–sister conceived by the same donor; that his father might be face in th...
The Untold Story of Sperm-Donor Children
According to Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values and editor of FamilyScholars.org, half of young adults who are conceived by sperm donation are "disturbed about the circumstances of their conception." "Overall, compared to those ...
Sperm Donor Kids Speak Out: Our Biological Dads Matter to Us
Anonymity has fueled the practice of deliberately denying children and young people the identity of their fathers. Now, it is allowing those very young people to tell their own stories, in their own way. A new generation of would–be parents, doctors and policy makers would be wise to listen. Th...
For Sperm Donor Offspring, Parents' Divorce Brings a One-Two Punch
A history of infertility. Getting pregnant from another man’s sperm. Keeping an enormous secret from your child and everyone else. Raising a child in which one parent is biologically related to the child and another is not. These experiences and more might account for the strains one hears abou...
Invisible Dads
Stewart's name changes reflect her search for identity and a way to connect to the father she only knows as "Donor." Her experience is echoed in the title of a recent study-"My Daddy's Name is Donor"-that contains troubling findings about the way some donor offspring view their identity and experien...
Vial of Tears
My Daddy's Name is Donor, a survey led by Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Children and Families at the Institute for American Values, is an unprecedented study of young adults conceived by sperm donation... Her survey makes clear that, among a diverse, fairly representative group of ...
Infertility Wars
But behind the heated rhetoric, a much more serious campaign is underway. The opening salvo on this latest front in the culture wars came in May when a study, "My Daddy's Name Is Donor," found that donor offspring are more likely to "struggle with serious, negative outcomes such as delinquency, sub...
Infertility Wars
But behind the heated rhetoric, a much more serious campaign is underway. The opening salvo on this latest front in the culture wars came in May when a study, "My Daddy's Name Is Donor," found that donor offspring are more likely to "struggle with serious, negative outcomes such as delinquency, sub...