Synthesis of Loss

I am feeling extreme anxiety because I can foresee what lies ahead but I am powerless to stop it. It is like foreknowledge the car is about to crash, without the power to apply the brakes. Market deregulation. Thousands, millions of children growing up to make sense of the confusion of deliberate family dislocation and a fractured identity and the loss of being raised by their family of origin, who alone can reflect their looks, interests and personality and help them find their place as a link in the chain of their kin.

Donor conception is wrong because it is geared towards fulfilling the needs of adults – at the expense of the needs of the child. Circumstances vary, but the bottom line remains the same. People believe they have a right to a child and are therefore entitled to remove a child from its kin to be raised by an alternative family. If people have a ‘right’ to a child then the child loses its autonomy as a human being. Conceived with a technique that has its origins in animal husbandry, fused from two people who were never in love, never danced together, never even met, further erodes our sense of humanity. The most primal need of the child is to be loved, valued and raised by its parents. Donor conception interferes to pervert the relationship between the child and their biological parents.

Children of surrogates are told “the woman who gave birth to you is not your ‘real mother,’ she was just a handy womb.” The real mother is the woman who provided the egg.’ Children of egg donors are told “your ‘real mother’ is the woman who gave birth to you, the woman who provided the egg is ‘just a donor.” Adults willing to procreate with the intention of not parenting the child are held in high esteem. It is madness. Donor conception should be subject to the same tests as adoption. A court should transfer parenting rights to the commissioning parents only if it can be proved that it is in the best interests of the child not to be raised by their biological parents.

I feel tremendous empathy for the next generation of ART babies, struggling to conform to the extreme pressure to be the smiling babies advertised on the websites and clinic walls. Never betraying their loyalty to their legal parents by identifying their loss. This next generation will struggle even more because they will be told they were ‘lucky’ enough to be raised in the ‘perfect model’ of donor conception. They get to know their donors name. What more do they want? At least people admit mistakes were made in my generation.

Society keeps repeating the folly of separating children from their families to fulfil the huge demand for children, as we have seen with child trafficking in Haiti and service providers organising third world adoptions of ‘orphans’ with living parents. Donor conception has more of a veneer of respectability, but the ethical considerations concerning the vulnerability and powerlessness of the child are the same.

Adoptees, wards of the state and members of the Stolen Generation understand. Will the Donated Generation ever get their apology? Will anyone ever listen to us, the ‘commissioned children?’

I shout my experiences into the vacuum of the infertility treatment industry and numbly watch as the next generation is unthawed and inseminated.