Center for Reproductive PsychologyHome PageCenter for Reproductive Psychology Home Page
  Home    Publications    Articles  
Publications

Past Article of the Month Originally Published 02/04/2008
Giving Up Your Biological Connection: What It Means to Use a Donor

The decision to use donor technology is not an easy one. No doubt, it was not your first choice when you started down the road of wanting to build your family. You may have dreamed of a little girl with your red hair, or a little boy with your partners sense of humor. Or you may have hoped to pass on the family name and lineage with a biological child. This is a major step and a major loss: the fact that you will not be biologically connected with your child is something that must be grieved. Your reproductive story has gone awry, and while you must grieve the loss of how it was supposed to be, using a donor whether it is sperm, egg, or both can offer you a family-building option that wasnt available in the past. Using a donor may give you a sense of control over the pre-natal environment that you would not have with adoption. The experience of pregnancy and childbirth may be a part of your reproductive story that you hope not to forfeit and using a donor offers you that opportunity. Donor insemination (DI) is the process by which a woman is impregnated using the semen from a man who is not her partner. Although it is primarily used with married couples with male factor infertility, lesbian and single women who want to have a child also utilize this procedure. Additionally, gay men may use DI to create a family using their own sperm with a surrogate. Although sperm donation has been available for a long time, egg, or oocyte donation (OD) is relatively new. The first baby born using an egg donor was in 1984. The procedure is much more complicated than using a sperm donor because both the donor and the recipient must coordinate their menstrual cycles using medication (stimulating ovulation and egg production in the donor and suppressing it in the recipient). The eggs are retrieved from the donor, fertilized with sperm, and then transferred to the recipient when the embryos are several days old. Egg donation is widely used by women who have old eggs, by women who have diseased or damaged ovaries, cancer survivors, or because of other genetic anomalies. Many questions may emerge for you and your partner as you wrestle with this choice. Because there is no one right or wrong way to think about donor technology, it is common and normal to flip back and forth in figuring out the right thing to do. It can be beneficial, if any of these issues seem insurmountable, to discuss your concerns and fears with a therapist who can help you find answers that are personally meaningful. Think about how you might answer the following: Is it unethical to go to such lengths to create a child when there are children already in need of homes? Is using a donor tampering with nature? Does it go against your religious mores? Will the spouse who is not genetically connected feel differently about the child than the parent who has the genetic link? Will you be able to withstand a possible pregnancy loss? Is it better to use a known or anonymous donor? If a known donor is used, will the relationship with the donor change and if so, how? If the donor is anonymous, on what basis is the choice made? On physical features? Intelligence? Health? Family history? What will other people think? Will you tell your future child where they came from? And how will you tell them? (This topic will be covered in full in next months Article of the Month: Why Children Need to Know Their Biological Roots.) While there may be a rush of excitement in feeling as if you can finally move forward, it is essential to take your time and think through this decision thoroughly. This is a decision that not only affects you and your partner, but your future child(ren) as well. It is important to recognize and grieve all that you have lost: the loss of your own biological offspring, the loss of sharing this with your partner in essence, the loss of your original reproductive story. At the same time, you should consider all that you have to gain. You can rewrite your reproductive story to include this relatively new technology and embrace it with all the joys of building your family at last. * Back
Copyright © 2024 by the Center for Reproductive Psychology. All rights reserved. Please contact us for permission to publish. If you have a question, comments, or a suggestion for an online article, please feel free to contact us.