Why Parents Should Be Open With Their Kids About Donor Conception

When sperm donation first took off in the U.S. in the 1980s, the typical medical advice was to keep it a secret from the kids it helped create. “Doctors were saying to parents, ‘Just pretend that this donor insemination didn’t happen,’” says Susan Golombok, who’s been studying modern methods of family formation for more than 40 years. Though there were no formal guidelines, the conventional wisdom surrounding families built with the help of donor genetics—which later came to include egg donation and surrogacy—was that the knowledge could confuse or even psychologically harm them. Back then, Golombok, now professor emerita of family research at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., wondered how children who were told they’d been born with help from a donor fared in comparison to those whose families kept it a secret. “We couldn’t do that research, because fewer than 10% of parents had told their children that they’ve been conceived by sperm donation,” Golombok says. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Now, after decades of changing science and convention, Golombok has published the first-ever longitudinal study looking at personal and familial outcomes for those born via sperm donation, egg donation, and surrogacy: a group of interventions known as third-party assisted reproductive technology, or ART. The results show that being open with these children about their genetic and gestationa...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate medicine Source Type: news