Tag: third party reproduction

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Surrogate Mothers Help Couples Who Can’t Conceive

brigitte

As a pediatric nurse at St. John’s Hospital, Buffy Lael sees the beauty of childbirth daily. It wasn’t surprising that she longed for a baby of her own.

After years of trying — including fertilization treatments — and several miscarriages, it seemed her dream was not to be. But where nature and science let her down, her good friend never would.

Antonea Wolf Lael is now 2 years old. Nea, as she is called, is still too young to understand how she came to be, but her mother is forthcoming in telling the tale of the special role her friend Brenda played.

Around three years ago, Buffy and her husband, John, were out to dinner with Brenda and Scott Wade of Cantrall. The two couples had been friends for years, but it still came as a shock when Brenda offered to serve as a surrogate mother so the Laels could finally have a child.

“I immediately started crying and was in disbelief. It was totally not expected at all,” Buffy said.

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Donor Siblings, and a New Kind of Family

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As we swelter toward July 4th and traditional family gatherings, I find myself contemplating the meaning of the very new, and very non-traditional, type of extended family that has dropped into my life.

Last month I posted eight words to the Donor Sibling Registry, a Web site that helps form connections among the children conceived by sperm, egg or embryo donations. Girl born October 2008. Boy born May 2010. I was required to enter one other key piece of information: the name of the sperm bank and ID number of the donor that we used to conceive our children. The match popped up instantly from my simple query, like a book in an online library catalog.

Two messages awaited me when I logged onto the Web site the following morning. Janedog in Canada has one child and wants to make a connection. Tripk6 has two children. They live on the West Coast. The three children are all born from the same donor that we used. “Doesn’t he make beautiful babies?” asked Tripk6 rhetorically.

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Conservatives Line Up Against Sperm Donors, But Lack the Power to Ban Them

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WASHINGTON — A new documentary exploring the ethical implications of sperm donation is creating a buzz among religious audiences.

“Anonymous Father’s Day” delves into bioethics from the perspective of donor-conceived children who grow up not knowing their biological fathers. The film gives fodder to opponents of assisted reproductive technology, who argue the fertility “industry” has led to psychologically scarred children and the “commodification” of human life.

ART’s ethical implications are not solely a religious issue, and “Anonymous Father’s Day” makes no explicit religious claims. But its promotion of heterosexual marriage attracts religious audiences, who oppose the reproductive alternatives ART facilitates.

Jennifer Lahl, the writer, director and producer behind the film, recently held back-to-back screenings in Washington, D.C., at the conservative Christian-focused Family Research Council and the Catholic Information Center. Lahl plans future showings at Christian institutions.

This is the second film on gamete donation by Lahl, founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture, a California-based nonprofit that studies beginning and end-of-life issues.

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France: donor anonymity holds firm in court case

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A French court has effectively reaffirmed the country’s policy of gamete donor anonymity by rejecting a donor-conceived woman’s demand for information on her biological father.

The woman requested that a message be passed on to the man asking whether he would accept to be identified. She was also seeking disclosure of non-identifying information – medical history, reasons for donation, number of children conceived from the sample – in the event of the man’s refusal of her request.

But even though the woman, who has requested anonymity, was not asking for direct identification, the tribunal in Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, still threw out her request on the grounds that information given to clinics by gamete donors is protected as secret under French law.

The woman, herself a lawyer, had invoked Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to private and family life and in some readings confers a right to access information essential to personal identity.

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Parents Hope Reborn with Gestational Carrier

ASRM News and Research

Kim Christian knew when she was 32 that she could not bear children. For the next decade, she and her husband, Dan Rominski, saved and planned for fertility treatments…So the Montvale couple gambled — legally and medically. They crossed state lines to make a deal with a 30-year-old Illinois woman who agreed to bear a child for them.

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Give Me Back My Sperm, Donor Says

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An Israel woman has filed a petition at the Supreme Court against the Health Ministry in an attempt to regain access to five units of sperm from a man who now regrets his donation.

The woman, whose name has not been revealed, is the mother of a two-year-old daughter who was conceived artificially using the donor’s sperm.

In order to provide her child with a biologically related sibling, the woman acquired five further units of the same donor’s semen from a sperm bank.

The donor, whose name also remains protected, claims that a recent religious epiphany made him wish he had never donated.

Israel is a global centre for assisted births, including artificial insemination. Sperm donors can expect to earn between £50 to £130 per donation, and in exchange, are guaranteed absolute, lifelong anonymity.

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Ed Houben, Sperm Donor, Has Fathered 82 Children

ASRM News and Research

Ed Houben was a virgin until the age of 34. Now he’s the biological father of 82 children.  Der Spiegel reports that the 42-year-old Dutchman performs his services for free, offering women and couples a chance to conceive a child without the expense of using a sperm bank.

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Carrying Dreams: Why Women Become Surrogates

ASRM News and Research

Surrogacy is an idea as old as the biblical story of Sarah and Abraham in the book of Genesis. Sarah was infertile, so Abraham fathered children with the couple’s maid. Today, there are many more options for people who want to grow their families — and for the would-be surrogates who want to help.

Fertility Headlines

Surrogacy Experts Help Navigate Murky Legal Waters

ASRM News and Research

According to the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, more than 1,400 U.S. babies were born this way in 2010, and many more such births are thought to go unreported. This small, but fast-growing field is fraught with risk, and often intense coordination is the only way to avoid a legal nightmare.