I follow a blog by a women who has adult, donor conceived children. I found her when I was researching about donor eggs and her perspective and thoughtful insight helped me to make the difficult choices that lead me to the creation of my family.
She recently put out a post about whether or not you should tell you donor conceived children the truth about their biological origin. As you know from reading my blog I strongly believe that secrets are toxic and that we owe it to our children to tell them where they came from, and not least because it shows them how much they were wanted. BUT, it’s so painful to go back to that place of fear and sadness and loss. It’s so scary to expose that tender underbelly of longing, especially when we don’t know how they’ll react. But it’s so necessary.
The recent post was about a new booklet to help the parents of donor conceived children navigate the difficult conversations and emotional turmoil involved with telling. Here are a few quotes from her post, which I believe are quotes from the booklet.
As with all family stories, in the end it is not so much about what has happened but the way we are able to make sense of it that leads to being able to integrate it into part of who we are. If the story you tell your child is coherent and rings true (probably because of the emotion that accompanies it) it will be much easier for your child to take in and sooner or later see your perspective, alongside managing their own feelings.
Feelings of loss or confusion can come and go over the weeks, months and years for your children as well as for you. Sometimes they may feel fine and at other times they may not. Donor conceived adults may need independent counselling – somewhere they can express themselves completely honestly and confidentially – either in the first weeks after being told or sometime down the line. Your support of their need for this is likely to be welcomed.
Deciding to ‘tell’ is not without risk or anxiety, but many worthwhile things in life involve some risk-taking. After all, we grow as people as a result of making courageous choices. There is much to gain for everyone.”
I would encourage anyone with donor conceived children to get this booklet (I will as soon as it’s available!) and to follow the blog Olivia’s View.
Here is a copy of the recent blog post referenced above.
**EDIT – Shortly after I posted a got a comment from Olivia with additional information and resources. I copied it here for those who avoid the comment section (usually a savvy internet move, although not a problem in this space, thankfully).
Hi. this is Olivia from Olivia’s View. Thank you so much for quoting the section of Telling and Talking 17+ that I posted on my blog recently. I should add for your readers that THIS booklet is really intended for parents of donor conceived adults (over 17 year olds) who have not yet ‘told’ their children. I have also written Telling and Talking booklets for parents of 0 – 7, 8 – 11 and 12 – 16 year olds. They can all be downloaded for a small fee or bought in hard copy from DC Network
https://www.dcnetwork.org/catalog/books-and-pdfsAll the booklets are for parents and are supportive of ‘telling’ giving reasons why this is important plus practical guidance on timing and language to use. They are all illustrated with stories from real donor conception families.
Hope is something you pee on 
Hi. this is Olivia from Olivia’s View. Thank you so much for quoting the section of Telling and Talking 17+ that I posted on my blog recently. I should add for your readers that THIS booklet is really intended for parents of donor conceived adults (over 17 year olds) who have not yet ‘told’ their children. I have also written Telling and Talking booklets for parents of 0 – 7, 8 – 11 and 12 – 16 year olds. They can all be downloaded for a small fee or bought in hard copy from DC Network
https://www.dcnetwork.org/catalog/books-and-pdfs
All the booklets are for parents and are supportive of ‘telling’ giving reasons why this is important plus practical guidance on timing and language to use. They are all illustrated with stories from real donor conception families.
Thanks you so much for your comment and for the additional resources Olivia! Also nice to met you, and thank you for all of your work with the DC Network – you’ve made an incredible difference in my life.
I’ll amend the blog to add your resources for those who don’t read the comments. Thanks again!
Hi, thanks again for adding my comment to the body of your blog. I just wanted to acknowledge the feelings you expressed earlier. It is hard to return to that place of fear, sadness and loss – it feels so much easier to forget it all happened and really scary to start telling your children about their different beginnings in life. But I promise you that once you have taken that first leap, with churning stomach, it gets easier every time, particularly if you start when children are really young. Little children are much more likely to ask you for their favourite snack in response than ask you questions about how they were made and once you have started you always have a place to start from again…”you remember when we talked about how sometimes mummies and daddies need some help to have a baby, well……
Small children need love, emotional warmth and security. They do not care about whether they are genetically related to the person(s) providing these things.
I follow Olivia’s blog as well. I reunite families and she and I have gone round a bit on the specifics of things since I’ve helped to reunite many of the more public activists with parents who were egg or sperm donors. I do respect Olivia and we’ve reached an accord. She bravely grows with her children and is not afraid to discuss her changing opinions over the years. She’s advanced conditions for donor offspring for sure as you will if you are inclined to ‘tell’.
Thanks for your comment Marilynn. For the record, I have already started “telling” my boys (https://hopeissomething.com/2016/10/21/talking-to-my-kids-about-donor-conception/). All of the perspectives and resources provided have been helpful in navigating this process.
I’ve chatted with Olivia about this before and we go round and round on the topic. In all likelihood a person who is ‘told’ about their ‘biological origins’ will process that information over time while growing up. Olivia councils her members to be open and supportive and truthful in response to all questions by the person they ‘told’, but her literature does not yet touch upon how to respond to questions about their absent biological family and why they are not allowed contact with them or why their birth certificate does not list the individuals that they are the offspring of. As you know there are people whose parents were donors that are going to court to have their birth certificates corrected to remove the name of a parent they are not the offspring of. The reason for that is primarily as a matter of factual historic record and it does not change the emotional relationship with the people that raised them. One woman I know just added her father to her certificate in New York City and he was a Numbered donor she and I tracked down for her and her siblings she met on the DSR. The change will legitimize and legalize her relationship to her siblings. If they don’t change their certificates they’ll all be legal strangers to one another.
Telling a person they are not the offspring of the person raising opens the door to the next logical question of whose offspring are they. Telling about ‘how someone came to be’ or about their ‘biological origins’ makes it sound like a story about something that happened to them in the past. To the person telling, it is in the past because they don’t have relatives out there somewhere that they don’t know. Its important to remember that being another person’s offspring is not in their past its who they are every day. It may well not bother them at all but it’s not an interesting fact about their beginnings or origins, they have other relatives out there in the present every day.
Thanks for the perspective Marilynn. You’ve given me a lot to think about.
Hi Marilynn
You say “but her literature does not yet touch upon how to respond to questions about their absent biological family and why they are not allowed contact with them or why their birth certificate does not list the individuals that they are the offspring of.”
In order for children to ask that sort of question they would have to have their origins explained to them in a different way. Parents would have to tell their children from the beginning that they were not ‘Daddy’s or Mummy’s child” but the child of someone else. As one of the most important components of successful and appropriate child rearing is to give your child a sense of security, I think speaking in this way would undermine this aim completely. Also on a practical level, I think it highly unlikely that any parent would ever use this sort of language. It’s hard enough getting them to ‘tell’ anyway, let alone asking them to say that the child isn’t really their child at all.
I have never known a child ask about their ‘absent biological family’. Actually I have rarely heard an adult speak like that either, although some do.
We do encourage parents to speak about donors as real people who exist in the present as well as in the past. This is particularly important for children conceived in the UK since 2005 when anonymity was lifted.
With regard to birth certificates, very few DC people (and these would be adults) want to have their genetic progenitors names on the piece of paper. The only person in the UK to have their (social) fathers name removed was someone whose father did not raise her and who gave his permission to have his name taken off the birth certificate. In the UK the whole issue of birth certificates is likely to be raised by our Law Commission very shortly. The proposal from the Birth Registration Campaign is that ALL birth certificates should have a statement saying that parents named are legal parents but that there may be further information available giving genetic heritage. Only the person registered and their legal parents would be able to apply for this information. This is important for personal privacy as in the UK birth certificates are public documents.
Perhaps I’m misinterpreting, but Marilyn’s comments kind of make it sound like using donor egg/sperm is similar to adoption. It’s not at all like adoption, in my experience. My daughter was conceived via donor egg, but she is my offspring. She doesn’t have another mother out there waiting to be put on the birth certificate.
Agreed.