In talking about adoption online, I am repeatedly reminded that many people find it unintuitive to criticize infant adoption by strangers simply because it creates genealogical bewilderment. Or, to qualify a bit, people can understand what is bad about what we might call “medical bewilderment:” the loss of family health history, which can inform everything from life habit formation to the decision to undergo early screening for cancers and chronic health conditions. Family health histories can inform the decision to bear children. And of course, those offspring inherit medical bewilderment from their medically bewildered parents. But many people believe that even the disadvantages of medical bewilderment are offset by the boons of removing children from their original families, beset by whatever crises, and placing them in “loving” and materially better circumstanced households. (Never mind that this type of accounting presumes that the advantages of the latter must come at the cost of genealogical bewilderment.)
Beyond medical bewilderment, however, the idea of genealogical bewilderment spawns—well, bewilderment. Countering this is a large task I keep returning to in these posts. This time I want to look at one way skepticism about the harm of genealogical bewilderment finds expression: in the idea that one’s biological parents—mere contributors of the germplasm for one’s formation—aren’t “true” parents at all. I am critical of this attitude, but in a curious way, I find that I agree with an idea that underlies it: the idea that parenthood morally demands some degree of social connection to one’s offspring.
I have listened to advocates of ending secrecy in the fertility industry: those who argue that anonymity in gamete “donation” (typically, the selling of gametes to cryobanks) is unethical. And I am especially interested in the critiques made by donor-conceived people, many of whom have known since early childhood that they were conceived that way, while others came to the knowledge much later, either through an announcement from their families or through the use of genetic genealogy companies like Ancestry and 23andMe. The industry they are criticizing eschews calling gamete donors “parents,” preferring to frame donation as selfless, and maybe a little heroic—playing up a comparison with donating blood or bone marrow or organs. The problem with these comparisons is that assisted reproduction with donated gametes is not a curative intervention. And assisted reproduction with anonymously donated gametes has the unique feature, relative to the other types of cell, tissue, and organ donation, of producing a human being. And that human being is genealogically bewildered.
To be genealogically bewildered is not to know who one’s parents are. This is not sentimentalism; it is how we talk about the continuity of biological life. Think of how biology classes standardly describe Mendel’s experiments with cross-breeding pea plants.
We keep track of the generational connections by speaking of the “parent plants” and their offspring. Plants do not “raise” their offspring. Even if the parental connection is mediated only through germplasm, it is a parental connection. Gamete donors are parents, in this attenuated sense.
I want to probe the implications of this point, particularly because I believe that people who have experienced severance have the right, and the burden, of deciding how to use kinship language, and that includes deciding whom to call “parents.” I made this the twelfth of my Fourteen Propositions about Adoption. But first I want to note that given the far greater prevalence of anonymous sperm donation than that of ovum donation, there is a sexed aspect to the idea of donors as non-parents.
I think about my own biological father, whose identity I know but whom I have never met, and with whom I haven’t yet made contact. His situation, in relation to me, is similar to that of an anonymous sperm donor in relation to their offspring. Although he knew my birth mother was pregnant by him, he may not even know she gave birth. I am almost as socially disconnected from him as it is possible to be. My birth mother carried her pregnancy for 41 weeks, gave birth, and relinquished me. That connection lives in her memory. As an individual I do not live in my biological father’s memory at all. All he contributed to me was his germplasm, by mistake. But of course I am not a Jesuslike miracle. I did not enter the world fatherlessly.
But to say that there is little or no social connection between him and me is not to say that he bears no social obligation to me. I still lack any knowledge of his family health history. If anyone has an obligation to make that available to me, he does. For this reason alone he has at least a negative obligation not to refuse all communication between us. I’m unsure whether he has an obligation to provide more. And note that this is not settled by the question of anonymity. I think that parentage even in the “weak” genealogical sense is every person’s entitlement, and for that reason it is wrong to conceal it. It is literally your property. No one may alienate it from you without your consent. No, the question is what social obligations a genealogical parent, hidden or not, has toward their offspring. Beyond health history, I am unsure what they might be.
(Of course, health information is dynamic, not static. There are facts about my birth mother’s current family health situation that are vital for me and my family, although they only became known relatively recently. Ongoing contact is vital for sharing this information.)
Some severed people, including myself, yearn for more connections to our genealogical parents than regularly updated health information. We want to learn our parents’ own stories, or to share our own, and from this gain a richer sense of our own identities. But not all severed people value these connections in the same way, or to the same degree. And this is connected to the idea that each of us defines family relationships differently. This is our freedom and our burden. No one else gets to tell us who our “real” family is, because the notion of “real” is actually a normative notion that embodies which connections matter to us.
But underneath that existential choice is a genealogical fact that holds for human beings no less than for pea plants. Gamete donors are genealogical parents. Absent and hidden impregnators are genealogical parents. No one has the right to hide them from us. We have the right to decide how important they are to us. And they owe us too. Not much, but not nothing.