Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  When three more rounds of IVF failed, she asked Steven (his middle name) to consider adoption—she imagined bringing home a daughter from China—but he refused. “Even with one child I wasn’t spending as much time with our son as I wanted to,” he told me recently. “I wasn’t spending as much time with my wife as I wanted to. I wasn’t spending as much time on my work as I wanted to. So the combination of all the negatives plus the fact that it wouldn’t be mine or her genetic child—it would be kind of a lottery. I know lots of adoption success stories and I know lots of adoption horror stories, and given the overall pluses and minuses, it just wasn’t something I wanted to do.” Although he’d happily stick with one, Steven told his wife, if she truly wanted two kids, ovum donation—and possibly a gestational surrogate to protect Deborah’s health—was the only way he’d agree.

  When I met Deborah this spring, she had finally committed to going ahead with a donor egg after several years of flirting with the idea—the donor was chosen, the fees paid, the contracts signed, the appointments planned, the drugs delivered. Yet, days before the process was to begin, she found herself lying awake nights, frantic over whether she was doing the right thing. “What gets to me is that the three of them would be genetically related,” she said, “and I would be the one . . . It’s not about passing on my genes. It’s that I don’t want to be an outsider in my own family. I don’t want to feel less legitimate in my child’s eyes. I’d feel I’d have to prove my status as a mother by not making any mistakes and by being the perfect mother to this child. Otherwise, he or she could . . .” She trailed off, staring out the window again.

  “I just don’t understand,” she went on to say after a moment. “How can one parent tell a child that the genetic connection is irrelevant to their bond—when it clearly means something to the father, or why would they have gone to such lengths to maintain it? How can I tell my son that the special sense of connection he shares with me and with his cousins is irrelevant, even forbidden to mention in front of his sibling, who wouldn’t have access to his own genealogy? That’s one of the reasons why I preferred adoption. At least it allows the family to maintain a coherent logic.”

  Most parents expect that clarity, those bright lines in their genetic, biological, and social relationships to their children. Becoming the parent of a donor-conceived offspring means reconciling, even embracing, something murkier. Before starting our donor cycle, my husband and I met once with a social worker, a standard requirement for couples using donor eggs—though, again, not for those using donor sperm. Her job wasn’t to screen us (she did, after all, work for the clinic and had little incentive to reject anyone) but to help us imagine how the genetic asymmetry might play out. What would it feel like to see my husband’s caterpillar eyebrows or artistic talent in my child but no heritable trait of my own? What about our extended families? My parents had assured me they’d love their grandchild no matter whose genes she carried. I knew they meant it, theoretically, but I wasn’t sure they could pull off the particulars. My dad loved to brag, “It’s in the genes!” when one of his grandkids excelled in school, sports, or music. I worried over how hearing those comments would affect our child. Or maybe I worried over how they would affect me.

  I wasn’t alone in my concern. According to a paper published in the March 2005 issue of the journal Social Science and Medicine, parents of donor-conceived kids found “resemblance talk”—something most of us consider innocuous—to be “ubiquitous, unavoidable and uncontrollable” and they feared the constant chitchat would stigmatize their child and throw the family’s legitimacy into question. This was true irrespective of whether parents had told their children how they had been conceived, and it exacerbated uncertainties about these decisions among both groups. It also made them apprehensive about whether their children could be fully accepted by their extended families.

  “People see a child in a supermarket checkout line and almost reflexively make some comment about who he looks like or doesn’t look like,” said Robert Nachtigall, an adjunct clinical professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco and a coauthor of the paper. “We interpret it as a kind of shorthand by which people validate the child’s position in the family, in society, by basically making comments that refer to the blood relationship that must exist between the child and his or her parents. The problem for people who have conceived with donor gametes is that they know it’s not true. And the dilemma for them is how to respond, if at all.”

  Resemblance talk did something else, too: although emphatic that it didn’t change their love for their child, mothers said it was a constant reminder of their own infertility. “Your infertility is always kind of there when you do donor conception,” said Marie, the mother of fourteen-year-old Catherine. “It’s always there through adoption, too.” The difference is that there’s widespread cultural support for adoption in a way there isn’t for donor conception. Families can access a long-standing network of social workers, psychologists, other parents. Marie knew this from personal experience: she was herself adopted at birth. “Adoptive families are not as isolated,” she said. “People have been educated. Although I still think in general the culture is adoption-negative, it’s certainly different than thirty years ago.”

  For years there has been speculation about how high-profile, late-in-life moms got pregnant: Geena Davis had twins at forty-eight; Holly Hunter had hers at forty-seven; Jane Seymour’s were born when she was forty-four. Joan Lunden has had two sets of twins, one at fifty-two and one at fifty-four; although she appeared on the cover of People with a gestational surrogate, when asked flat-out by reporters if she also used an egg donor she declined to comment. Elizabeth Edwards, who gave birth to a daughter at forty-eight and a son at fifty, has ducked the question as well, demurring that it’s not “ladylike” to discuss infertility. Marcia Cross, the actress, is one of the few celebrities to acknowledge, last year in a USA Today article, that older women may use donor eggs, “which doesn’t make the baby any less beautiful or perfect. One’s own eggs only last so long, and sometimes at forty-three or forty-four you can have your own baby, but statistically it’s very difficult and expensive. You don’t want to wait that long.” In a People cover story published after her twin girls were born, Cross was described as having “beat the odds” of conceiving via IVF at age forty-four using her own eggs.

  Even those in the limelight have a right to privacy, especially where their children are concerned. At the same time, drawing that line at egg donation is troubling. For one thing, the author Liza Mundy says, it perpetuates the fantasy of women’s endless fertility, as much a Hollywood illusion as unfurrowed brows, full lips, and perky breasts in middle age. In reality, according to CDC statistics, in 2004, only 5.2 percent of forty-four-year-old women who transferred embryos created through IVF using their own eggs gave birth. Among forty-seven-year-old women, none did. With donor eggs, the odds for both sets of women jump to 51 percent and often far higher. It’s also hard to imagine that these same women would be equally circumspect had they adopted. Consider the proudly public stance of the adoptive mothers Angelina Jolie, Sharon Stone, Jamie Lee Curtis, Madonna. By trying to protect their children from stigma, famous egg-donor recipients may inadvertently be creating it.

  Most parents of donor-conceived children won’t be expected to take a stand in the national press, but they do struggle over who to tell and when to tell, the difference between “secret” and “private” information, and how much of the story is their child’s as opposed to their own. “The hardest part about not being willing to disclose until my daughter is old enough to understand is that I feel this responsibility to women my age,” said Anne, the mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl conceived using a donor egg, who asked me to use only the middle names of her and her husband. “I want them to know they could do this, too—they could carry their baby, give birth to it, and it’s wonderful. This girl at work got pregnant. She was fort
y-three, a year older than I was when I got pregnant. She found out it was a Down baby and terminated.”

  Anne’s eyes welled up, her voice dropping to a whisper. “I was so devastated for her. She came to my office and said, ‘You beat the odds.’ And I felt so guilty because I didn’t beat the odds. And I couldn’t say anything about it.”

  It was a sunny weekend afternoon in Anne’s newly renovated kitchen in a San Franciso Bay Area suburb. Anne’s husband, David, a forty-year-old contractor, was out back building a new deck. Anne showed me a picture of their daughter, who was taking a nap. Then she showed me a photo of David at the same age: the resemblance was uncanny. “When I was pregnant,” Anne said, “I just kept saying to him, ‘I hope she looks like you.’”

  Anne and David met through an online support group for widows and widowers. Her first husband died seven years ago; David lost his wife not long after. Neither of them had children, though Anne, who describes herself as a “late bloomer,” badly wanted them.

  By the time the couple married, Anne was forty. “I used to say, ‘I’m willing to adopt but I want the experience of pushing out my own,’” she told me. An enthusiastic advocate of egg donation, she felt truly blessed that technology had so beautifully fulfilled her dreams. She also believed that finding her donor was fated: the young woman was Canadian, as was Anne’s first husband. And her favorite flower was the sterling rose, the very same flower he’d sent Anne after their first date. Yet even she had wrestled with loss. “My sisters and I all look so much alike,” she said, “and there’s part of me that feels ripped off because of that. But not because I want to see my face in my daughter’s face. More because . . . there’s this feeling of belonging that I have with them. It’s always been fun when people have said, ‘Oh my God, are you guys twins?’ So, I’m sorry my daughter doesn’t have that.” Anne wondered whether her daughter would feel she was missing out on something. “But then I think, Am I just projecting? Is she ever really going to feel this way? And how can I make sure I don’t do something to make her feel this way? Because it might otherwise never even dawn on her.”

  According to several studies, most donor recipients haven’t told their children about their origins, though some researchers argue that this trend is reversing. The women I spoke with, all open enough about their choices to talk with me, said they did expect to tell their children. They talked about integrity and a child’s right to know his history. They mentioned the danger and difficulty of keeping family secrets. “If I keep it a secret, then why is it a secret?” Anne said. “Then I create the stigma even if no one else ever does. And I don’t want to be responsible for that. I want my daughter to understand that, you know, you were the best egg for the job.” Anne laughed. “And she’ll learn about perseverance. And that some things are nature: your genetic makeup makes you behave certain ways, or like certain things. That’s the way that it is. But I’ve been nurturing her. I carried her in my body. I pushed her out. She’s my child.”

  The idea that disclosure could be a viable, even preferable, option is relatively new. Taking a cue from donor insemination, which was historically (and often still is) kept secret, fertility doctors initially counseled couples that disclosing to their children would only cause unnecessary confusion. I recall our first appointment to discuss egg donation at the clinic where we had undergone two IVF cycles; a nurse led us to an office in a different part of the building and offered to close the blinds to ensure our privacy. Until then, I hadn’t realized we were supposed to feel furtive.

  Deborah told me that she heard a clinic counselor speaking on a panel at an infertility conference promoting secrecy as a perk of egg donation. “She said, ‘The women who use donors tell me they just forget about it when they’re pregnant.’ She repeated that. Twice. Isn’t that awful?”

  In truth, it isn’t clear that secrecy is necessarily damaging. In the most extensive longitudinal study to date, Susan Golombok, the director of the Center for Family Research at Cambridge University in England, has compared families who have sperm-donor children with those who have egg-donor children, as well as with those who used conventional IVF and those who conceived naturally. In 2006, when her team last checked in with the donor-conceived children, they were twelve, and most had not been told the nature of their conception. The kids in all of the groups were equally well adjusted. What’s more, parents of donor-conceived kids (and those who used conventional IVF) were more involved with their kids’ lives than those who had conceived naturally.

  Apparently, secrecy has not affected their relationships. But, Golombok wonders, what if those children someday discover the truth? Close to 75 percent of her subjects who were not planning to tell their children had told someone else that they had used a donor. What if the information came out accidentally or was blabbed during the course of a bitter divorce? What if the nongenetic parent contracted a fatal, genetically linked disease? That one hit home: I’d been through treatment for breast cancer five years before our donor cycle; I couldn’t imagine allowing a daughter to believe that she, too, would be at risk.

  There have been no large-scale studies on how disclosure affects the psychological development of donor-egg-conceived kids or their relationships with their parents. But among teenagers who were told as young children that they had been conceived using donor sperm, there have been no negative repercussions, according to research by Joanna Scheib, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. In 2004, the ASRM switched its official position to support disclosure, though not unequivocally.

  According to Robert Nachtigall, who has looked at disclosure decisions as well as “resemblance talk,” both those parents who disclose and those who don’t have the same motivation: acting in the best interests of their children. “We were struck by how people could use the same argument and come to a different conclusion,” he said. “Disclosing parents perceived the danger would come from an internal disruption of the family dynamic: they felt that if the child found out from another person it would destroy the trust and their relationship. Nondisclosing parents were more concerned with threats from outside of the family, with stigma. They didn’t want to subject the child or themselves to public scrutiny, to be thought of as different or other. They’d made the decision that that was the greater threat, so they weren’t going to disclose. Both types realize that this information is powerful and important; they just have different strategies about how it is to be managed.”

  Parents who take the leap, though, say they don’t regret it. In a study published this March of disclosure strategies among parents who had used donor eggs or sperm, Nachtigall and his coauthors found that many expressed relief at having told their children, as if a weight had been lifted, while most children’s responses ranged from neutral to positive. “That’s the big take-home message,” Nachtigall said. “Nobody regretted telling. Nobody.”

  Once a child knows she was donor-conceived, what then? How far do her rights extend? Should she be able to meet her donor, and who gets to decide? It was clear to Marie, the donor recipient who is also an adoptee, that knowing one’s genetic lineage should not just be an option, it should be an entitlement. “There’s no way I would have a child of mine go through what I went through in terms of the not knowing and the questioning and the search,” she said. Not only did she and her husband, a sixty-five-year-old lawyer, plan from the get-go to be open with Catherine about her conception, they also wanted to ensure that their daughter would, whenever she was ready, have access to the donor.

  That was not a popular position in 1992 when Catherine was conceived. The couple had been trying to get pregnant for four years, since Marie was forty. They worked their way through the standard infertility treatments, the pills, the shots, the IVFs. All of it failed. Her husband had never been eager to become a parent in the first place; despite being married to an adoptee, he preferred to remain childless rather than adopt. Marie wasn’t ready to give up. So they became among the first couples in thei
r area to use a donor egg.

  They have been in phone and email contact with the donor, who at the time of the donation was a college student interning for an acquaintance of Marie’s, ever since. Catherine has known about the woman since preschool. “The comments she’d make about it at five were different than at ten,” Marie said. “At five, we’d be driving to Safeway, and this little voice in the back of the car would say, ‘Now, what’s an egg donor again?’ At ten there were a lot of questions about who she looked like and ‘Why don’t I look like you?’”

  Then, when Catherine was twelve, came the moment that all of the donor recipients I spoke to told me they dreaded. “She turned to me in this relaxed, Hey, Mom, isn’t this interesting kind of voice and said, ‘You know, technically speaking, you’re not actually my mother.’”

  This, Marie said, is where it helped to be a trained therapist—and perhaps an adoptee as well, someone who has understood from experience both the salience and limits of genetic relationships, that DNA doesn’t make the mom, but children need to figure out what, if anything, it signifies. “It was her way of acknowledging that this means something to her that’s completely independent of her relationship to me. And that’s inevitable: no amount of being wanted, planned for or loved eliminates that piece of the experience.”

  Last winter, the donor, who is now thirty-six, single, and childless, began pressing for a closer relationship with Catherine. She invited the girl and her parents to her house for dinner, the first time they had gotten together in several years. Halfway through the meal, and against Marie’s explicit instructions, she pulled out a collection of family photos: her mother, brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews. Catherine recoiled. “The donor has this great need to make Catherine into family because she doesn’t have children of her own,” Marie said. “My husband and I had to tell her: ‘That’s Catherine’s decision. It’s not yours or even ours.’ So now the two continue to email but rarely get together.”