Husband won't discuss

[Princesslucky1]

We have a child through donor sperm, before we had treatment we had to go to counselling to discuss any issues, one of them being should we tell child or not. We could not make a decision so decided we would talk about this in the future now child is almost 3 and I've tried to talk to my husband about should we tell or not... He said no we should not tell, I'm in between minds but would like to as least discuss it further. Donor can never be found and no information will ever be given to us or child. Its so confusing I hate secrets but what's the point in telling?

I agree with making it part of their story from the off - something like "daddy is your daddy but you are special because we wanted you so much we went out and got the seeds to make you".

PosyFossils I'm more than happy to be enlightened about all the selfless reasons a parent might have for choosing an anonymous donor…

I'm sure you are, in which case do feel free to use an internet search engine. The only person I need to justify my decisions to is my child.

What I object to is your presumption that any parent who chooses anonymous sperm is acting in bad faith - which is extremely rude - and your presumption that you know better than I (and thousands of others) what is best for us - which is extremely patronising.

Like so many other things (abortion, same-sex marriage etc) what is right for one person might not be for another. If you don't like the idea of anonymous sperm then don't use it yourself - but don't feel entitled to a knee-jerk judgment on other people's valid choices.

Posy I am genuinely interested to know why you prefer non-anonymous sperm. I will be more than happy to respect your views.

I hope you won't be offended happy if I say - should we ever meet in person I'd be delighted to share but I'm not sticking details of a very personal choice up on the internet for others (not accusing you here!) to pick holes in, sorry. That honestly isn't meant to be rude, just realistic about how much I want to share online.

This may have been said already, so apologies.

Princess, don't be so naive about how your child can find out that they are not biologically related.

If he ever gets a blood group done (which happens before any moderate to major surgery, after any significant accident, or if he decides to become an organ or blood donor) that could be a biologically implausible group compared to his parents.

The technology for DNA typing is accelerating exponentially. Very very large scale full genetic testing trials are underway. The blood donation INTERVAL study, looking at how often blood donors can safely donate blood and recover their own blood count before donating again is going to undertake full genetic testing on 50,000 volunteers. Just 5 years ago that would have been prohibitively expensive. The tech changes mean that this testing is cheaper, quicker, and inevitably going to get used in wider and wider applications.

I genuinely believe that in our lifetime, and certainly that of our children, genetic testing for a myriad of carrier or marker genes etc. will become part of standard batteries of tests for both "health" and disease.

You need to factor this into your equation.

Pinkdelight - DS was relinquished at birth he never really met his birth mother who left false information so we have zero story to tell him. None at all. Absolutely nothing.

He still deserves to know at least as much as I know about him. I don't deserve to know more about him than he does himself - how is that right? He (like all children) had no choice in how his life came about, the choices were all mine and his birth mothers - the very least I can offer him is control over the little knowledge he has.

As it happens the existence of another set of birth parents isn't something he worries about unduly (he's 8 at the moment) he has known about it from before he could understand what it meant. WE don;t discuss it much - or at least no more than you might say to a birth child "oh I remember when I was pregnant with you and..." "I remember the first time we met and you took one look at me and cried and cried and cried!". He loves the stories of how we met and what he was like and he isn't in any doubt whatsoever that I am his mother.

I'm sure its tempting to "protect" someone from hurt but this isn;t protection, it's concealment. It tales away knowledge, control and choices from an individual that you don't have any right to do.

How would you feel if you discovered that your parent knew that you carried a gene for something and hadn't told you "I decided it wasn't important that you knew and anyway I didn't think you'd ever find out [shrug]"

"How dare you - it wasn't your decision to make!" OR
"That's so kind of you to decide for me what about the makeup within my body I need to know"

What do you think?

Once you've decided that you don;t have the right to with-hold this information from an adult then you're really just left with the choice of "When?" and all teh research shows that children who have always known this kind of information (adoption, donor, step vs bio parent) and cannot remember being told have the fewest issues with it.

Your responsibility to your children is to help them become the people they want to be and not to "protect" them from something which shouldn't be that big a deal by lying to them.

If you make a big deal of it then it may affect them more. A matter of fact, this is how it is and aren't we lucky to have you, will affect them less.

If you are stressed every time the subject comes up, then they will pick up on it and will worry.

From what I can read from the OP's posts, it doesn't sound as though her DH is primarily concerned with it effecting the child, it sounds as though he's scared of it effecting him. I can understand that point, and it's easy for me to sit here and say that it's all going to be OK, because I'm the biological parent.

But I can say with no doubt in my mind, that the relationship between my DC and their Dad is not diminished in any way because they are not related genetically. DC1 in particular is obsessed with DH, and has been since birth! That has not changed one jot since we told.

The other part about "people" knowing and judging - that's harder to reassure anyone about. People can have very strong opinions about any kind of assisted conception, as evidenced on threads here. Before we found out about my DH's condition he stated that the two things he would never do were IVF and DI! But here we are. :) You never know how you'll feel until you're in that position, and sometimes people forget that.

I think that it's very unlikely that the child will go off telling the world and his wife about the DI though. That certainly hasn't happened to us. We have found that telling family about it after the effect has actually been quite easy, because they can see how well it has worked out for us, and what a great bond there is between DH and the DCs. Even if they would have had prejudices in theory, it's harder to have them in the face of a happy family.

You should tell, perhaps not just now when it may confuse them, as my 4 year old niece has trouble understanding Her Nana is Mummy's Mummy! But definitely when they are still a small child. They WILL find out, and the later it is, the worse and more 'secretive' or 'shameful' it will seem. Your husband did something not a lot of men would do, because you both wanted a family together, that's a wonderful thing, not something to be kept secret.

I have a 5 year old donor conceived son. Following the advice of all the experts, we told him from when he was a baby (using the donor conception network's book 'My Story') so it is something he has always known, and we just build on the story as he gets more curious with age.

I'm really pleased your husband has agreed to tell, you haven't left it too late, but I would urge you to do it asap - at a network meeting I met a couple who were in a awful place because they hadn't told their 9 year old twins yet and they couldn't find the words to tell them. The guilt, the 'how can we tell them this now' and the worry CONSUMED them. The couple were entirely defined by this issue. In contrast, if you tell children when they are 'too young to understand properly', it becomes something as unremarkable as 'chickens lay eggs but dogs have live puppies', which you build on as they get older.

Please do it asap - just buy the book (there's a gap to stick in your child's photo so they love it) and read it to him.

I'd also like to add, having caught up with the anonymous/non-anonymous ding dong, that it has only been a few years since sperm donations in the UK have been made on the basis that the donor will be able to be traced by the child when s/he has reached 18 years of age. When my dd was conceived, anonymity was the rule. I don't personally want to contemplate what sourcing a non-anonymous donor would have meant for us.

Vey similar scenario with my dd and she knew well before she was 3. She's always known, she's a straight surrogate baby btw so not biologically mine.
Just always told her, we made a book, put photos in of us and saying in simple words mummy and daddy wanted a baby, mummy's eggs didn't work properly blah blah.
No drama no trauma

One other advantage of telling them when they are very young is that it doesn't matter if you make a complete and utter balls of it

Glad I wasn't the only one!

I deliberately told DS before he was 2 that I could practice sayiing stuff out loud for a bit without him having a clue what I was bumbling on about!

Me too! We got so practiced at saying 'sperm' and 'eggs' when he was still a baby that now we're not fazed at all!

You'll have to tell. We're in the same boat (almost) and we will, too. Otherwise your child will be looking at your DH's side of the family when anything medical comes up, and giving the wrong information. (I imagine there is some medical info with the donor sperm - he'll need that).

This kind of information needs to be normalised from the word 'go'. Entering adulthood is hard enough without throwing a revelation like that into the mix.

happymundanes - I'll tell you why we chose anonymous eggs if you like.
We felt that we'd still be responsible for this choice when our child was a teenager. I've watched peers in 'open adoptions' endure devastating emotional damage from trying to get some kind of parenting response from their biological parents - people who are no longer, in fact, their parents. There's no doubt in my mind that those Pandora's boxes would have been far better left unopened. Thinking about it, I could see that using non-anonymous eggs would throw our child into a not dissimilar situation. If the child was anything like I was as a young adult, just knowing that the knowledge was obtainable would be a huge emotional pressure to go and get it. While we very much appreciated the donor's contribution to our fertility journey and were happy to pay compensation, I really don't think she would have wanted a complicated reunion down the line. I have to say that I wouldn't have confidence in her (or anyone 'unknown' to us) to handle that immensely delicate situation, given the enormity of what it could mean for our child's psychological health.

I realise there are arguments both ways and that many donor children do feel a need to know. However, this is still a new area for research and I didn't come across anything that dispelled my concerns. If I could be sure that non-anonymous donation would one day lead to a pleasant, informative meeting between a balanced, mature adult and an emotionally resilient teen, we'd have chosen to do it. But we couldn't be sure and felt we had to balance that possibility against some very dark possibilities. In the end, the pressure of our parental responsibilities (to protect and nurture) weighed more heavily with us than a 'right' (and I do see that in a sense it is a 'right') to knowledge. I only hope our child will understand we've done our best, but I'll never feel that I have a right to avoid their pain or anger if this turns out to be the wrong decision for them.

And again, this decision has been influenced by seeing some adoptees go through far worse emotional pain through disastrous reunions than they ever experienced through the simple fact of having been adopted. I don't know the differences felt by adoptees and donor children but am not convinced anyone else has a good handle on it either - yet.

I agree that egg and sperm donors should be anonymous. To me it's different to adoption where the biological parents particularly mother maybe wanted a child but couldn't cope.
Egg and sperm donors never intended to parent that child and I saw a programme where a boy in America was tracking down his donor and trying to turn him into a father figure and make him say he'd donated sperm to help a couple conceive and not just for money. If something happens to the man meant to be fathering the child I think this sort of substitute searching is more likely. I would only ever have become an egg donor to someone who was either related to me or a good friend because I'd feel responsible if they tracked me down when older and I realised the parents who had raised them had done a poor job or were both dead or something.
I also think altered birth certificates should say on them clearly that they are different from the original. They should be legal for the purpose of identity checks but at least then when people reach 16-18 and see their birth certificate they will know that the original was different so it would be harder to hide the fact that a child was adopted or had a surrogate mother. Maybe they do already but i suspect not from the tale of the adopted person who didn't realise they were adopted.

Thank you for sharing that, wouldbemedic, each of us who have been along this road have different feelings .

On the original topic, we have given up trying to tread the fine line between sharing the information and respecting DS's right to share his own information. We now just tell when it comes up naturally. I told our (tiny) nursery, as I thought DS might mention it, and they used it for a discussion about all the ways families happen, and some of the parents talked about it at home with their DC so it is just a fact of life for them. Even though, not being lego, it's not that interesting. The clear message as Maryz said, there's nothing wrong with it.

On the other hand we are bringing up another child who was told a lie until he was old enough to search for the information himself. He was 11 when his discovered what happened to his parents, on his own, with no potential to ask questions. Secrets are loose canons.

2rebecca TV programmes generally dig up the most dramatic rather than the most representative case. The information emerging now, prompting the change in law, comes from donor-conceieved children.

You just cannot be sure that your child will never find out. You have no idea what situation could arise in which telling him might be necessary

This ^^ X100

Some possible situations - medical emergency - he needs a transplant but dad won't be tested.

There is an incident such as a missing child, your ds gives DNA to be ruled out of the investigation. The police then find out he is related (genetically but that's all their computer tell them) to a rapist and they knock on your door.

Life insurance. Say you never tell him, he marries has children everything is lovely and then something dreadful happens, it's very sad but at least the mortgage has insurance, except that the insurance, and the life insurance premiums were based on a fictitious family medical history.

Again happy married life but child is born that has a) genetic condition b) looks mixed race (with the assumption that both your ds and future wife are white and expect a white child which I know is not the case for many)

Someone else finds they are the child of the same donor, does know details and knocks on the door.

There are so many possibilities about how not knowing could impact on his life, and yet what is the impact of him knowing?

You have no choice. Sequencing of human genomes will become more and more commonplace and your DS will find out the hard way one day. You don't want that.

You confidently say that your parents and PILs don't know but perhaps you are kidding yourself? My brother has children that are plainly not biologically those of him and his wife. It is plain awkward. I don't care a fig if they had fertility treatment but do feel a barrier between us in that they have felt this "secret worthy", and they are treating us as idiots, when there is nothing to be ashamed of. Their DC will also realise one day soon once they do some basic inheritance biology and once they get sick of people asking them why they were adopted (due to clear dominant heritable phenotypes that belong to neither of their parents). It's weird, and gets harder and harder as the DC grow. It would be a non issue if early on they had said "oh, we had DI or egg donation, or whatever - NOT that it is any of our business but just that it is so odd to pretend it can be kept secret.

PS your DH is the real dad! There is simply another bio parent out there somewhere who was involved right at the start but not any more.