Continued from here.

But here's the part that I really have a problem with - and this pretty much fits in with my whole philosophy of adoption - it ain't about the parents, once the child exists - it's about the child. Here are some things that I believe:

I believe that children who are adopted need to know they're adopted.

I believe that children who are adopted need to know as much as possible about their first parents, and have contact with them if contact is safe.

If you don't know who your kid's daddy or mommy is, either because you're in a closed adopted or because you've used an anonymous sperm donor, it seems to me that you've chosen a way to create a family that has automatically set up your kids to have unanswered questions. In the case of many, many closed adoptions this can't be helped. Perhaps, in some international adoption, you have no contact information for those parents. The child may have been abandoned or the government you're working with has shut it down. Perhaps you've adopted from the state and the birthparents' rights have been terminated because of something really horrible. In that case it can't be helped. But all those things can be explained to a kid. But in the case of donated egg or sperm, it can be helped. No child exists until you have the procedure. An entirely voluntary, revoltingly expensive procedure with a good possibility of failure.

I'm not sure how you explain the whole donor egg or sperm thing to a kid. Your (bio)mommy donated her egg because a)she needed the money and b)to her, you were just a cell, otherwise sloughed off in her monthly cycle? Do you tell the kid that we're your 'real mommy and daddy' because you grew in mommy's tummy, even though when the kid looks in the mirror she has questions about where she got that great hair or the bump on her nose?

And I know I said it's all about the kid, but what about the woman who's donated her eggs? I wonder if she ever wonders about the child she might be biologically connected to? And what about any future children she might have? Don't the deserve to know that they have a (bio)brother(s) or sister(s) out there somewhere?

Gah - it's really too much to think about! I feel pretty strongly about this issue, and it's not just because we chose adoption as a way to expand our family when we found out that the biological way wasn't happening. We made a choice to only go so far in our
fertility treatments, and that choice did not include donor anything. There was a line we couldn't cross. I think some of the current advances in fertility technology cross that line, frankly.

I realize I may be offending some people by writing about this. There are probably a lot of people who read these blogs who investigated donor eggs or sperm. So tell me what you think. Do you agree with me that this goes too far? Or do you think I'm full of it? Do you see that the child created through these procedures might have life-long issues? Or is it all fine and dandy as long as there's plenty of love to go around?