IN RESPONSE to a recent Wall Street Journal article, which looks at the psychological difficulties of children of anonymous sperm donors, a woman wrote this letter to the editor: 

Regarding W. Bradford Wilcox’s “Daddy Was Only a Donor” (Taste, June 18): Although I agree that “old-fashioned” parenthood is still the best choice if possible, for many of us that isn’t an option. As a woman who has never found the “perfect mate,” I had the choice of no kids or donor kids, and I chose the donor route. It was the best decision of my life, and I think my boys would agree that they’re happy to be here. 

For many single women, it’s not a question of whether you want to raise your kids without a dad, but whether you want to have kids at all. How can you say it’s better to be unhappy the rest of your life, just because a woman didn’t find “Mr. Right”? How about comparing donor kids to children whose fathers deserted them when they were young, or a divorce in which the father is completely disengaged from his children’s lives? I think a father’s rejection is much more damaging than being raised by a mother who wanted you so much she was willing to “go it alone.” 

In my case, my kids have been surrounded by a loving family their whole lives. So it’s simplistic to say that having a dad makes up for everything. There is no one right answer for raising good kids. Whether middle class and single, poor and married or anyone in between, all kinds of parents have the ability to raise good kids. 

Laurie Gross 

Toledo, Ohio

Karen I. writes:

Planned Parenthood of St. Louis plans to start offering donor insemination to lesbians in Fall, 2010. The ad announcing the upcoming services shows two women in an embrace and says “They just found out they are expecting, finally.” I like the “finally.” Perhaps they finally realized they cannot keep having sex with one another and have a baby? 

A woman can now go to Planned Parenthood to have an abortion when she does not feel like having a baby, and back to them for insemination when she does. 

There will always be some women who want to have babies without men so it seems to me the answer is for men to refuse to donate sperm under any circumstances. Parents should raise their boys to think of this as the evil it is, telling them early and often they disapprove of the practice.

Laura writes:

I don’t know whether the recent slew of articles on this issue, which have been prompted in part by the upcoming Hollywood movie on the subject, have considered the ethics of donating sperm in the first place. There will always be women who want to do this and I think there will always be some men who want to also. It is every bit as wrong on the part of donors as it is on the part of the women. The practice should be illegal.

Laurie Gross above wrote:

I think a father’s rejection is much more damaging than being raised by a mother who wanted you so much she was willing to “go it alone.”

Imagine being raised by a mother who did not think you even needed a father and who placed her own convenience over the inconvenience of searching for a man who could be a father to her children.

Jesse Powell writes:

Turkey recently passed a law making it a criminal offense for a woman to go abroad and get herself impregnated through artificial insemination. Very few Turkish women actually go abroad seeking artificial insemination but there was a recent episode where one of Turkey’s best known actresses had announced publicly that she had used artificial insemination to conceive her now (at the time of the article) 5 month old daughter. 

Well, Turkey is having none of this lifestyle artificial insemination crap; it is maintaining its value system that all children must know who their fathers and grandfathers are, the feminists be damned!

 When artificial insemination first got started virtually all of the women who used it were married to men with infertility problems but now only 13 to 18 percent of women using artificial insemination fit into that category. Now, artificial insemination predominantly is used either by lesbian couples or by single women who don’t want to bother with the entanglement of forming a relationship with a man in order to have a child. 

One reason why artificial insemination is not used so much to overcome male infertility within marriages anymore may be because of improvements in ICSI technology (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection) where sperm are injected directly into the egg allowing men who produce only a small number of healthy sperm to still become the biological father of their children. 

In 1987, in the United States, 65,000 births were the result of artificial insemination. The great majority of them, it is safe to assume, to married women using either the husband’s sperm or a donor’s sperm, depending on the severity of the fertility problem in the husband.

Laura writes:

That’s interesting. I assume Turkey does not allow artificial insemination within its borders. Also, I would imagine it would be difficult to enforce its new law, but it’s an important statute anyway.

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