Nobody's Child, Everybody's Children:

Parents’ Assessment of Emotional Risks For their Donor-Conceived Children

When considering family-building by egg or sperm donation, couples are usually keenly aware that donor conception may have an emotional impact on their hoped-for child.  In counselling sessions prior to treatment, certain themes are consistently raised.  Factors that parents anticipate posing the greatest emotional risk to their children are not necessarily the ones that children later report as being difficult.  Other times, parents may not consider issues that could trouble their children in the future.

Prospective parents’ perception of risks to children conceived through egg or sperm donation include:

• The child may be emotionally disconnected from the non-genetic parent;

• The extended family may not fully accept the child;

• If the donor is known to the family, he or she may be intrusive, or try to claim parental rights;

• The child may be distressed by lack of physical resemblance to the non-genetic parent;

• The child may inherit a mental or medical health issue from the donor;

• Inadvertently, the child may grow up to fall in love with and marry a half-genetic sibling;

• If the donor is known to the family, the child may perceive him/her as a parent;

• The child may feel angry at their parents for choosing donor conception.

Issues that are not frequently considered high risk for their children, but may indeed have a significant impact, include the higher likelihood of multiple gestation (with egg donation) and the donor-conceived child not having access to and/or identifying information on the donor.

Many of the same concerns are raised by heterosexual couples, single women, and lesbians accessing donor conception, but there are differences as well.  This paper will explore themes of concern raised by heterosexual couples considering using an egg or sperm donor to conceive their children.  The discussion will include the findings of studies on families built by donor conception and the accounts of donor offspring and their parents.  The aim of the paper is to explore whether issues parents perceive as posing the greatest emotional risk to their children are in fact the issues donor offspring struggle with the most.