Regulating Unassisted Conception

If you go back to yesterday’s post you’ll see a few comments following.  And if you go to my first response, following Sam’s comment, you’ll see that I tossed out an idea for regulating unassisted reproduction.   (I’ve decided to call it that for the moment rather than “natural reproduction” for two reasons.  First, I’ve already started to think critically about the use of the word “natural” and I don’t want to muddy the waters any further.   Second, I think it nicely highlights that it is the complement of “assisted reproduction”–which is what ART is.

Anyway, regulating the actual conception is totally impractical and intrusive.   I’m not really even contemplating that as an outrageous sci fi suggestion.  But I am interested in considering the possibility that simply having sex and producing a child doesn’t make you the child’s parent.  One could regulate parenthood resulting from unassisted conception without directly regulating conception.

And then, just as a began to think about this, yet another octuplets story crossed my screen.   This one suggests that the hospital where the octuplets are being cared for may not release them to Suleman until she can show that she can properly care for them.

Now if this is true, it does not seem like a bad thing to me.  It also seems somewhat related to the idea I’ve just tossed out.   Granted that this is ART, but that’s not why the hospital can take this position–or at least I don’t think this is.  I would guess the hospital is acting out of some generalized obligation to make sure the babies it discharges are going to be in suitable environments.   Which means they do the same for all babies, no matter what the form of their conception.

I realize, of course, that no one is suggesting that Suleman is not the legal parent of the children.  In that way, what I’ve tossed off is very different.  But what you can see here is validation of the idea that simply because you gave birth or have that genetic link (which Suleman does) it doesn’t mean you have some unfettered rights with regard to the resulting children.   There’s a grain of commonality with my proposal.

Soon I’ll try thinking this through a bit more systematically, but for the moment it just struck me that the parallel was there.

More on regulating reproduction

This connects back to a post I wrote a little while ago about regulating assisted reproduction.   As I mentioned then, the octuplets are one of the worst case scenarios for unregulated assisted reproduction.

In today’s Baltimore Sun there’s an op-ed piece that picks up on this theme.    It’s by two very thoughtful people–Naomi Cahn and Alan Pertman.   I suggest you go read it, but reduced to its essence, it’s an argument that even as we regulate adoption, we should also regulate ART.

The logic is strong.  As the authors point out, adoption and ART have much in common–they are both “unnatural” means by which people become parents.    (“Unnatural” is my word, because I’m interested in the deployment of the term “natural’ at the moment.  The authors say “non-traditional”.   I wonder if that’s right, though.  Adoption is pretty old and might well be considered traditional.

Logic or no, though, I find the proposal somewhat worrisome.   We are in the throes of a struggle in which some people are trying to regulate lesbians and gay men right out of the category of those eligible to adopt or to maintain laws that exclude them.    The very same people would welcome the chance to regulate lesbians and gay men right out of ART, too, no doubt.    (Indeed, that was the point of my earlier post on this.)    

Donor Siblings

A new topic seems to be making the rounds–well, not really all that new.   (I wrote about it over  a year ago.)  But surely making the rounds.  There is this from Slate and this on NPR tonight. Part of me just wants to sit back and have you go and compare and contrast.  (That’s the teacher in me.)  But just in case you are not inclined to do so, I will offer some thoughts.

Both stories are about the donor sibling registry.   The registry allows people who used or were conceived with donor sperm to track down other people who used or were concived with the same donor.   I’m not sure what exactly happened in the last couple of days that made both stories turn up–it seems to have been the publication of the article  in Human Reproduction. (I’ll try to give that a read myself soon.  Nothing like primary sources.)

Although starting with the same substance, the stories seem to be quite different.  The Slate blog is somehwat sensational in tone and a bit sloppy.   I do sort of get this, being a blogger myself.   But it’s quite a leap to compare the sperm donors involved here to Ghengis Khan on the one hand and Nadya Suleman on the other.    I actually think sperm donors who donate to reputable sperm banks are fairly responsible.  The only people who will be using your sperm to create children have given it quite a bit of thought.

Now that said, the idea that 55 kids might have been created using the same donor is quite startling.   There may well be a problem with too many people carrying common genes, I suppose.  But the sibling registry might address that.  And I wonder how big a problem it is. 

News in Brief: Selling the Kids

I’m giving the octuplets the day off.   No doubt there will be more to say about that tomorrow or the next day.  But meanwhile, there aer a couple of smaller points I wanted to make.

This from today’s New York Times.   This is what commodification of children looks like.   I think it might be important to keep that in mind.  I do see that there is some similarity between selling a child and selling sperm (see the comment by Nelly here).   In a general way, both are about commodification of reproduction.    But I also think they are quite different.

At the very least, perhaps we can agree that there’s a spectrum.   Selling the kids (or trading them for a bird) is far more broadly (I’m tempted to wish it were universally) unacceptable.    Surrogacy falls someplace in between sperm (and egg) donation and outright sale of children.

Who pays for the octuplets?

Since I am still (or back) on the topic of the octuplets, I thought I’d throw out one more idea.

It seems to me that a good deal of the hostility directed at Nadya Suleman arises from the expense of the octuplets and her inability to pay for them.   I suspect if she were sufficiently wealthy to be able to afford to raise the kids without public support, we’d be much more inclined to let her go her own way.

So perhaps there is someone else who could pay apart from us?   One obvious place to look is to the father of the children.   That turns out to be less than satisfying.   I’m not convinced that there is actually a legal father here.   There’s the sperm donor.   But under California law I don’t think he’s legal father, which does seem to make sense.  He was well gone before the oldest of the kids was conceived (if I’m doing my math right.)   That makes it hard for me to argue that he is somehow morally responsible in a way that makes it right to burden him with the costs.

Now it also seems that Suleman was married when a bunch of the children were born, but it hardly makes sense to look to her (now ex-) husband and call him the father.   As far as we know, he has nothing to do with the operation.

There is, however, someone I would consider obligating to help pay for the kids.  That would be Michael Kamrava.   He’s the fertility doctor who is apparently responsible for all fourteen children. 

Octoindustry

Just a couple of quick notes here.

This is definitely more than fifteen minutes of fame, but then, new players keep coming out of the woodwork.  First there was the mother. (I won’t call her “octomom” as I noted yesterday.)   Then there was the “father.” Now comes the grandfather.

I just noticed that the link to that piece includes “octomedia”.  Doesn’t that just say it all?  As the end of the grandfather article makes clear, this is now a mad scramble in which every media outlet wants a piece of the action.  Public frenzy is a good sell.  I’m guessing that anger and scorn are probably a better basis for frenzy than are approval, too.   It simply seems to be in everyone’s interest (save, of course, for the fourteen children) to turn this into as much of a circus as possible.

And here is a version of the story I blogged on yesterday with the author’s name attached–John Rogers.  Credit where credit is due.

The Octuplets Yet Again–Will It Never End?

Some of you might be thinking that it would end if I’d just stop writing about it?  Perhaps so.   But still, interesting little bits do keep coming along.   I actually am quite restrained.    There are many many items I have not written about.

This is really a meta-comment about the octuplets, anyway.  Which is to say that it is not about them directly, but rather about the reaction to them.   I take this AP article from today as my starting point.   It does a rather nice job of tracing the trajectory of the story, reminding us how Nadya Suleman went from being the beneficiary of a miracle of modern medicine to a pariah in about two weeks.     It’s amazing to think back on how quickly the story pivoted.

The AP story recites a list of factors that turned Suleman (and her ART doc) into the villian of the piece.  Most of these I’ve touched on.   Single mother, receiving public assistance, already has six children.  Add to that the fact that Suleman apparently resembles Angelina Jolie (news to me).

It’s possible now to have a tiny bit of distance on the reactions to Suleman and it seems to me there are at least two things going on.  

Do the Octuplets Have a Dad?

All this time the octuplets mother has been described as a single mother.   Indeed, I’ve discussed this before.   But now here is a new angle on it.    A man, identified as Denis Beaudoin, has come forward asserting that he is the sperm donor whose sperm was used to create all fourteen of the children.

Perhaps he is.  But it might be worth mentioning that even assuming he is the donor he is not, by operation of law, the father of the children.   Under California law a sperm donor is not generally a father.

Indeed, it strikes me as ludicrous to consider him a father under any scheme.   He apparently dated Suleman from 1997-99, well before the birth of any of these children.  He’s clearly never functioned in any paternal or parental role.

Of somewhat greater interest to me is the note in the ABC story that Suleman was married until January 2008.   Now California is among the states that has a marital presumption.   That means that if a married woman gives birth to a child there are circumstances under which her husband is presumed to be the father.   Indeed, there are circumstances under which that presumption may be conclusive–that is, where the husband is indisputably the father.  This generally requires the passage of a couple of years after the birth of the child in question.    I’m not sure if it is applicable here.  I also noticed that the divorce decree says there are no children of the marriage, but I’m not sure what the effect of that is.

I’m not an expert on California law, but it strikes me as more likely that the ex-husband is the father of some of the older children than that the sperm donor is.   But even that’s rather silly.   I gather the ex-husband has had no involvement with the kids at all.

I’m really not sure what to make of the rush to label the sperm donor the father.  Most likley I should chalk it up to the press eager to wring one more story out of this circus, I suppose.  But again, it hardly gives much of a model for what it means to be a father.

100% Natural

Sorry–ended up taking a couple of days off there.  I’m back now.

My just finished discussion about Utah has made me focus again on language, and in particular, on the use of the term “natural”.   There are several places in which you hear this in a parentage context and they are sometimes contradictory.   It’s worth thinking about.

Sometimes a person is referred to as the “natural parent” of a child.    It’s a trifle archaic, I think, but you do still hear it.   It means (at least as I think about it) a person who is genetically linked to a child.   So the natural mother is, barring use of ART, the woman who gives birth to the child.  The natural father is the man who had sex with the woman resulting in pregnancy.

Put less nicely, it is the parent of an illegitimate child.  I do think the term is almost exclusively used with regard to unmarried parents.   Thus where a married woman gives birth to a child, her husband isn’t referred to as the natural father of the child, even if he is genetically related to the child.  He’s simply “the father.”  Indeed, I went and looked it up in one of the on-line dictionaries and  “natural father” is defined as “the father of an illegitimate child.”

Utah, Part II

(This is just picking up from this mornings post, so go read that one first–I had to rush out before I could properly finish it. )

Just to close out the thoughts about the “it’s not natural” argument, I’d offer two things in response.   First, natural is not synonmous with good and second, really from the first, what does naturalness have to do with this anyway?  I actually plan to come back to this at some point.    The idea of parenthood being natural for some people is an interesting one, clearly embodied in the term “natural parent.”   And it is larger than the topic I’m addressing here.

There’s another way to look at the “natural” comment, one that is more pragmatic.   We cannot regulate “natural” parenthood.   Or at least we say we cannot.   But lesbian and gay parents cannot reproduce naturally and so are subject to regulation–either because they need state approval to adopt or foster or because they need access to ART, which is also subject to regulation.   Looked at that way, it’s more descriptive than anything else.