DNA and the Power of An Idea

One of the most interesting stories in today’s NYT magazine feature on DNA (see yesterday’s post, too) is the tale of Denny Ogden and D’Arcy Griggs.   I’ll summarize it here.  

D’Arcy Griggs was 34 years old when she called Denny Ogden and said he was her father.   Ogden knew that a woman he had had a summer romance with in college had become pregnant and given the child up for adoption.  He’d never traced that child.   He had married and had three more children.   He was 54 when D”Arcy Griggs called. 

She said she had tracked him down after her birth mother died of cancer.   He checked her background to make sure it wasn’t some swindle and then they began exchanging e-mails.  He began to think of her as his daughter.   They reveled in the little things they had in common.   After a few months, they decided to meet and he came to Seattle where she lived.  

Which Man Is Father To The Child?

There’s an excellent and fascinating article in the New York Times magazine (publication date tomorrow, but on-line now.)    It’s  a look at a problem that has arisen with comparatively easy DNA testing.   What happens when men learn that the children they are raising are not genetically related to them.  

I’ve written about this a bit before, but the article offers far more extended consideration than I’ve managed in a short post.   It also raises a number of different issues, primarily using individual stories to make its points and raise its questions.  

There are a few things that stand out for me.    First, as Ruth Padawer (the author) notes, in the cases discussed when a man finds out that the child he has been raising is not genetically related to him he also learns that the woman who gave birth to the child (in these cases his wife) has lied to him.  He learns she has been unfaithful to him.    

News from the UK: Gay Fathers Reflect

I seem to have allowed myself a de facto sabbatical from my blog last week.   My apologies to you all, but I suppose I needed the time away.   Anyway, I’ll gear myself back up now. 

Here’s a story about gay fathers in the UK.  It isn’t really a story, though. It’s six gay men/couples talking about their experiences adopting in the UK.   Not the sort of thing you see in the mainstream press all that often, really.  

I’ve been thinking a good deal about gay men and parenthood recently, though I haven’t had occasion to write about it for a while.   One so often lumps together “gay and lesbian” parents.  Yet parenthood is deeply gendered (surely I’ve said this thirty times?) and so lumping lesbian and gay parents together misses as much as it captures.   

Sperm Donors, Egg Donors or Gamete Donors?

Recently there has been a lot of conversation on the blog about anonymous donors.   Sometimes it’s clear that people have meant to use the term inclusively, to cover both egg donors and sperm donors.   But sometimes it seems to have been more specifically about sperm donors, as when sperm donors were compared with ”deadbeat dads.”  

It seems to me that in some respects whatever concerns there are about anonymous donors should be the same for sperm donors and egg donors.   In essence, they donate the same thing–genetic material necessary to create a child.   To the extent it seems like a problem, in both cases a child might not be able to trace back his or her genetic lineage.     

Despite this similarity, the conversation tended to focus fairly specifically on sperm donors from time to time, while it never migrated specifically to egg donors.

But if you are not my father, who is?

Yesterday I discussed a new case from Maryland in which a married man belated asserted he was not the father of a 13-year-old daughter he’d acted as father to since her birth.   Here’s another case , this one from Indiana, that was decided at just about the same time.   It’s similar in the set-up, but quite different in the legal issue.

Barrington and Lisa Smith were married in 1985. While married, Lisa gave birth to four children.   PSS was born third, in 1992.   CWS was born in 1996.  

The Smiths divorced in 2001.  The paternity of PSS and CWS was apparently at issue in the divorce.   A guardian at litem was appointed to represent PSS in connection with the paternity inquiry.  The final divorce decree specified that Barrington Smith was not biologically related to CWS and shared custody was ordered for the other three children, including PSS.

In 2008 PSS filed suit to establish paternity.  

Wait…Maybe I’m Not Your Father After All

There’s a recent Maryland case that illustrates some of the problems that might arise if you use genetics as the sole marker of parenthood.   I light of the substantial discussion over the last couple of weeks about sperm donors, embryo mix-ups and parenthood, I thought it was worthy of comment here.  

Darren Gerard Kamp and Vicki Jo Duckworth  married in 1983.   While they were married Duckworth gave birth to four children, the youngest of whom was Julie Kamp. 

Julie Kamp was conceived in early 1992.    At the time, Kamp was working out-of-state and only visited his wife occassionally.  Perhaps even more importantly, he’d had a vasectomy in 1987.   For these reasons, even before Julie Kamp was born, both Duckworth and Kamp knew it was quite likely if not certain that Kamp was not genetically related to her. 

Who’s the Father?

A recent comment on an earlier post led me to this case.  Sandy May asks, reasonably enough, who I think the father is.   Turns out I have some thoughts about more than just that question.  

Here’s the story in a nutshell.   Woman marries man (call him M1) in 1986.  While married to M1 she gives birth to three kids, in 1989, 1993 and 1996.  M1  believed he was genetically related to each of the children and assumed all the obligations of a parent.  In fact, the 2nd and 3rd children were genetically related to a different man (M2), but that’s getting ahead of my story. 

In 1997 the wife told M1 that she’d been having an affair but assured him that the children were all “his”–by which she meant they were genetically related to him.   As a result of the revelation about the affair, M1 and the wife separated, but they shared custody of the children, four days each, for eight more years.  

The Father of Michael Jackson’s Children?

Just because the tabloids are all over every aspect of the Michael Jackson story doesn’t mean there aren’t a few interesting points that could actually make one think.  I’ve written about Michael Jackson’s children and the legal questions presented there a couple of times.   (I didn’t post when permanant custody of the kids was awarded to Katherine Jackson, their grandmother, but a court order to that effect was issued last week.)  

So here is the next twist in the saga–one that was almost inevitable given the fact that it has been widely rumored that Michael Jackson was not genetically related to his children.   Mark Lester–he played Oliver Twist in the musical Oliver! and I do vividly recall him singing “Who Will Buy,”–says that he donated sperm for Jackson and may well be genetically related to at least the middle child and only girl, Paris.

Artificial Gametes, Laboratory Sperm And the Future of Parenthood

A story in today’s Daily Telegraph goes into some detail about scientific work towards creating artificial gametes.   Understanding the processes by which gametes (that’s egg and sperm cells) are produced has clear implications for infertility research.   But as the article describes, at the outer edge this research also suggests the possibility that egg and sperm cells could be produced by either men or women and that these cells could be produced from ordinary cells in our body.

The Telegraph chooses an eye-catching headline for the story:   “Does lab sperm mean the end of fathers?”   (It’s actually not a particularly well chosen headline, since the article suggests that it would be easier for the cells of men to be altered to serve as eggs than for the cells of women to be altered to serve as sperm.)  The answer–also in the headline is “Not in my lifetime.”

A Few Further Thoughts on Father’s Day

As I read through the New York Times this past Sunday I was impressed with the pervasiveness of the Father’s Day theme. Virtually every section of the paper  I picked up seemed to have at least one Father’s Day themed article—sports, business, style, and op-ed.  The Style section alone had two Father’s Day articles, plus a column reviewing a couple of books around single-motherhood thrown in for good measure.  

The pieces that struck me most were a pair of essays in the News of the Week by John S. and Jason Burnett, who are father and son.   They were separated for 27 years—from the time Jason was 10 to the time he was 37.   Though the essays are a bit sketchy on historical detail, it’s clear that John Burnet left his family.   He says, “I bolted down to the Brooklyn docks and signed on a merchant ship.”