A professional journal reports on the experiences of Donor Conceived Persons searching for their anonymous dads, and/or half-siblings. One fact that I have been interested in for some time: how many people using Artificial Reproductive Technology are actually infertile, and how many have normal fertility, but do not have opposite sex partners? This study is obviously quite preliminary, in that it only looks are the subset of DCP’s who have chosen to use the Registry to search for their donors. However, among that set of 165 people:
Fifty-eight percent (96) of offspring reported their parents to be a heterosexual couple, 23% (38) a single mother and 15% (25) a lesbian couple.
In other words, nearly half of the mothers in this sample had no male partner. We don’t know whether they had medically impaired fertility.
I have no idea how representative this would be. And I don’t know of anyone else who is even asking this question. This article deals with only a very limited set of issues surrounding the DCP’s decision to search, and how satisfied they were with it. We definitely need more research, before we go careening off, making the purchase of human gametes an entitlement for anyone who has the money or the insurance coverage….
