Brad Wilcox weighs in on the My Daddy’s Name is Donor study. Brad is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, and lectured at our ITAF conference last summer.
Seventy-one percent of the adult offspring of these single mothers agree that: “My sperm donor is half of who I am,” and 78% wonder “what my sperm donor’s family is like.” Half report that they “feel sad” when they see “friends with their biological fathers and mothers.” Donor offspring with single mothers also are much less likely to report that they can rely on their family. Fifty-six percent of these offspring said they depend more on friends than on family, compared to just 29% of young adults born to two biological parents.
The study’s findings echo recent commentary from young adults conceived through donor insemination. Writing in the Washington Post a few years ago, Katrina Clark reported that she envied friends who had both a mother and a father. “That was when the emptiness came over me. I realized that I am, in a sense, a freak. I really, truly would never have a dad. I finally understood what it meant to be donor-conceived, and I hated it.”
In the U.K., Tom Ellis recently decided to try to find his donor dad through a registry that attempts to connect children to their biological fathers. Without him, he told a reporter, “I will never feel whole.”
Such a sense of loss may help explain why the study found that adult offspring of single-mothers-by-choice were 177% more likely to report having had trouble with drugs and alcohol than children born to two biological parents. Perhaps in part because they did not enjoy the love, discipline and example of a flesh-and-blood father, young adults conceived through donor insemination to a single mother were also 146% more likely to report having been “in trouble with the law” before age 25.
So, despite the latest propaganda in favor of a father-optional future, this study suggests two stubborn truths: Children long to know and be known by their biological fathers, and they are much more likely to thrive when they have their own father in their lives.