Happy Pride Month

One aspect of my work is doing fertility counselling with the LGBTQT+ community, assisting them to build families, mostly through the use of egg donors, sperm donors, and/or gestational carriers (surrogacy). I am very passionate about this work and about supporting diversity in terms of what we consider to be 'family'. In honour of pride month, I thought I would share an article I wrote about families a few years ago:

What does family mean to you? If it means people who are biologically related, I want to ask you to consider your perspective.

Most of us also think of family as the nuclear family, meaning married, heterosexual parents and their biological children living in the same home. This also bears reconsideration.

If you believe that the nuclear family is the ‘natural’ living arrangement for humans, and this has always been the case, you could not be more wrong. I would like to clear up some of the main myths we continue to uphold about family.

In his recent Atlantic article, “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake” (March, 2020), David Brooks points out that the nuclear family only came into existence for the first time in the 1950s, and by the late 1960s, according to divorce rates, it was already falling apart. Nevertheless, the pursuit of the nuclear family has persisted. It is only the Millennials I see in my practice who seem to have a more fluid idea of the arrangement they want to live in (I find my Millennial clients, in fact, are far more likely than their older counterparts to say they do not plan to have children, and other Western countries have already experienced major fertility declines among their populations, so this appears to be a world-wide trend).

Our rigid ideas about families is an issue I see every day in my work as a psychotherapist. Often it’s around clients feeling guilt and obligation to maintain relationships with their biological parents and/or relatives even if these individuals are extremely abusive or toxic. Many people will sacrifice their own physical, mental and financial wellbeing to take care of these relatives because they believe this is their incontrovertible responsibility.

The definition of family is also critical to another area of my work. I am an infertility and assisted-reproductive technology counsellor. Clients come to me who are using sperm and egg donors because of infertility, or because they are a single person seeking to become a parent, or because they are in a same-sex relationship.

The first myth about family we need to banish is that children need a [straight] mother and [straight] father. The ‘form’ of the family, whether it is same-sex parents, a single parent or several care-givers in plutonic relationships, is not the critical factor. Kids need adults who can provide them with unconditional love, and a physically and emotionally safe environment. This is backed up by extensive research indicating financial and emotional stability of a household are more important than structure to child well-being.

According to Brooks, throughout most of human history, kin was not something based on biology, it was something you could create. Members of the LGBTQT+ community have been leaders in creating ‘forged’ families, essentially due to necessity. They have often been rejected by their biological families and they need to rely on alternative means in order to become parents, including using sperm and egg donors, surrogates or adoption. They also create strong social networks amongst themselves that involve the same emotional bonds most people look to have (but do not always get) with their biological relatives.

The second myth about family that must die is that the emotional bonds we form are dependent on a genetic connection. It is perfectly understandable that people will grieve if they planned to have biological children and they discover that this is not possible. It’s also understandable for my LGBTQT+ clients to grieve that they cannot blend their genetics with their partner’s the way other couples can, since most of us feel there is some romance in this. But what surprises me is the extent to which many of my clients will doubt that the same love that exists between a biological parent and child can exist between a non-biological parent and child.

Now, there is likely some mammalian primal instinct that drives many people’s desire for biological children, but beyond that there are a number of unfounded fears. The first is that my clients worry they will not love or bond with a child made from someone other’s genes, even if they carry the pregnancy. I often hear from my clients that they had always pictured their children to be mini versions of themselves. Their children would look just like them and share all their [best] traits!

What I tell anyone planning to become a parent is that the most dangerous thing you can do is make assumptions about who your child is going to be. This is something we cannot predict, nor control [yes, we can do a lot of tinkering with embryos, but this is not currently available to people to create their dream child], no matter whose sperm, egg or uterus is being used to create the child.

If you can only imagine yourself loving a child who looks a certain way, is a certain gender, has a particular personality, you might want to rethink becoming a parent. While, yes, genetics can help predict certain aspects of health and physical appearance, research has found very little correlation between parent and child personality traits.

The second misconception held by many people is that a child will not consider a person their parent unless it is their biological parent, nor will the child love the parent unless this is the case. This could not be more wrong.  The big concern I hear is that if a child discovers they are the product of a donor, they will reject the non-biological parent and then pack their bags and try to go live with the donor who they will consider their ‘real’ parent.

Once again, there is no basis for this concern. The assumption here is that if your child is biologically yours, they will adore you, and that is also not true. Once again, we do not get guarantees. You and the child you raise may have a wonderful relationship or a complicated one, but it will not be on account of whether or not you are biologically related. Children bond with caregivers who provide love and nurturing. The person who provided sperm or eggs for their conception is not automatically their parent.

Extensive research, especially that conducted by Susan Golombok, a professor at the University of Cambridge, has found that there is greater psychological well-being among families where there are not biological connections between at least one parent and child (including families that have used egg or sperm donors, or have adopted). Golombok has also found there were no differences in parenting quality or psychological adjustment of children compared to families where children and parents are biologically related.  Look at it this way, anyone who uses a donor, or adopts, must be driven to become a parent. These means are lengthy, emotionally taxing and very expensive.

By the way, my clients who do go ahead with donor conception never have regrets, nor do they report any issues around bonding.

So, since genetics are not important for love or emotional bonding within families, does that mean that if you use a sperm, egg or embryo donor, you do not have to tell your child you did so? Absolutely not! This is not only unethical (it is every human’s right to know the truth about their conception/origins), it carries huge risks.

I warn my clients that, if they are not prepared to tell their child the truth about their conception via a donor, right from the beginning of the child’s life, they should not use a donor. Period.

Once again, there is an extensive body of research that has found that: 1) Even if parents want to hide from their child that they were donor conceived, it usually comes out at some point anyways; 2) If parents have not told their child about their donor conception and the child finds out through another means, the child will be furious with the parents; 3) If parents tell their child about their conception via a donor, and do it from the start, than a child is significantly less likely to hold any negative feelings about it; 4) Donor-conceived individuals often want to know the identity of the donor [which is why the donor industries are moving away from using anonymous donors]; and, 5) When donor-conceived individuals show interest in knowing the identity of the donor, it is not because they want to run off and have the donor raise them, it is curiosity [it is natural to be interested in our genetic origins and ancestry].

It is time we let go of our narrow definition of family. As Brooks argues, “For many people, the era of the nuclear family has been a catastrophe. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart”.

Instead, perhaps we need to use the definition created by the Vanier Institute:

Any combination of two or more persons who are bound together over time by ties of mutual consent, birth and/or adoption or placement, and who together assume responsibilities for variant combinations of some of the following: physical maintenance and care of group members; addition of new members through procreation, adoption or placement; socialization of children; social control of members; production, consumption, distribution of goods and services; and affective nurturance (i.e. love).