Mummy, what's a sperm donor?

Parents of donor-inseminated children can find it difficult to explain that Daddy is not, strictly speaking, daddy. By Joanna Reid

It was one of Professor Dan Cohn-Sherbok's students who made him decide to come out of the closet. While attending his medical ethics course, she wrote in an essay that the products of artificial insemination are like Frankenstein's monsters. He marked the essay - but did not tell her that he was one of those "monsters". From that moment, he knew he would have to challenge such views and that he would have to be honest about his genetic origins.

Now Professor of Jewish Theology at the University of Kent, Cohn-Sherbok thinks he is one of the oldest products of donor insemination (DI) living in Britain. He was conceived at Chicago Medical School in 1945; his "social" father was a doctor and the donor an anonymous medical student. The technique - injecting semen into the woman's cervix with a syringe - was much the same as that used today, although then it was not widely available.

Cohn-Sherbok did not discover the truth about his origins until he was 27, when his mother told him. The man he thought was his biological father had always been distant - so much so that Cohn-Sherbok thought he wasadopted. His "social" father had never come to terms with his own infertility or Professor Cohn-Sherbok's birth.

He says it was terrible to learn the truth at that age, and even worse when the man he still calls his father disinherited him soon afterwards, on the grounds that he was not his biological child.

Professor Cohn-Sherbok is now married, has come to terms with the trauma, and is no longer angry at his family: his "social" father, at the age of 90, has also mellowed in attitude. But he is keen to dispel the image of DI as a weird practice that should be kept secret. He strongly advocates being honest with DI children about their origins from the start.

Research by Professor Susan Golombok and her colleagues at City University, London, however, shows that this is still unlikely. Out of 45 DI families they interviewed, with children aged four to eight, not one child had been told how they were conceived. Professor Cohn-Sherbok thinks the secret is often kept to protect the male partner and his feelings about his infertility. As Professor Cohn-Sherbok says, "It seems to go to the heart of a man's virility." But keeping DI a secret, he argues, means a man is never forced to come to terms with his feelings and they may well interfere with his relationship with the child.

"Every time the man sees the child he'll be reminded that it isn't his, especially if that child is in many ways different from the father, as I was," he says. "The child becomes a symbol of his failure to reproduce."

But the research by Professor Golombok does not support the view that DI fathersmight have problems relating to their children, particularly if their origins are kept secret. It found that parents in these families were warmer and more involved with their children than parents of naturally conceived children and concludes that "genetic ties are less important for family functioning than a strong desire for parenting". But Professor Golombok's research does ask why such dedicated parents cannot tell their child such an important fact about themselves.

Donor insemination has been available as an NHS treatment since the early Seventies, with the numbers of children conceived by this method increasing steadily until 1992, when numbers started to drop. The decline in DI is probably due to the increasing use of Intra Cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), an infertility treatment for men with low sperm counts. Nevertheless, about 1,500 children a year are still conceived by donor insemination. They were technically illegitimate until 1987, when the law changed, and Professor Cohn-Sherbok thinks that even now society has not come to terms with the method.

As the law stands, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority has to tell an adult who asks whether they were born as a result of DI, and whether they are related to someone they want to marry. Donor confidentiality is protected: the HFEA is not allowed to disclose donors' names or any other information about them. Donors are, though, asked to provide a pen portrait of themselves and their interests, so that if the law changes at a future date, this non-identifying information could be made available to the child. But children who have been given no inkling of their origins will not, of course, be in a position to ask information from the HFEA.

Telling a DI child about his or her genetic origins means that both parents have to be comfortable with the facts. Having talked to large numbers of parents, Professor Golombok sympathises with their problems. "I just feel it's very difficult for parents to tell a child at the moment, and you have to consider that when encouraging them to do so. It's not just that the child has a right to know; you can't ignore the fact that this could cause a big problem for the family and could have negative consequences for the child."

Adoption studies have shown that it is better for a child to be told their true origins, but as Professor Golombok points out, DI does not have the same social acceptability as adoption, or the support services available to adoptive parents.

Things are changing, however. Angela Mays, who has had two children conceived by donor insemination, helped to set up the DI Network in 1993 to give information and help to couples considering DI, as well as to DI families. Although the network encourages more openness, it leaves the decision about telling a child to each couple. A steady trickle of couples who have used DI are phoning for advice, having decided to tell their child the truth later in childhood. "One mother said she had decided to tell her child after 11 years," says Mays. "She couldn't believe the relief she felt." Another couple joined the DI Network, then decided not to tell. "That's fair enough," says Mays. "We've served our purpose. They'll be back in 10 years' time."

For further information write to: DI Network, PO Box 265, Sheffield, S3 7YX.