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03/23/2008: "Whole families benefit children"

"What troubles me is that children today are being raised in an era of increasingly flexible definitions of parenthood, definitions that often serve the interests of adults without regard for children.”

Marquardt has solicited the views of donor children from across the world. These “babies” are now grown up (one of the most vocal voices is pushing 70) and many are very unhappy. “They tell me that their early attempts to make sense of their origins were made more painful by the people around them who insisted that it shouldn’t matter,” Marquardt reports. “That they should be glad to be alive. That they shouldn’t torment the parents who raised them. That they are silly and deluded for thinking that some guy who went into a little room with a dirty magazine holds a key to their identity.”

But where is Marquardt coming from? The child of a broken home, she has argued in a previous book (Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce) that Western society underplays the effect of divorce. She claims to feel kinship with the offspring of donor conception who, similarly, are “not supposed to have a story” because it might conflict with the reproductive “rights” of the individual: “This debate is dominated by adults’ rights: the rights of same-sex couples, the rights of infertile adults, the rights of singles. But we also have to hear and respond to children’s pain when they lose the ability to grow up with their own mom and dad, whether it’s due to donor conception, or parental abandonment, or divorce.”

[ You mean in this, as in everything, nature did it best, first? You don't say! ]

http://whosedaughter.blogspot.com/2007_12_01_archive.html#3566895203965593105