The Possibilities and Pitfalls of Talking about Conception with Donor Egg: Why Parents Struggle and How Clinicians Can Help

ABSTRACT

It can be challenging for parents to talk with their children about gamete donation. Many mothers who chose donor egg, following failed fertility treatments and/or advanced maternal age, do not talk about it with their children. Research has found significant parental anxiety, increasing with time after conception, in parents who have not told their children about their donor origins. A set of common reasons given for a reluctance to talk will be considered, along with its impact on the psychic functioning of parents and children. Talking about donor conception is not a one-time conversation but a process that will evolve over the child’s lifetime. Psychological adjustment to the choice of egg donation that can foster disclosure will be discussed, including how couples (1) accept that a donor is required; (2) imagine the donor, who is often anonymous; and (3) incorporate the choice of donor conception into daily family life. There is growing research and psychoanalytic literature on the development of children conceived with gamete donation; however, fewer families of heterosexual parents are included in these follow-up studies because of the prevalence of nondisclosure. This article considers why talking about conception with donor egg is so hard for many families and offers lines of inquiry that may be helpful to these families and the clinicians that will support them.

Notes

1. I use this term to include all LGBT parents, but note that most research and clinical writing has focused on families of two men or two women.

2. The term artificial insemination (AI) most obviously reminds us of the animal husbandry origins of reproductive medicine; it seems to eclipse all the actual people involved: the woman, the sperm provider, and the infertile man.

3. Mothers Via Egg Donation evolved into Parents Via Egg Donation, a not-for-profit organization created in 2008 by Marna Gatlin to provide information and support to families.

4. Modern Families is the title of Golombok’s book (2015), and her choice to identify “new families” rather than “non-traditional families” (p. 3).

5. Available through Amazon; for example, search: “Talking with children about donor conception.”

6. Birth Other is a great term that can be used to identify anyone involved in the creation of a child who is also not one of the parents raising that child. A gamete provider is a birth other, as would be a gestational surrogate.

7. In particular, Anonymous Us is a group claiming to speak for donor-conceived people and linked with political agendas.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nancy Freeman-Carroll

Nancy Freeman-Carroll, Psy.D. is a supervising analyst at The William Alanson White Institute, and a faculty member of the National Institute of Psychotherapy, Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis, and Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in New York City.