A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto...a test tube?We were going to the store and heard just a jarring story on NPR about "Donor-Conceived Kids Connect With Half Siblings" In a nutshell, the story was about children conceived by the use of donor
Parents who've conceived children using a donor's sperm or egg are increasingly tracking down their own children's "donor siblings," according to a study in the journal Human Reproduction. These parents and children want to learn more about their genetically linked "half brothers and half sisters," and are curious about possible similarities in appearance and personality.
"It's a new form of family," says sociologist Tabitha Freeman, of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge in England.
"It's not, perhaps, what people traditionally understand by family — sort of mum, dad, child. And yes, they do describe each other as brothers and sisters."
Well that is the understatement of the century. Not what is traditionally understood as a family? I should say so. We are already to the point where we don't need a mother and a father, now we don't even need two parents at all and viola! we have a "family" based on shared DNA.
On the one hand, yes they are "half-siblings" in the sense that they share half of their DNA with a common donor. But siblings? People who may have never met, were born to different women in completely different families or even different countries?
What was jarring about the news article was how common place it really seems. Why not have families with no real connection other than DNA? In 2009, what place do families really have in society as a whole? We put off marriage until as late as possible, well after prime fertility years, refuse to set aside careers and pleasures until we have no choice, begrudgingly decide to have children (maybe one or two) and then realize that we waited so long that getting pregnant is really hard. So all the money we saved up is spent on costly fertility treatments that results in a couple of kids and then we ship them off to daycare and public school so that someone else can raise them.
Why wouldn't two kids born from egg donors consider themselves to be "siblings" in this environment? Plus you get to have lots and lots of "donor conceived siblings" and not have any real attachments. My poor kids only have 7 siblings, but these kids...
In Freeman's study, the average number of related donor siblings who've found each other was five. But some of those on the registry have 20, 50 or even, in one case, 120 donor siblings.
I know it seems somewhat cruel of me, we have never had any problem having kids and so who am I to say that other people should be denied children? But many of the people referred to in the article are single moms (intentionally single women who still want kids) and lesbian couples. The attitude seems to be a willful flaunting of God's design for a family of a man and woman, married for life, having and raising children. They don't want to follow God's commands but they still want to have children, so they do an end-around the natural order and God's laws. I am not a fan of fertility treatments even for married, faithful couples who want but are unable to have kids. Is God not sovereign and is childlessness in the Bible not always at God's decree? Each and every step along this path desensitizes us and further waters down the definition of "family" to the point that the word becomes essentially meaningless.
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