WHEN Lauren Burns listened to the Prime Minister’s national apology to those who suffered forcible adoption, she wanted to ask: what about me? It wasn’t that the 29-year-old Melbourne woman didn’t find the speech moving. She believes the mothers and children so cruelly separated deserved the apology.
But she, and so many like her, felt left out. Lauren is one of thousands of children (exact figures are not known — in the beginning records weren’t kept) born as the result of donor sperm or eggs, who believe they too have been denied an opportunity to know their biological parents.
It was these words which most affected her: ‘‘To each of you who were . . . denied the opportunity to grow up with your family and community of origin, we say sorry. We acknowledge that many of you still experience a constant struggle with identity, uncertainty and loss and feel a persistent tension between loyalty to one family and yearning for another.’’
‘‘I found it incredible that the Government was apologising to adopted people for the very things that are still happening via donor conception and surrogacy,’’ Lauren says. ‘‘It was frustrating that almost nobody except us could see that by simply inserting ‘donor conception’ for ‘adoption’, the PM could have been speaking to us. She promised no generation of Australians would suffer the same pain and trauma they did. But it’s not true.’’
Many donor-conceived children feel they are treated as inferior citizens, especially when secrets continue to be legally protected. There are no uniform regulations in Australia. In Victoria you’re guaranteed access to your donor’s identity only if you were born after 1998. Those born from 1988 to 1998 get access only if the donor consents. The rest have little hope. All they can do is put their names on a voluntary register and hope their donor does too.
Melbourne father Ross, 35, (surname withheld by request) describes an ‘‘enduring yearning’’ to know his genetic father.
‘‘I know how tall he was, his eye and hair colour, complexion and blood type. A pretty lousy list when you consider what a father has the potential to be. But at the moment, it’s all I have,’’ he says.
Some think that’s enough. Dr Doug Keeping of the Queensland Fertility Group says: ‘‘The code of secrecy has worked well for 25 years. Why spoil it for fairly theoretical reasons?’’
Donor offspring don’t think their reasons for wanting to know their biological parents are theoretical.
Lauren says: ‘‘There is a commonly held belief that since we were so wanted by our social parents, our biological kinship links shouldn’t matter. But there is still a loss experienced from not knowing biological family and not being able to trace where your looks, personality or interests come from.’’
Ross describes the battle of the donor conception community against the profitable reproductive technology industry as being like an ‘‘anchovy against a whale’’.
Lauren says she knows of a donor-conceived man who felt so much like a product he had a bar code tattooed on the back of his neck. And how is someone conceived from an egg donated in Eastern Europe, sperm donated in the US and born to an Indian surrogate mother supposed to find all the people involved in creating them?
Lauren found her father three years ago after a five year search. Holders of her records refused to hand them over because of legal advice. With the intervention of the then Victorian Governor, David de Kretser, (her mother’s treating doctor), her donor was found. While Lauren still has time to develop the relationship, a friend had merely four weeks.
Lauren and other donor-conceived offspring are grieving the loss of Melbourne social worker Narelle Grech, who died this week of cancer, aged 30. An advocate for retrospective rights to information about their biological identity, she was denied information about her biological father, Ray Tonna, for whom she searched for 15 years. But because she was dying, former Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu intervened and her father was found. Tonna and son Zac found and lost a daughter and sister in the space of a month.
The co-ordinator of the Donor Conception Support Group, Caroline Lorbach, says she is sad and angry the system made Grech fight for information which should have been hers.
The group is waiting for Victoria’s response to the Parliamentary Law Reform Committee 2012 report’s recommendation that all donor-conceived people know the name of their donor, no matter when they were born.
‘‘I hope the Government decides it needs to open up all the records so that no one else has to go through what Narelle did,’’ Lorbach says. If we acknowledge the pain of those forcibly removed from parents, then the pain of these children must be acknowledged also.
Published in the Sunday Herald Sun March 31, 2013
Melbourne woman Myf Cummerford has created a Change petition calling on the Victorian Government to protect the interests of donor conceived children.
“The welfare and interests of persons born or to be born as a result of treatment procedures are paramount”.
This is the first guiding principle of the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Act 2008 the legislation governing ART practices (including Donor Conception) in Victoria.
Donor conception is conception using donated gametes (sperms and eggs) or embryos.
There are likely several thousands of donor-conceived people who were conceived in Victoria prior to 1988, and more than 5500 have been born since then. Many of these people will be unaware that they are donor-conceived.
• People who were conceived from gametes donated in Victoria after 1998 are entitled under legislation to obtain identifying information about their donors when they reach adulthood.
• People conceived from gametes donated between 1988 and 1997 can only access identifying information about their donors with the donor’s consent.
• However, people conceived from gametes donated prior to 1988 have no legislated right to obtain identifying information.
This means that if you are donor conceived, your ability to access vital information about your genetic parentage and identity entirely depends on the date the gametes used to conceive you were donated. This has created a complex and confusing situation of differing rights and abilities with many serious implications. Read full petition wording here
Watch Myf’s appeal here:
15 Responses
Lets not forget apologising to the many thousands of adoptive parents who were insulted at the apology made by the Prime Minister. Even as a sibling of an adopted child, i cried during the Prime Ministers speech. Not for the mothers that had to give up their children, but for my parents who would be turning in their graves listening to such a speech.
Have we all become a bit soft? Many of these parents did these poor babies a huge favour.
My sister was adopted in 1973 because her 17 year old mother had no financial means to bring her up. The “father” was an alcoholic.
I also suspect her natural mother had kind of been disowned by her family for being unmarried and pregnant. At the very least there was a lot of shame.
I am certain my sister had a far greater upbringing than she ever could have received from her natural mother. How about a national “thanks” to all these selfless adoptive parents?
I think it’s pretty easy to make sweeping generalisations about the people at the centre of adoption and donor conception practices. Knowing and understanding the circumstances and motivations of those who relinquish a child and/or those who need to know the identity of their biological family member(s) is much more difficult. It’s something the majority of our population thankfully never have to think much about. That’s why we have parliamentary inquiries, to give proper consideration to these issues and to come to informed conclusions about what is the appropriate course of action. I praise the Australian government for the apology, I hope that it assists those so deeply affected by forced adoption practices to heal.
Thankyou Melinda for your public recognition of the parallels with donor conception. Hopefully the Victorian parliament will also decide not to perpetuate past mistakes by implementing the Parliamentary Law Reform Committee’s recommendations.
Thanks so much Myf. Appreciate your efforts in this area. About to add your change petition to the blog post.
In response to ‘Say it how it is’: My sister was adopted into a family, who brought her up well and loved her. That is fantastic and she’s one of the lucky ones, but she still has lifelong personal issues which are related to her forcible adoption, that no amount of love could ever erase.
The fact that her family gave her a good life does not excuse the forcible separation of parent and child. The institutionalised lying, forging of papers, intimidation, drugging and physical restraints that were often involved made the practice extremely unethical and illegal.
Your sister’s experience seems like one of the better ones, but many, I would go as far as to say most experiences were not as happy.
My mother is the most loving, demonstrative, protective, beautiful mother you could imagine and had she been given the option to bring up her own baby and been supported by the government, the community and other authorities, she would have been as good a mother to my sister as she has been to me. Just because these women were young and unmarried, did not make them bad people or bad mothers.
My mum and dad stayed together and 18 years later, had me. I have a full sister and I love her to bits, but there will always be an emotional disconnect between us and also between her and our parents because the opportunity to bond was denied. Not only has it had adverse effects on my sister, it has affected my mother’s whole life. She has never got over the pain of having her baby taken. We are so grateful to my sister’s adoptive family for loving her, bringing her up well and keeping her safe, but my parents could have done that too with proper support.
continuing from @say it how it is, what of those caring parents who raised the kids of the stolen generations? They were asked to look after someone else’s children, then find themselves vilified decades later, as though they themselves had walked into indigenous communities and ripped babies from the mothers’ arms.
I have always considered it ironic in the extreme that one of the earliest and most strident critics of the stolen generation policies was Charles Perkins: without the western upbringing and education he received as a child of the stolen generation, would he have ever been able to do what he did?
Hear hear, @say it, let’s give a big “Thank you” to all of those Aussies who opened their homes and their lives to help a child, wherever they came from!
Grace, since the introduction of single mothers pension there has been a huge increase in crime as more and more babies are born into welfare families, and as we all know, the cycle continues. A lot of the babies in the 60s and 70s were forcibly adopted because the mothers simply did not have the money to bring them up. There was no single mothers pension.
Nowadays young girls know that if they get pregnant they can just get Centrelink and more and more money for each baby they have. And still remain unemployed.
This has come at a huge cost to society. These children, like their mothers do not value education, or earning a living, and end up with a career in crime. And the cycle continues. Those kids have kids, get centrelink and on and on and on. Centrelink paying teenage girls to reproduce and not find a job has been a monumental mistake.
thinedgeofthewedge totally agree.
I felt i was probably pushing it getting started on the stolen generation. But as an arts practitioner i do know of a lot of indigenous artists that were removed and placed in white families who honestly would not have received the education or established their art careers had they not been removed from their natural parents.
‘Say it as it is’: You are making sweeping generalisations there. Of course there were cases then and still cases now in which the cycle of poverty and/or drug and alcohol dependence are perpetuated by the next generation and that is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed, as the safety of the children is the most important issue. However, your stereotypes of the women as reliant on welfare, not valuing education, and criminals who were not willing to earn a living and make a valuable contribution to society are not true of the majority of women whose children were forcibly adopted. The very involvement of religious organisations at the request of religious families are indicative of the type of women who were involved. Girls from good families, who were willing to recognise their ‘mistake’ and rectify it, by bringing up THEIR OWN children. If they were allowed to make their own decision and given support (not a government payment), but help to find employment, housing and access to health and family care, instead of being treated like second-class citizens, many (not all) but many, could have proven that they were fit to take care of their children.
This practice was not just unethical, but also ILLEGAL. Considering you seem so concerned with stamping out crime in society, I would have thought you would welcome this recognition of the illegality of the practice and the apology to victims of crime.
even my two adopted kids who were reilnquished have a yearning for their birth mother…i have seen through their eyes how sacred that birth mother child bond is….glad this topic is being brought up about donor kids…how frustrating for them not to know their genetic parents. i think we need to stop thinking having chilren is a right and find other ways for those who dont have kids to find fulfillment. I write this as someone who went through the heartache of not having kids till i was 40. We were very careful about how we got the two kids we did and they were already two and at the end of their options apart from a huge very poor quality orphanage ….but i have learnt from watching them grieve especially the loss of their birth mother ….
I am gobb smacked at some of the comments here. Firstly I am an adoptee I was abused, tortured and used as child slave labor by my cruel adoptive parents. My adoptive mother was mentally ill and my adoptive father was a violent heavy drinker. No not all adoptive parents abused children but to say that the apology was wrong because your adoptive parents were good people and did not deserve to hear such an apology sickens me. Do you think it was OK to shackle pregnant women to beds, hold them down by force, place pillows over their face so they could not see their baby, forge adoption papers hide the babies in the hospital, denie the baby the mothers breast, to be held and loved etc..how cruel can you possibly be.Most of the women were between the ages of 19 and 25 years of age..my mother was 35 years old. babies were stolen for adoption. Adoptive parents received stolen children. There was a payment available inwhich the states hid from the mothers and this was before the single mother pension. Many of the father wanted and tried to marry the mothers but were chased out of the hospitals and threatened by police. Young pregnant girls were held and hidden away in locked church property and made to work in laundries they were isolated and brainwashed to steal their baby. Some nuns even made a nice little sum for themselves. Some if not many adoptive parents knew very well how these poor girls were treated. This was a crime in which you want to pretend never happened. Educate yourself before you write in defense of people who took part in the theft of stealing babies, many of us took our lives due to the trauma, pain, suffering and grief it caused. How insensitive can you be…I was beaten, set alight and forced to work in charcoal pits at the age of 5 so please forgive me for finding your comments completely offensive. Forced adoption was a baby trade stealing from vulnerable women to give or sell babies to married couples who pretended to be sane, good and proper. when they were cruel, judgemental and helped break the law. Here are some of the Gods laws ,’ thou shalt not covet” ‘Thou shalt not steal.” I think that meant someone elses baby as well.
@Say It How It Is your claims that violent criminal behaviour is intergenerational and supposedly due to fact innumerable single women are daring to have children without mandatory presence of the biological father, is a right wing misogynistic women-blaming patriarchal myth.
Certainly many women both married and unmarried are forced to give up their child/children for adoption because of poverty but that is not because the mother is responsible. Male Supremacist System is responsible because it does not consider ‘motherhood’ to be of value and instead perpetuates lie that a woman who has a child must have the mandatory male breadwinner present in order that she can raise the man’s child (sic).
Male Supremacist system has always punished women who dare to have a child/children out of wedlock and /or dare to divorce/separate from their male partner.
Likewise the myth unmarried mothers/divorced mothers/separated mothers are all ‘welfare queens’ living a life of luxury on Centrelink is another misogynistic male supremacist myth. Ever tried living on Centrelink? It isn’t a picnic and is designed to punish women who through no fault of their own are poor.
It takes a society to raise children not just individual mothers but men and their Male Supremacist System do not want women to be financially independent. Instead there continues to be institutional economic barriers held in place to ensure women who are mothers are the ones denied work which lifts them out of poverty. Not forgetting childcare is extortionately expensive and male supremacist system doesn’t believe childcare should be funded by the state. Yet at same time these children are the future generations and male supremacist system sees them as ‘future workers!’
How about focusing on the innumerable biological fathers who continue to refuse to support their offspring and the innumerable biological fathers who deny they have fathered a child out of – horror – wedlock! But we mustn’t focus on male accountability instead let us continue to claim women produce children all by themselves because of virgin births!
Or how about focusing on fact it is still overwhelmingly males who are the ones committing crime not females and these males are not all working class offspring of single mothers. Many male criminals are from affluent families so one’s origins alone do not cause males to commit crime.
A lot of adoptions occur *because* there is a market. Sure there are cases in which relatives or friends raise a kid and don’t sign up with the gov or pay money or accept money to do it, and those are fine.
But any adoption of newborns is done with money and signatures. That is twisted and wrong. If the world weren’t war torn by our enemies (the globalist elite), then a mother would never have to give up a baby she wishes she could keep.
You are not “doing a kid a favor” to adopt it. You are doing the right thing when the reward may no be commensurate to the cost. For the reason I listed above, it’ a hard world to raise children in.
As far as finding a sperm donor father, sometimes it’s better to not even bother. Or maybe find him, but don’t hope to hard for anything in particular.
Say It How It Is – I have a couple of questions for you.
1. Do you have evidence to back up your claims regarding an ‘increase in crime’ since the introduction of the single mothers’ pension? Please note, Alan Jones or Today Tonight are not considered credible statistical analysis.
2. I am unemployed and receive government benefits to help raise my kids. I intend to have more children, for which the government will give me more money, and I am not going to return to the workforce in the forseeable future. I am middle class and married. Am I costing society, and will my children end up in a life of crime?
Look forward to your “answers”.
I am speaking on behalf of Melbourne Anonymous Donors (MadMen), a group of pre 1988 donors.
All of our members are on voluntary registers and we would all love to meet our donor children. The reason for the anonymous donations is that was a requirement for us to sign before we were permitted to donate. This was not something that we sought.
We all assumed that we would never meet our children but the latest proposed changes to legislation have at least given us some hope. We have met some donor children like Lauren and I must say that raised some emotional issues for us regarding the joy we would feel if we met our own children. Several of the donors have been fortunate to have met their children and we are delighted to share their experiences.
We support the donor children in their quest to know their biological origins. We urge any donors not on the VARTA registry to do so, and we urge social parents who have not done so, to let their children know of their origins so they can better know themselves. We can assure social parents that all contact is done with the greatest care and respect for the thier wishes.
It is great to finally read an article that acknolwedges the similarities between donor conception and other groups in our society that have been forcibly separated from their biological kin. Yes there are some differences for each group but the separation from kin in the eyes of the child affected can have startling similarities.
As a country we have acknowledged the trauma that can potentially be caused by these separations with national apologies to the stolen generation, the forgotten Australians, child migrants and forced adoptions. The donor conceived is one group which as yet still haven’t had the recognition by our society that the process could cause trauma to the person created.
Bravo MTR.