When I turned 30, my family doctor asked me if I was planning to conceive a child. I was in a relationship with a woman at the time, but we had barely discussed it. I wasn’t sure what the options were for a lesbian couple to have a child.
That question ultimately led me down the path of conception using artificial insemination and an unknown donor. My doctor directed me toward a gynecologist at a fertility clinic in Toronto, and on my own I found a workshop developed and facilitated by a Jewish woman that provides lesbian couples with information on methods of conception, including adoption, known and unknown donors.
When I was 38, my new partner and I had our daughter, Ma’ayan, using an anonymous donor from a sperm bank.
In her 2019 bestseller, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love, author Dani Shapiro addresses the issue of heritage and identity, as well as some of the ethical issues surrounding donor insemination. The author reveals how she accidentally discovered through a DNA test that her father was not actually her biological father.
Shapiro reveals that throughout her life, her appearance – blonde hair and “goyish” looks – were a constant source of alienation from her own family and the Orthodox Jewish community in which she was raised. Some of her earliest childhood memories include being questioned, often in intrusive ways by family and friends, about the veracity of her Jewish roots.
She describes having to defend her own Jewishness and right to belong within the Jewish community (even though, as she informs skeptical Jews who question her appearance, she was “raised kosher, spoke Hebrew and went to a yeshivah school.” In one haunting memory, a family friend suggests she could have passed as Aryan during the Holocaust: “Little blondie you could have gotten us bread in the ghetto.”
There are multiple reasons why Shapiro might have felt alienated growing up. In the book’s opening chapters, she describes the shock of discovering her paternity and its implications for her personal and communal identity. At the same time, the revelation connects a missing piece of the puzzle that helps her make sense of her feelings of alienation from family and community.
In Shapiro’s poignantly imagined narrative of her parents’ lives before she was born, she recreates the psychological motives that drove them to repeatedly visit a fertility clinic for treatment, despite the prohibitions of halakhah. How much did they know about these treatments? How could her devoutly Orthodox father have agreed to this? These are fascinating questions that propel the narrative forward.
As she embarks on a quest to uncover the circumstances surrounding her paternity, Shapiro tries to find answers to the question of whether or not her parents were fully aware of the impact of their actions. In a poignant moment, she meets with a close friend of her rabbi father who helps her come to terms with the ethical implications of her parents’ actions. We learn about the halakhic prohibitions against donor insemination, but how their actions may have been softened by her Orthodox parents’ deep desire to fulfill the biblical commandment of “pru ur’vu (“be fruitful and multiply”).
As the parent of a child who was conceived through donor insemination, it was fascinating for me to see how Shapiro handled the ethical issues surrounding donor insemination – and how much the landscape of artificial insemination has changed.
Shapiro describes a “how to” book for doctors practicing artificial insemination in the 1960s, which outlined the legal, ethical and medical issues surrounding artificial insemination and highlighted the secrecy that shrouded this practice and the intense commitment to preserving the anonymity of the donor. “In AI,” the pamphlet reads, “the child is never told.”
(At that time, the Farris Institute for Parenthood in Philadelphia, where her parents sought help to conceive, was run by a renegade doctor who had lost his license. His method was to mix the sperm of the biological father with that of an anonymous donor so that the father never really had to challenge his own paternity.)
In contrast to Shapiro’s parents, my partner and I have worked hard to ensure that our daughter knew at a young age how she was conceived. From the time she understood language, we read to her from Cory Silverberg’s wonderfully simple and explicitly gender-neutral picture book, What Makes a Baby. At the same time, we were careful to distinguish the donor’s role from that of a parent or a “dad.”
I don’t want my daughter to have false expectations of finding a father figure or be disappointed if she realizes how many other babies the donor may have been involved in conceiving, an aspect of artificial insemination that is not well regulated.
As she has gotten older, she has asked us more questions about the donor and we have shown her his profile, told her what we know about him and showed her the photo we were given of him as a child. My daughter is now eight years old, but I imagine that as she gets older, she will have other questions. We will do our best to answer them.