Pain, Profit, and Third-Party Conception

Pain, Profit, and Third-Party Conception | Leslie Fain | CWR



Donor conception and surrogacy place the desires of adults over the needs of children, a growing number of donor-conceived people argue.


The day after Stephanie Blessing learned she had been
conceived with the assistance of a sperm donor and that the man she knew and loved
as her father for 32 years was not her father, she went into shock. She
remembers sitting in her rocking chair, staring into space. It was so bad, her
husband had to remind her to do something as basic as changing their baby’s
diaper.

“I was just catatonic,” she said.

The shock turned into depression, as she began to mourn
what she had lost. “I was a daddy’s girl. I had a great childhood, and was the apple of my non-biological dad’s
eye. [I] adored my dad,” said Blessing, a homeschooling mother of five, who
lives in Tennessee.

“It really hurt to
find out [my dad] wasn’t mine in the way I thought he was,” she said.  “I grew up hearing about his dad being a
cowboy. Everybody on dad’s side of the family could tool leather like nobody…my
grandmother, who is about to turn 100…they aren’t mine anymore,” she said.

Then, she began to
mourn the loss of her biological father. “As much as my dad adored me, it hurts
to know that the man who helped create me chose to have nothing to do with my
life,” said Blessing. “People are deceiving themselves if they think they can
love somebody enough to make up for the person who isn’t there.”

She had never suffered
from depression before, and her husband, an evangelical pastor, had no
experience in dealing with an issue quite like this one.

Blessing was
finally told her conception story due to concerns she had over her dad’s
failing health from progressive supranuclear palsy, a condition similar to Parkinson’s
disease. Once in robust health, her father was having an array of physical and
cognitive problems, and his health appeared to decline more with each visit. Was
Blessing genetically disposed to this disease? Would her husband have to take
care of her the same way her mother now had to take care of her father?  

The answer was no,
yet much worse. Blessing learned she was conceived at the University of
Texas Southwestern Medical School in 1976. Following the procedure, “The doctor told my parents to ‘go home, have
sex, and pretend like this never happened, and get on with your life,’” said
Blessing.  Four years later, Blessing’s
parents conceived her little sister naturally.  “This convinced him maybe I really was his
daughter,” she said.

A DNA test she
took proved otherwise.

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