Your ancestors had only one way of producing a child. Today, technology has enabled children to be produced by sperm donation. A married couple in the Netherlands are using donated sperm from the husband’s father so that the couple can have a baby. This greatly alters the kinship terms that would normally be applied to a family.
Sperm donation is an option that a couple, or a woman who is single, can use in order to conceive a child. People choose this method for a variety of reasons. A woman who is single may want to become a mother without being married or in a relationship. A man who is infertile could want to have a child with his wife or significant other.
Typically, sperm donation is done when a woman goes to a specialized clinic for the purpose of becoming pregnant. She will receive the sperm of an anonymous donor. That donor may never know when, or how often, he has become a biological father. The child produced from a sperm donation will not find it easy to track down his or her biological father.
There is no way to know what health conditions the child might be especially at risk for genetically. The child could have dozens of half-siblings but will be unaware of who they are. This poses the potential risk of producing a child with a half-sibling.
A couple in the Netherlands chose to use sperm donation in order to produce a child. The couple is in their 30’s. The husband is unable to produce sperm. It sounds reasonable to use a donation. However, in this case, it wasn’t from an anonymous donor.
The husband does not have any brothers. So, the couple decided to use sperm from the husband’s father. The couple wanted a child that would share genes with the husband’s side of the family, and this was the only way to make that happen. The three went to a fertility clinic, and explained what they wanted to do. The clinic helped them to do it.
This scenario alters the kinship terms that would usually be applied to a family. What remains the same is that the person the child identifies as his mother truly is his biological mother. The person that the child perceives as his father is actually his half-brother. The person that the child thinks of as his grandfather is, technically, his biological father. I wonder what the conversation will be like when the child is old enough to hear the story about how he was born?
Image by Spectacles on Flickr