 Thank you for tuning in. Welcome to another episode of In the Studio. I'm Lynn Weaver, and our topic today is Who Is My Dad? We will be discussing artificial insemination and the who benefits from it, and also some of the psychological and social aspects of this type of conception. We will also be talking about a 10-year study and the findings for this study that basically says that about one third of children created or born in this way would like to know the identity of their donor. I have invited with me a distinguished guest, Joanna Shebb. She is an associate and adjunct professor of psychology at UC Davis. And she also is a research director or the research director of the sperm bank of California. And her research centers on all the aspect family and donors, as well as children in an artificial insemination realm. Thank you so much. Welcome, Joanna. It's a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us. Now, in non-technical terms, what is artificial insemination? It has various names, but this is the name that is mostly familiar to us. Artificial insemination is the term that they use often in the medical literature. It actually includes not just donors, sperm donors, but also a woman's partner. So when the focus is on the donors, the involvement of a sperm donor, typically an anonymous sperm donor, the term that they use is donor insemination or assisted conception. Again, assisted conception is a broad term. Yes. So donor insemination is actually, even though it's part of the reproductive technologies, and we always think of those as being really a modern thing. Donor insemination with anonymous donors has been around for over 100 years. The first medical reference to it was in the late 1800s with a doctor using the sperm of an unknown donor to assist a heterosexual couple to conceive a child. In that case, the woman actually didn't know that a donor was used. And of course, there's biblical references to assisted conception that go back even further. But if we limit it to the medical literature, that's the first documented case. Up until the 1980s, the way that donor insemination was done and used, if a sperm donor was assisting in the conception, this was an anonymous donor. So he would not ever, hypothetically, be known to the couple, typically heterosexual couple, who would be conceiving with the assistance of a sperm. In the 1980s, two major things happened. In Sweden in 1984, legislation passed, which banned anonymous donations. So sperm donors could no longer be anonymous. Well, they had to be identifiable. But what that meant was identifiable to adults. So they had to be either 16 or 18, basically maturity and maturity. And if the donor-conceived person was interested in learning the identity of their sperm donor, they could go and request it. So that was in Sweden. In the United States, what happened was there was a feminist women's health center, a collective in Oakland. Of course in California. Of course in California. And at this place, there were a number of women who were coming to the assisted. They wanted to know, the class was about how to avoid conception. But these people were coming to the class not to avoid conception, but they wanted to learn about how to actually conceive. And I know that sounds crazy. But what I mean by that is conceive with the assistance of an outsider. And when it became clear that there were a number of people who actually wanted to conceive, in their cases, most of the time it was with a known donor, a friend, perhaps the brother of one's partner. These are called known donors. They realized that people were using these classes as conceptual classes. From that, what happened was there were health scares. There was the rise of HIV. And they realized that they needed to be screening donors. And from this, there were sperm banks that were in existence at the time with anonymous donors. But the problem was the only people that they'd be willing to assist were heterosexual couples. The women who were coming to this health collective were typically same sex, female couples, or single women. I was going to ask you, who requests the most this type of conception? Yes. Well, speaking about heterosexual couples, I know some countries in the world, and I can think of Italy, for example, they don't allow artificial insemination or donor, sperm donor insemination to single women and same sex, lesbian couples. So that's interesting. So that leads me to be asking you, does California, well, of course, California has some laws and restrictions and regulations about this. Without going into details, what do you think stands out for you in terms of which would benefit both donor and the beneficiary in terms of the law? So in California, there's something called the Uniform Parentage Act. It falls under family law. And the law is such that if a man provides sperm under the direction of a physician, a medical provider, then the sperm that he provides, provided it's to a person to whom he's not intending to provide it to, a partner, a spouse, a friend, providing it such as to a sperm bank, then he has no parental responsibilities or parental rights. Those rights and responsibilities go to the intended parents. So that law has actually been in place for many years. And what about anonymity? Do they have, there's no, it's a voluntary? It's a voluntary thing. So sperm banks, for a long time, have typically recruited anonymous donors, again, presumably never to be known by the intended parents or the individuals who had been conceived this. That's right. As I was saying, in the 1980s, this feminist women's health collective, what evolved from that was a sperm bank. And it was a non, it continues to be a non-profit sperm bank. And at the sperm bank, the majority of users at the time were lesbian couples and single women. But do note, there were heterosexual couples, too. But the lesbian couples and single women were coming at forming their families from a very different perspective than heterosexual couples. The heterosexual couples, it had always been framed as sperm donation is a medical technique that's going to help you have a family. And you can just go away and forget about it afterwards. And there were reasons for doing that. There was concern about stigma for the family. There was concern at that time that there might be difficulties with attachment between the father and the child. There was the stigma associated with male infertility. So the good news is that things have evolved considerably from that perspective. That's very good news. And the psychologists support it. And the psychologists, yes. These donors in California, or specifically at the sperm bank of South California, A, do they have to be screened for diseases? All right, so that's good. And the sperm bank itself does that with the assistance of the medical staff and all that. And number two is, are they paid? Yes, I see. So typically, in the United States, and actually, I was doing a review of programs internationally. And at almost all programs, donors are paid. It's seen as a balance between an altruistic act and recognition that to be a sperm donor, you have to commit to at least seven or eight months. If you're an open identity donor, you commit to your life. And being exposed to having some kind of responsibility. Now, let's talk about the donors themselves. Do they want to know? Do they have to sign a paper, say, well, you said before, they waive all responsibilities and everything. But suppose a donor, later on in life, would like to know whom he gave the sperm to. And can he access that information? That's an amazing question. So there's two answers to that question. Let's see your amazing response. The two answers to the question is, one is that research is showing that donors are interested. It meant not all. There's always variability. But there are donors out there who are curious about what happened if there were any children that resulted from their assistance. So they are curious about the people that they helped conceive. And now I'm thinking specifically of the sperm donors at the Sperm Bank of California. These are open identity donors, which means that they agree at the time that they were donors. So people who would be releasing their identities now, these are from 20 years ago. They, 20 years ago, they agreed. I agree that the Sperm Bank can release my identity to adult offspring if that donor conceived adult comes to the Sperm Bank and specifically asks for my information. Interesting. So what happens in that case? So we have a study right now on these donors 10 to 18 years later. And what was amazing to me was that the kinds of questions they had about the donor conceived people were very similar to the kinds of questions that we were hearing from the donor conceived. At that time, they were teenagers. And in both sets, we were in both sets of groups. They were saying things like, I wonder what these people are like. I wonder if they're doing. So these sperm donors would say things like, I hope they're doing well. I wonder how they are. But the two groups were saying things like, I'm really curious about what happened. I'm curious about what this person is like. I wonder what they look like. Do they look like me? Is there any resemblance? Do they have similar interests? Amazing. Basically, the interests are all around them as a person. What has happened? So they're very similar. Thank you so much for that clarification. We don't have very much time left, as I said. 15 minutes go very quickly. And we could talk for hours. But specifically, I've been reading about the psychological and social aspects of this. And of course, there are many, I'm sure, many factors. It depends on the family and depends on the child and all that. But when would you say from reading the literature and everything, when is the best time or one of the better times to tell a child that he's been artificially inseminated? The literature suggests that the best time to tell your child that they have a donor or that the family has a donor, you have to be focused on family building, is to tell them when they're young, so that it's always a part of who they are, that they understand that. It's very much like adoption, where you want to incorporate that into the family's story. So the family has a donor. This is how we came about being a family. This person assisted us. And you can tell your children from the time that they're born. On the other hand, because it's not always been that way, the recommendations have not always been tell from the beginning, there's some really great resources that are available out there. And I can think of one set that are age-based, so young children, but probably for some parents, the most critical groups are 8 to 11 years old and then teenagers and beyond. They have specific guidelines and assistance for how to talk to your child. Oh, that's fantastic. And that's from the UK. Much needed. Yes, much needed. Yes. How was the donor conception network? This is fascinating, Joanna. Now, we need to wrap up, as I said, but very briefly, this study is you've been at it for 10 years now. Are you continuing or are you studying other aspects of this research? Well, we looked at who gets their donor's identity over a 10-year period. Yes. And now what we're doing is we're interviewing. We've actually finished the interviews with the donor-conceived adults who obtain their donor's identity to see what happens. And that's forthcoming. Wonderful. Joanna Shepp, associate and a junk professor of psychology, UC Davis, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you all for watching. And if you'd like to see this episode again, you can go on our website, dctv.davismedia.org. And of course, we will be on YouTube as well. Thank you again. Thank you, Joanna. And see you next time.