You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
These two books, published only a few months apart, take a psychodynamic approach to the question of assisted reproductive technology (ART). ART is a highly political issue that touches people in the deepest core of their cultural, political and social selves. It is usually difficult to create a space for thinking when affects are aroused in powerful ways, as happened recently with the outraged response to the views expressed by the designers Dolce and Gabanna in the Italian journal Panorama, where they said that, in the interest of the children, they support the traditional family model of a male and female parent, and are against surrogacy, donor conceptions and wild adoptions. It is vitally important that psychoanalysts and therapists engage in thinking about these topics, as both the parents and the resulting children might enter our consulting rooms, and we need to prepare to receive them and their requests.
The two books are closely linked, each containing a chapter by the same author, and I will put together some of the themes that are dealt with in both books.
We learn that the first sperm-donor baby was created in 1884 at Jefferson Medical College in Pennsylvania when Dr William Pancoast used the sperm of one of his students to impregnate the wife of an infertile man. The woman remained unaware of the procedure, having been told that it was routine gynaecological surgery (Ehrensaft, cited in Mann, p. 42).
According to longitudinal research by Professor Susan Golombok, donor children do well in attachment, relationship capacities, social behaviour, identity and cognitive capacities (Ehrensaft, cited in Mann, p. 22 and in Fine, p. 142). Diane Ehrensaft (Ch. 2 in Mann, Ch. 6 in Fine) pleads for us to rethink our theory, suggesting that the Oedipal triangle has to be managed in different ways or even abolished, as up to six people could be involved in the conception and gestation: an egg donor, a sperm donor, a gestational carrier,