In many states, if you are part of a couple raising a child, never marry or divorce, and your partner wants to sever the connection, you may be considered a legal stranger to a child you helped raise but with whom you do not share a genetic link. “I’m concerned that people may be acting in good faith but not understand the plight of these families,” says Douglas NeJaime, a Yale law professor who is working with LGBTQ organizations and other academics on a joint statement of principles on access to donor identification information. “In many places there is a real legal risk. And then there is the idea that these laws express, which is that biological links are more important than other links.”
Malina Simard-Halm, 27, the donor-conceived daughter of a pair of gay parents, is a former board member of Family Equality and Colage, two groups for LGBTQ families that are part of a coalition calling for stopping the passage of more disclosure laws. . Simard-Halm sympathizes with Levy Sniff, but she does not want the State to suggest that it is vital to search for the donor. Not knowing who that person is doesn’t necessarily create a void, she says. Her parents were frank about how she and her siblings were conceived (an approach that tends to strengthen relationships between parents and children, research shows) and she did not experience a sense of loss.
Simard-Halm remembers having to resist the judgment of outsiders, who forced her to assume that nature counts more than nurture. “People asked, ‘Who is your mother? Where is she?’” says Simard-Halm. “Sometimes they would say flat out, ‘She’s your real mother.’ You need to be with her.’”
This framework has been used in the past in the fight against same-sex marriage. A 2010 survey, called “My Dad’s Name is Donor” and funded by the Institute for American Values, a conservative group, claimed that many donor-conceived children felt hurt and isolated by their origins. The study was not peer-reviewed, and other research has shown that donor-conceived children generally do as well as their peers. But for years in court, opponents of same-sex marriage argued that children of gay couples would grow up worse off, feeling fatherless or motherless.
LGBTQ families are also concerned that some people who advocate ending anonymity, including Levy Sniff, think children should be able to know their donor’s identity before the age of 18, meaning 16 or 14. They say That this creates the possibility of conflicts between how adolescents define their families and how their parents are doing. Lowering the age “leaves the family more legally vulnerable,” says Courtney Joslin, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “And it affects both the social perception of the family and perhaps the way children and parents view each other.”
