Sperm donor kids not really all right

Slate has an article about a new study of 18- to 45-year-olds including 485 who were conceived via sperm donation, 562 adopted as infants, and 563 raised by their biological parents that has found that children conceived by sperm donation are more likely to have problems with the law, substance abuse and mental health:

Regardless of socioeconomic status, donor offspring are twice as likely as those raised by biological parents to report problems with the law before age 25. They are more than twice as likely to report having struggled with substance abuse. And they are about 1.5 times as likely to report depression or other mental health problems.

Here's a link to the whole study report.

Sad news for children this week

Two studies were released this week that are bad news for the children of the United States of America. We learned that 40% of all children born in 2007 in the USA were born to an unmarried mother. And we learned that children raised by lesbian couples are twice as likely to be raised in poverty than those raised by heterosexual married couples.

The study with the numbers on births to unwed mothers comes from the National Center for Health Statistics. The New York Times reported on the racial and ethnic breakdown:

Racial and ethnic differences remain large: 28 percent of white babies were born to unmarried mothers in 2007, compared with 51 percent of Hispanic babies and 72 percent of black babies. The shares of births to unwed mothers among whites and Hispanics have climbed faster than the share among blacks, but from lower starting points.

The AP story on the study results skipped those statistics and got a quote a Professor from Emory University, Dr. Carol Hogue:

Cultural attitudes may be a more likely explanation. Morgan noted the pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the unmarried teen daughter of former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The young woman had a baby boy in December, and plans for a wedding with the father, Levi Johnston, were scrapped.

"She's the poster child for what you do when you get pregnant now," Morgan said.

But shouldn't the "poster child" be a black woman given the much greater percent of black children born out of wedlock? Maybe that is why AP skipped giving those statistics. And the study was based on 2007 birth certificates, and nobody had heard of Bristol Palin in 2007, let alone 2006, when many of those 2007 babies were conceived. And Bristol's baby was born in late 2008. I think the AP reporter was just using this as an excuse to get in another dig at the Palins. Why didn't he interview someone who would talk about the Octo-mom or lesbian unwed mothers?

Which leads me to the study with the high poverty rate for children raised by lesbian couples, titled Poverty in the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community comes from UCLA's Williams Institute. The study intention is to support the push for gay marriage. But it seems to me that it undermines the claim that lesbians are such good parents. Lesbians chose parenthood while children are the natural result of heterosexual couple sexual behavior. So, I have to wonder why lesbians are choosing to have children that they will be raising in poverty.

Cornelia: "These are my jewels"

I have a friend, let's call her Rachel, who is friends with a very rich woman (over $100 million). Rachel is more of the first generation upper middle class. One time when Rachel went to Paris to stay at her friend's apartment, Rachel came back and told me that what she remembered most was a painting she had seen in a museum. Rachel said that the painting depicted a story about a woman who had been widowed and was poor. The widow was visited by a rich friend who was showing off her expensive jewelry. The widow had called for her children and showed them to the wealthy friend, saying "These are my jewels." I could understand why seeing that painting had meant a lot to Rachel during her visit with her wealthy friend at the Paris apartment.



I think the painting Rachel saw was a genre painting of Cornelia. This subject was very popular in the 18th and 19th century. Cornelia was a Roman noblewoman born almost 200 years before Christ. She was widowed and refused to remarry, devoting herself to raising her children. Cornelia is the origin of the "These are my jewels," quotation. I like theEncarta write-up on Cornelia, but I took this image from the Wikipedia article.

The idea of Cornelia and the rich woman has maintained its power over time, I think because our minds really do associate jewels with children. In Anglo-Saxon England, around 736 AD, Bede reports that the mother of the Abbess Hilda had a dream when she was pregnant that she pulled a most precious jewel from under her dress. This dream was understood to foretell the importance of the child in her womb. The metaphor of jewels for children even shows up in Freud's dream analysis. In Dora's first dream, she wants to save her jewelry box from a fire and Freud makes the association of the jewelry box with the woman's womb.