The Kids are All Right

This week you will watch the film “The Kids Are All Right” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0842926/ This story is about a lesbian couple who used a sperm donor to conceive their two children. The women used the same donor to each carry a child, so the children are actually half-siblings. The younger child urges his sister to reach out to the donor on her 18th birthday and they meet him. His involvement in their lives becomes the focus of the film.

For this assignment, I want you to research the topic of psychological well-being in open identity gamete donation. You can focus on egg donation or sperm donation. You can look at studies examining well-being in the donors, the recipients, or the offspring. You can also incorporate all three in your essay.

Use the movie to think about the issues raised about gamete donation. You have the donor who gets a call out of the blue and then realizes that he wants to be a part of these kids’ lives. You have a same-sex couple struggling with their own feelings about their children having this father figure appear out of nowhere. You have the kids who have fantasies of who this donor is and perhaps the disappointment of finding out he isn’t who they dreamed about.

This essay can take various forms, but I want you to think about what the psychological implications are for any or all parties that create a family
using gamete donation, in particular, open-identity donors.

Use at least 3 peer-reviewed studies to support your topic. Also comment on whether or the research you review leads you to think that open-identity has psychological advantages for those involved over anonymous donation. Why or why not?

On a separate page please answer this question:

This week’s discussion will focus on the psychological evaluations of egg and sperm donors. What do you think is important to assess for in this type of evaluation? What is standard practice? Do you think standard practice is sufficient? What about the discrepancy in evaluations for egg and sperm donors? Do you think sperm donors should undergo a psychological evaluation? Why or why not?

Please include Fertility Counseling: Clinical Guide and Case Studies, Josephs and van den Broeck (2015) chapter titled, Counseling anonymous gamete donors as one of your references.