59 Replies to “Olivia Pratten”

  1. Olivia should take the issue up with her mom. If she continues to press this, men will stop donating their ‘stuff’ and then where child’free’ couples go?

  2. “Arvay opened his statements by citing a passage from the novel Roots, which states that “in all of us, there is a hunger — marrow deep — to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.” ”
    Can’t help but think that not citing a book now known to be largely made up would have been a better tactic. The defense could have been all over that one – pointing out that a hunger for heritage can aslo drive people to do things society considers immoral or illegal, like invading privacy and negating torts.
    About the only reason to allow this is the one buried at the end – a test tube baby won’t have an up-to-date medical history profile. But that’s no different from any orphan, or child whose father ran off shortly after birth.
    My understanding is that you can’t get paid for sperm donation in Canada to begin with, so this will pretty much be the nail in the coffin for sperm donation in this country.

  3. In other words, it looks like artificial insemination wasn’t as well thought out from a rights and law perspective. Again, just because they could do it, doesn’t mean they should.

  4. There have been court cases for child benefits from donors. The chill was already on. If Canadian woman prefer sperm from Southern Prisons that is their right. Years ago when this was a topic, I think it was two lesbians seeking child support. Some of the young women thought why not? Got a point there although it just seems wrong. No good deed shall go unpunished.

  6. The poor baby! Denied her right to her bio-parent’s medical history? What a travesty!
    Ok,ok, sarcasm off. As an adoptive parent I know a bit about the rights of children. My child will have no medical history to work with and after 4.5 years in foster care and institutional living he has enough baggage to bury that sperm-donation-whiner. While I will never be able to tell him if he has risks for cancer or mental illness I will have to explain why his mother was an addict and why she didn’t take him to the hospital for three days while he was suffering through detox. And then I have to explain why his half-brother and sister don’t know he exists and why his mother never visited him. There are so many things that should be the birthright of a child but in the end I am just thankful for the birth part. We’ll work on the rest. Too bad Pratten can’t.

  10. I don’t think she wants the medical records, actually; I think she wants the fairy tale made-up daddy she’s been building in her mind since she found out her real origin. Every adopted and test-tube kid has this fantasy; most of them just grow out of it by age twenty-freaking-eight.
    I think the medical records bit was thrown in by the lawyer to make it look less like whining.

  13. Good news for Olivia Pratten – I found out who her biological father is….. Colonel Russell Williams. Yippee!
    Oh.

  17. The irony is that her actions will discourage future sperm donors. In countries where they have passed laws identifying sperm donors the donations have fallen precipitously
    Most of the needed medical knowledge can be delineated from the sperm.
    If she is successful will she thank the man who gave her life even though there is a chance she will be ruining his?
    She has a mother and probably a father in all but name. Has she even considered his feelings?
    This is just messy nonsense. The girl should go home and thank her lucky stars she was given the gift of life.
    Who pays for this shit anyway?
    BTW- I think she has my eyes brains must be her mom’s.
    Kate you are the headline writer of the Gods!

  18. I keep thinking about the movie “Boys From Brazil”. Sometimes it might be better not to know who your father was.
    Barney Gumble on the Simpsons also springs to mind.

  19. There are already way to trace paternity: DNA Genealogy. As more people put their DNA online, it will become easier to make these connections.
    With the existing precedents in family law, this will make it more difficult for families to find donors. The potential risk for donors will become too high.
    Too bad we can’t make these decisions retroactive: If she wins the case and her ‘father’ decides not to donate… she ceases to exist.

  20. What do Olivia and Osama have in common besides the first and last letter in their names ?
    An ungodly number of siblings…

  21. “Lawyer Joseph Arvay argued before a B.C. Supreme Court judge Monday that Pratten, 28, and thousands of others who are offspring of anonymous sperm or egg donors have a “fundamental” right to know the identity of their biological parents.”
    And if she wins, how many of these anonymous donors will no longer participate?
    If this happened 29 years ago, she might not even exist.

  22. The lawyering industry ….
    Because there are never enough whiny little b!tches to parade around as victims with special rights of some sort.

  24. Personally, I don’t think it should ever have been legalized. There is no known God-given right to conceive and the morality of it all, is very questionable.

  25. Frankly my dears, if egg and sperm donations shrivel up, I couldn’t care less. Life dishes out hard knocks and sterility and barreness are just two of a vast multitude of possible disappointments in life.
    My mother’s generation used to say it was God’s way of screening out the bad parents, a meme that didn’t quite take into account the fact that there were a lot of fertile people who became parents, who shouldn’t have.
    But it does indicated that in times past, people dealt with their fate in a rather more stoic manner than they do today. Today, they whine and demand.

  26. I’m in 100% agreement with Louise @ 7:51 pm. Donations will cease and doctors won’t be able to play God anymore as often. Octomoms will have to find their own suckers.

  27. In fact the medical history of the donor is, or used to be, passed to the mother. And donors were vetted very thoroughly for family histories of heritable diseases (thallasemia, tay-sachs, CF etc.) So, probably her mom forgot, or simply doesn’t want to open up the whole can of worms.

  28. I bet it sucks more to be a product of rape than AI.
    “Mom, how did you meet Daddy?”
    “I walked home alone.”

  29. larben said “Personally, I don’t think it should ever have been legalized. There is no known God-given right to conceive and the morality of it all, is very questionable.”
    Absolutely correct. Many times, if AI or in-vitro produces multiple embryos, many of them are destroyed….it’s nastiness all around.

  30. Just when you think you’ve seen everything in terms of selfish, self-absorbed entitlement attitude, along comes Olivia…all together now:
    ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!

  32. Carl 8:59pm “Just when you think you’ve seen everything in terms of selfish, self-absorbed entitlement attitude, along comes Olivia…all together now:
    ME! ME! ME! ME! ME!”
    The same could go for the parents who felt it was their right to have a child. It’s obvious that they bent the rules to conceive. Which in itself is entitlement.

  33. A bioethicist I know told me that the problem with bioethics is that it’s both 100 years behind science, and that when they’re contacted, they’re asked: “we want to do X, tell us how to do it ethically”, never: “we want to do X, should we do X?”. Contacting an ethicist is just another link on the chain in order to get or maintain funding. Science-types, when contacting ethicists will NOT stop what they are doing even if the ethicist bursts into tears on the other end of the phone line. Ethics is only paperwork by this point. It doesn’t matter that it’s wrong to do AI in many situations, because if science can do it then science WILL do it.
    Unless you’re talking to Margaret Somerville. I saw one of her talks once. I think she just made it up as she went along because it had a weaker structure than a Haitian house.

  36. People like this Pratten creature are the reason paper shredders were invented. No paperwork, no problem.
    People like Pratten’s lawyer, on the other hand, are a threat to our society.
    Safety forced, no one -ever- asks “should we do X?” That’s because Judeo-Christian tradition is an unenlightened superstitious blight upon the Modern World (TM) and nothing bad ever happened from sneering down one’s ample scientific nose at it.
    [/sarc]
    It never occurred to anyone that a technology perfectly acceptable for reproducing livestock might lead to problems if introduced to widespread use amongst humans, right? Actually it -did-, but all those people who said “hey, wait a second…” were smeared, kicked off the Ivory Tower and basically told to shut the hell up.
    Well, here we are forty years later…

  37. If I got it right, the being will have the right to know it’s sperm donor’s name at age 19.
    No problem … simply restrict the age allowed to donate sperm to 65 and older.
    A nineteen year old probably won’t have much interest in harassing a 90 year old even still alive.
    All wankers under age 65 can … as the saying goes … “spill their seed on the ground” or key board … whatever.

  38. because of this kind of legislation Britain is down to 400 registered donors. this and that they pay only $600 and you have to be celebate and not drink for 3 months prior .
    seems a bucket in a boys high school and they could get all they want.

  41. This will put the fear of God into every male who bottled a little milk for money. In the long run it won’t only be your anonymity gone, but your wallet as well. You see in the end of this logic trail, you end up paying child support in the future.Perhaps even retroactive. If you didn’t it would make her a second class citizen. Its never just about knowing their biological parents. Look at the Chaos caused by opining up the adopyion records.
    Another parasite from that class looking for a free ride in a better car at any expense.
    JMO
    Glad I never did.

  42. The lady has my sympathy, but her real albatross is an over-eager lawyer. We knew that part.
    Bastards,such as she, and other ofspring of questionable ancestry, may face the prospect of being scrapped away,ala Morgantaller, if she gets her way.
    “Course the lawyers will be laughing all the way to the bank.

  43. If, as many here argue, the connection to biological parents isn’t important, then there should be little objection to randomly handing out babies to the parents who deliver a child in a hospital. After all, biology isn’t important, right?
    What we have here is a the mother putting her desire for a child above the welfare of the child. There is a good chance that a child born of IVF will suffer the same trauma that afflicts some of the children who are adopted.
    Arguing that the gift of life is more than sufficient to compensate for the purposeful erasure of a person’s biological history and the erasure of half of a person’s identity opens the door to all sorts of misery. What harm would come to any child if they were stolen from their parents and raised by others who posed as their parents? They’d still be alive, wouldn’t they? They’d still be raised by loving parents, wouldn’t they? What benefit could they get from being raised, and from knowing, their biological parents? This woman has had part of her identity stolen from her, for identity isn’t something that is solely constructed from life experience. A large part of identity comes from your family history – your grandfather had the same temper as you, your father has the same streak of sarcasm as you, etc you become part of a family. Your identity is partly anchored in the lineage you’re descended from. Genetics matters.

  44. Sometimes when these matters arise for which there seems no definitive answer…..
    TAIN’T RIGHT…..
    TAIN’T WRONG…..
    IT JUST IS…….

  47. Kate, I think you are off key on this one. Knowing where one comes from is the foundation of one’s identity. Being myself a sperm donor, I valued anonymity at the time but now, decades later, I would be delighted to meet my offsprings.
    One year ago, I wrote a surprisingly emotional letter to Olivia. She struck a chord somewhere in me. I totally support her.

  48. Well isn’t this an interesting turn?
    How will this impact all those same sex couples that demand to have offspring of their very own. These couples tend to gloss over the gorilla in the room that they cannot on their own procreate, they made that choice on their very own. Part of that logic is that tehy want to raise their children in an enviroment that normalizes homosexuality, and by so doing minimizes the reality that it takes a union of a heterosexual couple to create a life. To maintain that logic, the surrogate must remain isolated and kept separate from the offspring least he/she start asking where they came from, conversely which comes after realizing that they didn’t come from mom and mom or dad and dad.

  49. Another thought.
    Does this mean that the donated stuff (sperm and embryo) have person status?
    Would seem to support the idea of when life begins to extend beyond the time of conception.
    After all, until her mother carried her to term the fertilized egg didn’t have any rights that anyone else had, like security of person. So who or where he “father ” is, is irrelevant. (sarc)

  50. I found my natural parents when I was 28. The adoption agency contacted my mother and asked if she wished to exchange anonymous letters with me through the agency. If she had said “no” it wouldn’t have happened, but at least they asked. Politely. It isn’t a right.
    Mine said yes. I had to spend an hour with an agency councellor who gave me a bunch of literature about the good and bad that can come with meeting biological family for the first time. Not long after I had a similar chat with a buddy, and gave him that same literature, when his own kid showed up in the form of Family Court documents. It seems the involuntary introductions don’t come with the councellor and the glossy brochures. They did help.
    I will argue that this girl should be able to have a search done to find her father, at her own expense. If he is dead she should know who he is. If alive, he should be asked if he is willing to exchange anonymous letters etc. and possibly meet her. Not as a “right”, but as a simple courtesy. It is the decent thing to do, and shouldn’t scare off too many donors either.

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