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The Lie That Made Me

torontolife.com

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Re: The Lie That Made Me

#41

Post by madrox »

stickfigure wrote: post #31
madrox wrote: post #27

This is so incredibly sad. At this point in my life, I empathize with the involuntary donor quite a bit. While the author might not understand his position not wanting her to have any contact with him or his family, I certainly do. It's clear this doctor has a pattern of deceptive behavior beyond merely his practice. It's also clear that if one doctor does it, someone else has or will. I wonder how the medical board…

Can you explain that in more detail? Because I don't understand it at all. If somehow it turned out I have other children, I'd love to know how they're doing and if they're similar to me or my kid. A personal data point on the nature vs nurture debate! I can understand not wanting additional financial responsibilities - but that can't be the worry here, the author is in her 30s.

I think people with families can be incredibly protective of it and anything that may create emotional upheaval in it. If I were in his situation, I'd be thinking more about how this might impact my wife or children. Depending on upbringing and religion, I can see it being immensely traumatic for the rest of the family. I'd care more about protecting that stability than satisfying my or my donor child's curiosity. You can say that family would be wrong, but sometimes being right isn't the most important thing in a marriage or in parenting.

Imagine this story if it didn't happen through artificial insemination but through, say, an ex-girlfriend who didn't reveal the pregnancy until the child was in adulthood. That literally happened to a friend of mine. While the father had no control over what happened, it was immensely disruptive to his family. To them, it was a lot like discovering he had a second family...cue the thoughts on if you'll be loved less, etc. While you can say there's a world of difference between the two, the emotional journey for the family can end up looking very similar. Again, it isn't fair, but anything emotionally charged like this isn't.

I'm not saying it's necessarily what I'd do, but I understand.

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#42

Post by AlwaysRock »

anonporridge wrote: post #11
tomrod wrote: post #9

23andMe and similar services, though creepy to a degree to have your genetic information linked and profiled, have spawned a minor industry of social and familial alignment. Half-siblings and half-aunts/uncles are being found to be more common than people realized. The convergence of technology and society is fascinating. This was an interested read on the mispractice of a fertility doctor.

I'm honestly a little worried about the social fracturing that could happen as genetic and paternity testing get increasingly cheap and ubiquitous. My intuition is that infidelity and paternity fraud is wildly more common than anyone wants to believe, and old social orders will break down as it becomes impossible to ignore and trivial for even light suspicions to be validated. I have to believe it's good in the long…

If it is truly commoner than most think, wouldnt acceptance of it become common eventually?

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#44

Post by fortran77 »

gowld wrote: post #16
worik wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

anonymous sperm donation has been a bit of a disaster. It matters who your father is. For emotional reasons, and for medical ones. Collecting sperm off young men for $50 a pop is madness. And it seems that young men know it and do not donate. Hence the deception layered over the badness of the whole idea. I do not think that understanding who your family is is a particularly "western" preoccupation.

What's mad about it? Most people don't donate because they don't care (there are a lot of things I could do for $50 for a few hours of overhead and work), and there is plenty of supply from the people for whom $50 is worth paying attention to.

Before cheap genetic testing, why not? But now, everything is changed. You don't want to get a phone call 20 years later from someone who wants to "connect".

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#45

Post by bobkazamakis »

akavi wrote: post #38
drewcoo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering nobody ever considers it, 1-2% is huge! 1 in every 50-100 families. How many people from different families do you know? Even if your family isn't one of affected, I'd bet you know several people from affected families.

I would strongly expect it to be clustered in specific populations. I'd be very surprised if the rate among HN readers was equal to the rate among the general population.

I promise you HN is a statistical anomaly in a certain direction.

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#46

Post by anonporridge »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #42
anonporridge wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm honestly a little worried about the social fracturing that could happen as genetic and paternity testing get increasingly cheap and ubiquitous. My intuition is that infidelity and paternity fraud is wildly more common than anyone wants to believe, and old social orders will break down as it becomes impossible to ignore and trivial for even light suspicions to be validated. I have to believe it's good in the long…

If it is truly commoner than most think, wouldnt acceptance of it become common eventually?

Unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Those males who are psychologically ok with cuckolding will eventually fail to pass on their DNA, whereas those who have a strong aversion to it will be more likely to pass on their DNA.

Being ok with expending your limited time and resources raising unrelated offspring is a self terminating trait.

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#47

Post by AnimalMuppet »

anonporridge wrote: post #46
AlwaysRock wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is truly commoner than most think, wouldnt acceptance of it become common eventually?

Unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Those males who are psychologically ok with cuckolding will eventually fail to pass on their DNA, whereas those who have a strong aversion to it will be more likely to pass on their DNA. Being ok with expending your limited time and resources raising unrelated offspring is a self terminating trait.

> Being ok with expending your limited time and resources raising unrelated offspring is a self terminating trait.

I don't know about that. I know at least one family that has six children, two of whom are adopted. That's somewhat rare, but not totally unique.

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#48

Post by anonporridge »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #47
anonporridge wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Those males who are psychologically ok with cuckolding will eventually fail to pass on their DNA, whereas those who have a strong aversion to it will be more likely to pass on their DNA. Being ok with expending your limited time and resources raising unrelated offspring is a self terminating trait.

> Being ok with expending your limited time and resources raising unrelated offspring is a self terminating trait. I don't know about that. I know at least one family that has six children, two of whom are adopted. That's somewhat rare, but not totally unique.

Still applies here in my opinion.

This family you know had 33% fewer biological children than they could have had. That means their DNA will be ever so slightly overwhelmed by families with the same desire and capacity for children who chose to have 100% biological offspring.

Having said that, there certainly is some debate on whether genes are actually greater than memes when it comes to this kind of psychology. It could be that the human brain is general enough to be loaded with this kind of DNA self terminating software (meme) such that it continues for longer than you might otherwise expect, because the unrelated offspring still inherit the memes that motivated the decision to not prioritize your own genetically related offspring.

However, given enough time and generations, there should still emerge a mutant human brain that is more immune to these kinds of memes, and that genetic lineage slowly out competes the one that is more accepting of raising unrelated offspring.

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#49

Post by primordialsoup »

Somewhat orthogonal comment. Was reading this book "The coming storm" where the author Michael Lewis talks about chaos theory, and how you could go back to one (small) thing that is at the root of who you are. For example, DJ Patil had dyslexia, and that made him not do well in the school, and so he ended up going the off-beaten track and hacking his school systems etc. Years later, he was hacking into US Weather service's data, and many more incidents later, he became "Head of Data Products and Chief Scientist of LinkedIn" and later worked for Obama.

Parallel here is that one guy's mischievous behavior has such a massive consequence.

Re: The Lie That Made Me

#50

Post by nicolas_t »

anonporridge wrote: post #19
kryptiskt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a study that showed that cuckoldry was pretty rare, the rate was around 1-2%[0]: "Reading the internet, or even perusing the scientific literature, you'd get the idea that people are constantly cheating on their spouses. Indeed, scientists have estimated that anywhere from 10-30 percent of men are unknowingly raising children who are not their own. This situation is referred to as cuckoldry, or scientifical…

I'd love for this to be true, but it does conflict with various state policy decisions on the matter that seem to indicate at least a belief in the opposite. France's policy is particularly striking, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_paternity_testing#France It is possible that state institutions make these policies based exactly on my assumption above, which seems like it could be incorrect. Or perhaps even 1-2% is…

France is incredibly regressive and conservative when it comes to anything related to genetics. For example, for people doing IVF, it's not allowed to test the embryos for viability. The argument is that such testing is too close to eugenics, so instead women doing IVF cannot get any guarantees that the embryos are viable and it makes the procedure harder.

Doing a DNA test for yourself is also illegal...

Surrogacy is also not legal in France because “Any agreement, even if it does not provide for remuneration, whereby a woman agrees to conceive, bear and give birth to a child and then renounce it, is contrary to public order, the inviolability of the human body and the personal status of a natural person.”

So I wouldn't put much stoke into the policies of France on this matter

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