The story is bizarre even by today's standards: Marissa Evans, a 42-year-old
Texas woman who recently lost her 21-year-old son in a street fight, regretted
that he never became a father. So Evans obtained a court order to harvest her
dead son's sperm. She plans to pay a surrogate mother to conceive and bear a
grandchild whom Evans would raise. That child, Evans told "The Today Show's"
Matt Lauer, would "heal my heart."

It is a sign of the times that most of the uproar over Evans' strange
scheme has focused on her violation of the rights of her dead son, who never
consented to posthumously father a child, rather than on the welfare of the
child who would be conceived through the union of a dead man's sperm and the
egg of a surrogate mother he would likely never know.

Many children enter the world in less than ideal circumstances, and many
adopted and orphaned children struggle with the unfulfilled desire to know the
birth parents who placed them for adoption or died before they were born. Yet
the strange new scenarios made possible by today's reproductive technologies
have created an entirely new class of offspring: children intentionally
conceived from the gametes of men or women they will never meet and often born
into intentionally fatherless or motherless families.

As Elizabeth Marquardt, author of the forthcoming study, "My Daddy's Name
Is Donor," has noted, these children differ from adopted and orphaned children
in that they know "that the parents raising them are also the ones who
intentionally created them with a severed relationship to at least one of their
biological parents."

That knowledge can make a donor-conceived child's natural longing to
understand his origins particularly painful and confusing. While few such
children have a back-story as strange as the one Evans may someday tell her
grandchild, a growing number are voicing feelings of anger, sorrow and
confusion over the circumstances of their conception — feelings overlooked for
decades by glowing media reports about their overjoyed parents and "miracle"
births.

This is especially true of the estimated 1 million American children
conceived with the help of sperm donors. Many such children have embarked on
desperate searches for their biological fathers and half-siblings using such
online outlets as the Donor Sibling Registry. Their motives vary, from a
yearning for a father figure or more complete medical history to a fear of
accidentally committing incest with a half-sibling with whom they unknowingly
share the same biological father.

Their searches often end in frustration. Few men want to connect with the
dozens or even hundreds of children spawned from sperm donations they made in
exchange for beer money back in college. Nor do most sperm banks want to risk
spooking potential sperm donors by foregoing donor anonymity. Unlike adoption
policies, which increasingly honor an adult adoptee's right to know about his
biological parents and genetic history, America's largely unregulated fertility
industry remains much more focused on adult desires than children's needs.

That frustrates donor-conceived children like Katrina Clark, who noted in
a 2006 Washington Post op-ed that "we didn't ask to be born into this
situation," deprived from birth of "the right to know who both of our parents
are." Clark eventually found her biological father online when she was a
teenager, but she felt crushed when he told her, shortly after they established
contact, that he had grown tired of "this whole sperm-donor thing."

Plaintive stories like Clark's, and bizarre scenarios like the Evans case,
remind us that it is a mistake to consider only adult desires when deciding
whether or how to use today's reproductive technologies. The rights and needs
of children deserve consideration, too — even before those children are
conceived.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is an author, television and radio host, and St.
Louis-based fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Her website is
www.colleen-campbell.com.