From Lonny Higgins, Author of "Creating Life Against The Odds

I am honored and extend my thanks again to the amazing and wonderful Lonny Higgins for the first blog entry....


I am a 62 year old practicing Ob/Gyn, author of the book Creating Life Against The Odds, The Journey From Infertility to Parenthood which you might have fun checking out through my website at http://www.lonnyhiggins.com/. But I am also an elementary school substitute teacher, an addicted distance paddler of the Molokai Channel and a neophyte farmer of artichokes on the Big Island. So, how come I'm wanting to share on your blog? Mine was one of the early DE journeys of the 1990's, making me a crusader for the right of our children to know of their donors during a time when REI's thought that anonymity was the only reasonable choice. It was foremost a journey which brought me to have our third baby at the age of 50 because I couldn't bear the thought of no longer hearing the patter of tiny feet in our home. I'm a philosophical nut, too, so I'll excerpt some insights...
I find it very interesting that finally we are seeing studies about donor siblings in which, for the first time, identity/family quest behavior is no longer presumed to be stemming from a desire to understand loss, but rather from a desire to know bounty in the sense of a greater family identity. The early years of DI were so immersed in secrecy that the only paradigm we heard about was how anonymous DI was really an angst experience for the lost parent, yet I always felt that the sense of having lost something by being conceived in that way was something more due to how the information was or wasn't shared and how guilty the parent or parents felt about it, than anything to do with genes shared with those "lost dads." It is also noteworthy to me that the term donor siblings is now using the word sibling to mean anyone who shares some genes, where before it meant only those who share all their genes regardless of what roof they were raised separately beneath.We are one step closer to understanding what has been a lightbulb experience for me and that is the positive aspect of genes shared rather than owned. For our family, the sharing of genes never became the criteria for sibling identity because we fell on the other end of the spectrum entirely. We feel that sibling is defined by being raised within one family under one roof, so the basis of closeness never became one of genetic ranking. I believe the opposite end of the spectrum is finally taking a back seat when people can call those with shared genes full siblings. We are all related and at the same time someone else's child. This fundamental duality is inherent in all of nature. Nice to see it declaring itself after all these years. Hugs, Lonny