Since the birth of the first baby through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 1978, more than 1 million babies have been born as a result of assisted reproduction. These new reproductive technologies have had a fundamental impact on genetic and gestational relationships between parents and their children. With donor insemination, the child is genetically related to the mother but not the father, and with egg donation it is the mother with whom the child lacks a genetic link. In the case of surrogacy, where one woman bears a child for another woman, the surrogate mother may also be the genetic mother of the child. Thus it is now possible for a child to have 5 parents;an egg donor, a sperm donor, a surrogate mother who hosts the pregnancy and the 2 social parents whom the child knows as """"""""mom"""""""" and """"""""dad"""""""". A number of concerns have been raised about the potentially negative consequences of these types of assisted reproduction for parenting and children's psychological well being. These relate to secrecy about the child's donor conception, less positive parenting toward a non-genetic or non-gestational child, and the discovery by children born through surrogacy that their gestational mother had conceived them with the specific intention of relinquishing them to the commissioning parents.
The aim of the proposed research is to address these concerns. Preliminary data on parent-child relationships have been obtained from representative samples of the following family types when the children were aged 1, 2 and 3 years: (i) 51 egg donation families (ii) 50 donor insemination families (iii) 42 surrogacy families, and (iv) a matched comparison group of 80 natural conception families. However, many of the key issues cannot be examined until the children develop a more sophisticated understanding of their family circumstances. Thus, the specific aim of the current proposal is to follow up these families when the children are 6-7 and 9-10 years old to allow assessments of family relationships and child development to be made in relation to children's developing understanding of the implications of their genetic and/or gestational origins. Data will be collected by standardized interviews, questionnaires, observational methods and psychological tests administered to mothers, fathers, children and teachers. These samples are the first of their kind to be followed up from infancy, thus providing an opportunity to examine the influence of early experience on later development in these new family forms.
