An English teenager who began life in a test tube, was “frozen” for about two years and eventually rescued from the deep freeze and given as “a donor embryo” to a couple has spoken about the great distress her origins have caused her.
She wants any person thinking about having a child this way to reflect on the challenges the child may have to face and the suffering he or she may experience.
“Knowing that the two people I love most don’t look like me and that I am not biologically related to them has been really tough,” said 16-year-old Gracie Crane.
“There are times I’ve wished I’d never been born. As much as I love my parents, it’s just so sad not knowing who I am and where I came from.”
One of the first British children to have been “a donor embryo”, Gracie was born before the UK introduced a law allowing children like her to trace their natural parents.
Like 25,000 other people created before 2005 with anonymous donor sperm, eggs or embryos, she has no right to ever find out who she is.
She does know that her genetic parents were a couple in their 30s. ‘The female’, as she refers to her mother, was a white woman and her father, ‘the male’, was half Afro-Caribbean, half white.
Having successfully had one child they decided that they didn’t want the other three embryos in the batch, their baby son’s brothers and sisters, and that these could be incinerated.
When asked by the clinic, however, they agreed to “donate” them to a 46-year-old woman and her husband who couldn’t have a baby. All three were implanted but just the one, Gracie, survived.
Each year about 2,000 people opt for egg, sperm or embryo donation in Britain — approximately 44,000 babies have been born this way since 1994.
“I would like to be a mother one day so I can finally have someone I’m genetically related to,” said the teenager.
“But if I can’t have children naturally I would never have one through donor conception. I wouldn’t put anybody else through what I’ve been through.”
She added: “Knowing that the two people I love most don’t look like me and that I am not biologically related to them has been really tough.”
She told how a few years ago she was asked to give a talk in school about donor conception. To the surprise of her parents she explained, “I stood at the front of the classroom and just cried.
“I didn’t want to tell the other kids about how I started life so they had to make do with reading the information I’d pinned to the walls behind me.”
In a frequently emotional interview she told the Daily Mail: “I brought a friend home from school recently and I’d never told her how I came to be born, so when she saw my parents I think she was quite shocked.
“I tried to explain but it’s not like adoption, so people find it really hard to understand.”
In a bid to grapple with some of the complexities of the issue Gracie argues that if people are going to have a donor-conceived child, then the donors and parents need to be matched up.
With tears in her eyes she added: “But then embryos that can’t be matched will be thrown away, and that’s not right either.”
ALIVE! Ireland