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The American Fertility Association Blog
News Alert: There Are 50 States & Michael Jackson’s Children Were Born in Only One – California
July 2, 2009 - Thursday
Posted by admin
California is one of the only states that permits the intent of the parent(s) to govern their parental rights, so that the intended parent (or intended parents) are listed as the legal parents on the birth certificate, regardless of biological connection, so long as this intent is formalized in an agreement/consent.
I, like all of us, have been intently watching the news involving Michael Jackson and his children, yet what amazes me is that lawyers on TMZ and other national news outlets are declaring that Michael “never formally adopted the children.” Therefore, he must not be the father of these children…..And, they then ask, who are the parents of these children?
Well, guess what? He is the father – no adoption required in this case no matter if he is the biological father or not, which appears to be the case for all three children. In California, surrogacy law is very clear as to who is the parent, regardless of biological connection, based upon intent. We can only guess at the facts in this case, but a birth in California with a surrogate, egg donor and sperm donor, will not affect his rights to these children, or the rights of his children to his estate. The only uncertainty is the fact that he was married to Ms. Rowe at the time of the birth of the first two children. She may certainly have a claim if she remains on the birth certificate, again even if an egg donor was used.
What people have to remember is that almost all people have the desire to be a parent, even Michael Jackson, so we need to remember his intentions to be a father, instead of focusing on the drama surrounding these children. Let’s hope they can move forward without their father in their lives and become successful adults without the media making it worse
See more on Channel 10 News and my interview.
Theresa Erickson, Esq.
Erickson Law
Categories
Adoption •
Donor Egg •
Family Building •
Surrogacy
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Madoff and Jackson and Family, Oh My.
June 30, 2009 - Tuesday
Posted by Corey
Can’t choose ‘em. Your family that is. So much has been going on in the press lately, what else is new? Instead of focusing on Health Care, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, it is so much easier to focus on personalities and their stories, especially if they are tragic. Good luck to you if you try to avoid it.
Yup, family.
Family men. I remember a few months ago the New York Times ran a story on the male biological clock http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/magazine/05wwln-lede-t.html that really gave me pause. It featured a photo of Pablo Picasso as an old, yet vigorous man, holding up his baby son Claude. About a hundred years ago I was friends with Claude’s ex wife, Sara, in NYC and I remembered that photo immediately. Sara and I were young women together, selling advertising for the New York Yellow Pages and we used to laugh over that picture. Sara always referred to Claude as “Pablo Picasso’s illegitimate son Claude”.
But it was always clear to me (and to Sara too) that Pablo loved his son. The love of a father for his son, for his child, is one of the most precious things on earth, of that I’m sure.
Fathers.
When I first heard that Michael Jackson had died my first reaction was ‘holy shit”. Yours too I bet. But my second reaction was, how are those kids, Michael’s kids? And to be honest, and I said this to Brian (Armentrout, The AFA’s Communications Director) “Are his kids better off now?” Because I remembered that horrible footage of Michael dangling his son off of the balcony. Who doesn’t? Who could possibly forget that image. And I remembered the charges of child molestation, later dismissed. As the days have gone by, and more and more voices have risen to the surface, I think I was wrong in my second reaction to Michael’s death. I don’t think his kids are better off. I think that Michael was unusual, yes. Oh boy yes. But I think he loved his children, and clearly wanted them so much that he hired two surrogates to conceive them.
Madoff, I can’t even stand writing his name on paper. My friend Jamie works for Hadassah and my own extended family was hurt by Madoff. Not that you need a personal connection to hate this man. And you know what else? This is awful but I think he’s sexy. Someone that evil doesn’t have the right to be sexy. But I can see how he scammed people, that’s for sure. Gawd, how lousy is that!
So. Does Madoff love his sons? Is he protecting them now? He almost lost one son to cancer, did he actually scam, and deceive, a child of his own that he thought might not outlive him? Does Madoff love his sons?
Oh boy, family. We at The AFA help you make ‘em. What you do after that, is up to you.
Corey Whelan
Program Director
The American Fertility Association
Categories
Family Building
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Greetings from Planet Menopause
June 29, 2009 - Monday
Posted by Corey
My life is ruled by hot flashes these days and I have to tell you, it ain’t no picnic. I’m 53, and today my twins turn 14 years old. They ate birthday cake for breakfast and partied like it’s 2009. And in the midst of all this joy, I couldn’t help my mind from wandering back to that day when I gave birth to them, with the help of IVF, at 39 years old.
You know, women contact The AFA all the time for help with getting pregnant and a full 30% of them are over the age of 35. Women my age call almost every week, in various states of denial about their fsh level and possibility of motherhood. It’s heartbreaking, and it has made me weary. These women so want to have a baby, and time has not diminished that want. If anything, it has increased it. It’s devastating, sometimes scary even, trying to talk to women about their fertility potential and that tick tick. Tick. Could this really be the “disease of infertility” or is it simply nature’s way?
I’m going on record right now to say that I’m personally committed to changing the conventional wisdom around the bio clock in this country. I am a bio clock vigilante. I am a stand for educating women about the truth about their own bodies.
I am committed to getting less phone calls from 42 year old women who are shocked that they can’t conceive, and more phone calls from women of any age letting me know that they gave birth to a 6 pounder with rosy cheeks.
Gratefully, I am the Program Director for The American Fertility Association. I have an amazing army of people who have joined me in taking this stand.
Ok. I need to open the freezer now and stand in front of it for about five minutes.
Happy birthday Connor and Caitlin, I love you. Happy birthday to me.
Categories
Fertility Preservation
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Green Eyes
June 26, 2009 - Friday
Posted by Corey
My dogs are people magnets. I have two, Cabo Lucas, a mixed breed that we adopted out of a shelter in Mexico; he had been hit by a car and lost a leg, I adopted him when Dubya was president and I used to get a kick out of the fact that my furry Mexican wetback had no green card. My other nut job is a maniacal cocker spaniel named Coco Chanel; she got a hair cut yesterday and lost her auburn curls, her beautiful green eyes are more prominent now. She’s a shelter dog too, I tell all my friends in the adoption world that I have one domestic and one international adoption and they indulge me in my story without reminding me that dogs are not children.
The three of us were out for a walk this morning and a little girl stopped me to pet my dogs – Coco is skittish but I let her warm up to the little girl’s hand. A teenage girl was with the little one. I took one look at her and knew without a doubt, PCOS. Like most girls, and women, with PCOS, this 16 year old was trying very hard to be invisible. Overweight, a navy blue hoodie, jeans, dirty scuffed sneakers, a monotone look and voice. She had acne but what really got to me was the male pattern baldness and the five o’clock shadow that she couldn’t hide above her upper lip. But you know what else she had? She had the same shade of green eyes as Coco – seriously – riveting eyes.
I didn’t know what to do. In my work at The AFA I have spoken to scores of young women over the years who also had pco and had never heard the words before. No, of course I’m not a doctor, and I can’t make a street corner diagnosis. But still. I felt so torn, in my mind I kept going back and forth. Do I have the right to talk to her about this, without an invitation? Do I risk making her feel worse? Do I risk ruining her day? But in the end, I chose to talk to her because I couldn’t bear the thought of her not knowing the truth about herself.
I was more gentle than I knew I know how to be before my first cup of morning coffee. “Do you know that you may have pcos? Have you heard that term before?” She was clearly embarrassed and I went on to tell her that I have it too. I told her that I lost 70 pounds by eating low carb foods and exercising and sent her to http://www.atkinscenter.com to teach her how to do it. I told her how I had eradicated the other life sucking symptoms of pco from my existence and also that I was a mom. I told her my name and address, and that she could borrow my work out tapes. I told her what she had, but mostly what I told her was that that she also had hope.
Yes, she already knew that she had PCOS. But the hope piece? That she didn’t know. She had been given a prescription but not a game plan. When I told her she could be a mom someday, her beautiful eyes smiled.
Then I went home and had a cuppa, and turned on my computer, and started my day. Dogs at my feet, I couldn’t stop smiling either.
Corey Whelan
Program Director
The American Fertility Association
Categories
PCOS
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The Bad News Island: An Interview With Tour Guide Melissa Ford
June 24, 2009 - Wednesday
Posted by admin
In MY day, when people found out they couldn’t have children, they gave up their power to the men in the white coats. We allowed the men in white coats to poke and prod us without completely understanding the whys. We suffered alone, isolated. And we liked it! We loved it!
Today,
***
You decided to become a tour guide for an island where no one wants to go. Huh?
Well, someone had to do it! Actually, there are a lot of really good books out there for infertility, but they were all missing items here and there. I wanted to cover the basics, but also make sure that all of the questions I still had after I put those books down were answered. Such as what happens if you hit a blood vessel during an injection? Or what are the various IVF protocols?
I also wanted one book for everyone: primary, secondary, situational, biological, young, old, single, or married. This doesn’t mean that everyone will love the book because they may hate my writing style, or how inclusive it is, or any other reason. But I wanted the door to be open to everyone who wanted to walk through by using inclusive language, considering a plethora of situations, and including information for everyone in the community.
You call this island the Land of IF. What does IF mean?
IF is the online abbreviation (on bulletin boards and blogs) for infertility, but “if” is also a huge part of infertility. “If” also conveys the uncertainty and leaps of faith one needs to take daily with infertility.
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You’ve done a lot of actual travel. What did you look for in a good guide book? And how did you incorporate this into the Land of If?
I looked for consistency between chapters/cities and information I could use. I love Lonely Planet and Let’s Go because they both skip the pictures and essays about the place (well, they contain that in a small amount) and instead use the space to list the important information you need while you’re there, keeping in mind all people and not just a small subsection of the traveling population. They don’t make assumptions about your financial situation or your interests. They just throw it all in there along with a few helpful tips that will help you bypass difficulties while on the road.
Everyone gets off the island eventually, one way or another. What neighborhoods did you hang out in and what was your path off the island?
It’s an interesting question because I had the neighbourhood I lived in (and most of us only own one home), but many neighbourhoods that I visited due to friends or family members living in other spaces. Many of my childhood friends ended up going through infertility with me, and, of course, I met people along the way through Resolve and now blogs.
In addition, I think the way off the island is really an emotional journey. You can have children and still not resolve your infertility or you can stop the family building process and still not resolve your infertility. There is a saying with Resolve that children resolve childlessness, not infertility. And I find that to be very true.
So my path off the island was a lot of self-searching and finding peace with the journey. But my neighbourhoods while on the island (and I’m still living over here because we’re not finished with our family building) were primary infertility and early loss, with our apartment building being the Injectable IUI Cycle Towers.
When did it first strike you to write the Land of If? What was that a-ha moment where you thought, “This must be written?”—was it a sudden or gradual realization?
It actually started out as a very different book—a book for non-infertile men and women to read to understand the infertility experience. I came downstairs one morning and my husband, Josh, was angrily writing a response to an advice columnist. He had followed an intriguing sentence from the “front page” of the online newspaper to read a question about adoption. And her advice was crap. We were talking about it with my parents that night and they said, “well, you can do something about this. You could write something. You’re both writers.”
I started writing that book, but realized after a chapter or two that it wasn’t a good fit. It wasn’t flowing and it didn’t feel comfortable. I switched it to being a book for me, for my community. And that’s when it clicked.
Would this book have come about if not for your blog, Stirrup Queens?
I don’t know. I don’t think so. I guess one thing that makes this book very different from all other infertility books is that it has this living, breathing counterpart—the blog—and the author is completely accessible. I tell you to join a community and vent your frustrations, but then I also participate in said community and make sure you’re welcomed inside by maintaining the blogroll and Lost and Found. I hope people who read the book then step through the fourth wall that sometimes exists between the author and the reader and communicate with me, either through the blog or by emailing or meeting me at a reading.
Why would someone who is NOT experiencing infertility want to pick up this book?
To better understand someone they know who is experiencing infertility. I don’t know how many people who are not experiencing infertility will pick up this book, but that’s okay. The words are there for everyone to use who is experiencing infertility and they can pass them along in conversation with people outside the experience.
How different would your own IF journey have been if you’d had this book?
I probably would have felt less lonely. The exercises in the book I used to make decision and I included one of the real decision webs we made before we started treatments. And I took my sister’s advice to heart a lot and still do in living my life. But I wish I had known about the online community back then. It was small, but still existed. I wish I had known about blogs and read them.
There is a lot of humor in your book. Can you talk about the importance of levity while putzing around on the Isle of If?
If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. And even as you laugh, you’ll still cry. I think it’s important to note that having a sense of humour doesn’t mean that you’ll laugh your way through every insemination or egg retrieval or meeting with the adoption facilitator. It means that you’ll bring whatever levity you can to every situation while also honouring the enormity of the situation.
One time, when we were at the beginning of a very early loss, we stopped at a rest stop while driving and when I saw the blood in my panties, I instinctively took off my glasses and threw them. In this very dirty gas station bathroom. And after I had cried and cried and cried, I realized that I couldn’t see anything without the glasses--especially in the dim bathroom light—and didn’t know where they were outside the stall and feared that I would step on them in my attempt to find them. So I could cry but still see the amusement in having thrown my glasses—the ridiculousness of it all.
What is your marker of success with this book. I mean, how will you know when you’ve accomplished your goal(s) in writing it?
If someone writes me and says that it helped them breathe. That it made anything easier or shed light on something that had been muddled in their brain prior to reading it. If people feel that it is inclusive and respects everyone in the adoption/loss/infertility (ALI) community. I wish it could also speak to those outside the community and hopefully the book is respectful to other members of the adoption triad, doctors, nurses, surrogates. It is hard to write balancing everyone, but if I did so overall, I will think the book is a success.
What other projects are you working on, books or otherwise?
Right now, I’m finishing up a work of fiction. I needed something lighter and less research driven this winter/spring. As I complete that project and release that, I have three more non-fiction ideas that I’m tossing around. It is interesting because at the same time, I thought up four non-fiction projects that sat well with me and four fiction projects. So I would love to weave back and forth between the two—with the heavier topics being balanced by the lighter ones.
You’ve tweeted that you’ve been writing sm.ut. Is writing sm.ut as much fun as writing about timed intercourse and hormone levels?
Oh, timed intercourse wins out every time. There is nothing more joyous than writing about timed intercourse EXCEPT writing about home inseminations.
Give us the sales pitch. Where can we get your book?
Navigating the Land of If has its own website where I post information such as readings and where to purchase the book. You can get it at any bookstore in the US as well as online from sites such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
Lori
Weebles Wobblog ... mindful living amid chaos.
All Thumbs Reviews ... get your sass on.
Categories
Infertility •
IUI •
IVF
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