How Silence Became “Outdated”: Secrecy,Anonymity and Artificial Insemination by Donor in Belgium,1950s-1990s

In 2019, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted a recommendation calling for the waiving of anonymity for all future human gamete donations in order to allow children born through assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to know their genetic origins. The draft recommendation was an initiative of the Belgian Senator Petra De Sutter, who herself was a fertility doctor until she switched careers and became a politician. The recommendation stated that “traditionally, most countries favoured anonymous donation models”, but that human rights law had increasingly moved towards “recognition of a right to know one’s origins.” Whereas fertility doctors for most of the twentieth century took donor anonymity for granted and saw it as a means to protect the child, as shown in various papers of this special issue, De Sutter in 2019 considered anonymous sperm donation to be both harmful and “outdated”. ¹

How did donor anonymity evolve from a common-sense matter of good clinical practice to a controversial remnant of the past? Much like De Sutter did in her draft recommendation, most existing works on evolutions concerning donor anonymity search for an explanation within the legal sphere. ² They mostly give an overview of important national laws. They typically begin with the Swedish Insemination Act (1984) that for the first time provided donor offspring the right to have access to the identity of the donor, and then proceed with legal changes in other countries, such as Austria, Germany, Switzerland, New Zealand, the Australian States of Victoria and Western Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Norway and, most recently, France. ³ Many studies also take into account the international instruments that courts have used to change the law, for example, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), which provides for a child’s right to know his or her parents “as far as possible”, or the Hague Convention (1993), which maintains that information concerning the identity of the parents of an adopted person should be preserved. ⁴ There also is an extensive and growing body of work on the consequences of donor anonymity, both from an ethical perspective and from a more practical point of view, for example, regarding the impact on the profile and the recruitment of sperm donors. ⁵

These studies from the social sciences occasionally touch upon the history of artificial insemination by donor (AID), often in the introduction. Yet, mainly because of their different disciplinary aims, these historical overviews are either focussed on medical and political developments, paying relatively little heed to wider cultural change ⁶ , or are limited to the direct political and public debates leading to the waiving of anonymity, largely neglecting the more distant past. ⁷ As part of a growing interest in infertility and assisted reproduction, historians have identified —and began to fill— this gap. ⁸ In recent years, scholars such as Gayle Davis, Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Angus McLaren and Kara Swanson have shed light on the historical development of AID, often through a gendered lens. ⁹ However, until today, the existing historiography remains dominantly Anglo-Saxon. ¹⁰ With most studies focussing on either the late nineteenth century or the direct post-war years, there also appears to be a certain reluctance to venture further into the last decades of the twentieth century. ¹¹

In several of the aforementioned historical studies, anonymity and secrecy come into view as important principles underlying AID practices in the past, but they are not studied as subjects in their own right. To my knowledge, this is the first article that addresses donor anonymity and (non)-disclosure as historical phenomena, with attention for their changing meanings and functions. The key questions are: how did secrecy and anonymity first become controversial? When and why did these principles cease to be self-evident?

This article is inspired by historical studies on adoption that have paid attention to evolving views on disclosure. ¹² Also more generally, secrets are a flourishing subject of historical research. ¹³ Most notably, for the British context, Deborah Cohen has related several kinds of family secrets to each other —for example, regarding mental disabilities, adoption or homosexuality— providing fascinating insights into both the forgotten functions of secrets and into the changing cultural appreciations of secrecy and reticence. ¹⁴ This article innovatively draws on this body of scholarship ¹⁵ , revealing that the history of AID shares many characteristics with histories of adoption and other family secrets.

Even though secrecy and anonymity are often confused with one another in contemporary debates and press coverage, this article makes a firm distinction between both issues. With secrecy, I refer to the complete silence that used to surround, and in a significant number of cases still surrounds ¹⁶ , donor conception. Pioneering practitioners of AID urged couples to keep silent about the treatment. Donor insemination was only considered to be a good solution for infertility if everyone —family, friends and definitely the child itself— was kept in the dark about it. In fact, fertility doctors claimed that even the couple, once pregnant, would soon forget that the child was not biologically related to the husband and go through life as a “normal” family. Anonymity, in contrast, concerns the identity of the donor. The issue at stake is the possibility for donor-conceived persons to receive information about the man from whom they descend, including his name. Much like secrecy, anonymity was a self-evident principle for the pioneers of AID. In fact, it was one of the main reasons for the physician’s involvement. Acting as an intermediary, the doctor was responsible for matching the sperm donor to the intended parents, without them having to meet. While the waiving of anonymity implies disclosure (if you reveal the identity of the donor, you also have to reveal the means of conception), disclosure is possible without sharing information about the donor. This article shows that this distinction is also relevant from a historical point of view, as the issues of secrecy and anonymity became controversial at different moments and for different reasons.

The focus of this article is Belgium. Belgium is one of the few countries in Central Europe where anonymous sperm donation remains the norm, even though “known” donations are also possible. ¹⁷ Significantly, Belgian legislation on donor anonymity is not a remnant of political discussions that took place decades ago (the article of Fabrice Cahen in this special issue sheds light on the “prehistory” of the 1994 French bioethics law), but is fairly recent. In fact, apart from a law on paternity and the legal status of donor-conceived persons, which was voted in 1987, there were no laws on sperm donation in Belgium for the entire twentieth century. ¹⁸ Indeed, the first law on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) was established as late as in 2007. With this law, Belgium legally endorsed donor anonymity, even though various European countries at that time had already waived anonymity or were considering to do so. ¹⁹ In the last decade, donor anonymity has become the subject of public debate, prompted by activism of donor-conceived persons. Since 2012, the organisation Donorkinderen (donor children) supports those searching for their biological family through DNA testing and occasionally brings to light scandals. ²⁰ As a response to their activism and the resulting media attention, politicians from various parties have proposed to change the law. ²¹ Most fertility doctors, however, continue to defend donor anonymity, referring to the right to privacy of both sperm donors and donor parents, and to the risk of causing a supply shortage of donated sperm. ²²

Relating concerns about AID from the 1950s to the 1990s to wider histories of truth and identity, this article tells the histories of secrecy and anonymity before the rise of activism from donor-conceived persons and before the commercialisation—and the resulting democratisation—of DNA testing. It considers the impact of earlier transformations: both within reproductive medicine and in Belgian society as a whole. This article consists of four parts, successively paying heed to the moral opposition against sperm donation in the 1950s and 1960s, the “psychologisation” of AID and the complex movement of the “sexual revolution” in the 1970s, the impact of the “lesbian baby boom”, and the growing influence of adoption studies in the 1980s and 1990s.

Silence and Moral Controversy: Pioneering AID (1950s-1960s)

Silence shrouds the early history of AID in Belgium. Whereas artificial insemination already gave rise to political debates in neighbouring countries France and West-Germany in the mid-twentieth century, not a single Belgian politician even mentioned the issue in parliament before the 1980s. ²³ In a similar vein, scientific and medical societies in France (Académie des sciences morales et politiques de France), the Netherlands (Koninklijke Nederlandsche maatschappij tot bevordering der geneeskunst), and West-Germany (Bundesärztekammer) already took position against AID in respectively 1949, 1956 and 1958. ²⁴ The Belgian National Medical Order (Nationale orde der artsen), of which all Belgian physicians were required by law to be a member, followed suit only several years later. In 1965, the decision was made that AID was not a permissible medical act, which means that practitioners that did offer the technique risked to be sanctioned for deontological reasons. ²⁵

Due to the lack of political attention and the dismissal of the medical establishment, AID gained little visibility in Belgian society in the 1950s and 1960s. In this sense, it comes as no surprise that mid-century Belgian newspapers represented AID as something foreign. Articles, which were often alarming in tone, reported on the issue of donor insemination in the United States, Britain, Germany and France, but the readers were reassured: “In Belgium, the method has not yet been widely adopted; there are only sporadic cases.” ²⁶

It is hard to find even basic information about these “sporadic cases” occurring in Belgium, as doctors offering donor insemination tended to keep their practices off the radar. It is telling that the few sources that do exist on the practices of Belgian fertility doctors in the 1950s and 1960s are international reports or proceedings of international conferences: it appears that proponents of AID only dared to share their views abroad. For example, the gynaecologist Jean Snoeck did not publish anything about AID, but nevertheless defended its use on an international conference in Marseille in 1957 and before the Feversham Committee in 1959. ²⁷ Similarly, the married couple Robert Schoysman and Andrée Schoysman-Deboeck, who were both trained as fertility doctors, began to offer AID in the seclusion of their private practice in Brussels in 1956. Robert Schoysman was well-known as a pioneer of AID abroad, in France especially. ²⁸ Yet, it was only in the early 1970s that Schoysman and Schoysman-Deboeck began to mention AID in publications and lectures. At that time, they—by their own account— had helped to conceive 205 donor children. ²⁹

This is not to say that AID was quietly condoned. To the limited extent that the subject was touched upon in the Belgian context, it was almost universally dismissed. Within Catholic circles especially, there was some (negative) attention for artificial insemination between 1949 and 1956, as a response to papal addresses about it. ³⁰ From the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, the religion 93% of Belgians identified with at the time ³¹ , artificial insemination raised many moral issues. When it considered Artificial Insemination by Husband (AIH), meaning that the sperm of the husband was used, the technique was said to contravene “natural law” because reproduction was separated from sex and because sperm acquisition often implied masturbation. Artificial Insemination by Donor (AID) was considered to be even more problematic from a Catholic point of view. Here, the most decisive objection was that a third party intruded upon the marriage. In other words, it was seen as an adultery. ³²

There is reason to assume that these religious objections affected Belgian involuntarily childless couples’ experiences and decisions, as research on the 1950s and 1960s has shown that “the influence of the church on morality in general and on sexual morality in particular can hardly be overstated”. ³³ A rare study on the subject indeed suggests that involuntarily childless couples rejected donor insemination for moral reasons, instead opting to adopt or to remain childless. In 1972, a student in social nursing wrote a dissertation documenting what infertile couples thought about different routes to parenthood. She interviewed eighteen couples born between 1901 and 1948. Apart from one younger couple that preferred AID over adoption, all respondents rejected the technique. A few did so for religious reasons (“the married couple is Catholic and given the fact that the Catholic Church objects AID, they also do so”), others called AID “animal-like”, “an experiment”, “immoral”, or “a technique that has little to do with love”. ³⁴

Given these hostile views, it is no wonder that those couples who did try to conceive with donor sperm did not make this public. Historical accounts of donor parents are virtually non-existent, likely because they feared the moral judgement of others. More generally, silence fitted with the emotional culture of the time, in which self-control and reserve were important values. A contemporary saying was that “one did not speak from the bed”, which meant that sexuality had to remain a private issue. ³⁵ Forms of sexuality that did not conform to Roman-Catholic norms were the subject of family secrets: not only AID but also, for example, homosexuality or pregnancy outside of marriage (for example, in so-called homes for unmarried women, women could —and sometimes were forced to—give birth secretly and give up their child for adoption). ³⁶ Even though such family secrets nowadays are all too often portrayed as narrow-minded or repressive, I agree with Deborah Cohen that families themselves also viewed secrets as a means of protection, which allowed for some freedom to deviate from societal norms—at least behind closed doors. ³⁷

In any case, not only AID was kept secret. Popular books targeted at childless married couples suggest that male infertility in general remained taboo. The statement that men could be infertile continued to be presented as a revelation, even well into the 1980s. ³⁸ Oral history interviews also point at the persistent invisibility of male infertility. ³⁹ Most tellingly, two women who respectively remained involuntarily childless or adopted due to male-factor infertility in the 1960s, told me that they “took the blame” in order to conceal their husband’s infertility. As one of them explained:

“If you adopted, people assumed that the woman was infertile. […] I always took it upon myself. To me, it was fine that they thought this. […] It is different now, but at that time it was very, very humiliating for him. It was better if people thought the cause was me. They were convinced of that anyway, so why should I have argued with them?” ⁴⁰

When taking into account this wider culture of silence and the taboo on male infertility, it becomes easier to understand that fertility doctors urged intended parents to keep their lips sealed. If intended parents were planning to reveal the truth, they were not considered to be eligible for AID. Everything surrounding the treatment had to be shrouded in silence — the parents even could not have told anyone about their fertility issues. Because they had to be able to explain the pregnancy, nobody could suspect that the man was infertile. For Schoysman and Schoysman-Deboeck, the criterion of secrecy was so essential that they used it as a benchmark for selecting “suitable” couples for AID. Only couples who they believed both to be able to keep a secret and who had told no one about the husband’s infertility were eligible for the treatment; others were recommended to adopt. In practice, this meant that they, by their own account, rejected more than 8 out of 10 requests. ⁴¹

It is true that fertility doctors might have recommended secrecy for their own sake. After all, secrecy offered an additional guarantee, on top of medical confidentiality, that the doctor offering AID would not face any deontological charges from the Belgian National Medical Order. ⁴² However, the reasons for the omerta were probably not solely selfish. Internationally, the common view amongst fertility doctors appears to have been that secrecy would allow those involved to be a “normal” family. The couple could have children without revealing the husband’s infertility, which protected his (sexual) reputation. ⁴³ In Belgium, there was also an important legal reason to remain silent (much like in the United Kingdom, as you may read in this special issue). It was crucial that the donor child was considered to be legitimate, born within the marriage, because legitimate, natural or bastard children were not equal before the law. ⁴⁴ The bottom line was that a child born out of wedlock had fewer rights, especially relating to inheritance, until the law changed in 1987. ⁴⁵

In general, secrecy was considered to be in the best interest of the child. Caring parents were urged to remain silent in order to protect their children from legal inequalities, negative reactions and mockery, and, even more importantly, from self-doubt and worries. Why provide children with information that would render their lives needlessly complex? The idea was that the child would believe that s/he was biologically related to both parents and therefore would not face any emotional difficulties. The child would never find out. It would attach itself to the social father without any problems and recognise itself in him without questioning. In the words of Léon Hermann Levie, a Dutch practitioner who in the 1960s also helped many Belgian couples: “The whole point of donor insemination is that the child that is conceived in this way considers himself, and is considered by others, to be the own child of this man and that woman.” ⁴⁶

To sum up, there were many reasons to remain silent: the fear of social rejection, the protection of the infertile husband’s reputation, the importance attached to it by medical practitioners, the legal status of the child. However, there also was criticism on secrecy. As aforementioned, opponents of AID mainly used moral-religious arguments against the technique, which they associated with masturbation and adultery. Yet also psychological ideas were integrated into their argumentation. For example, quoting American psychologist Ruth Berenda, the Catholic physician Raoul De Guchteneere put forward that “it is especially the secrecy created by the hetero-insemination between the husband and the wife that can seriously compromise certain unions […] they try to conceal the truth and try to present everything as normal. The result is that they deceive themselves and deceive others and this can be harmful to their relationship.” ⁴⁷ He called the psychological outcomes of AID “unpredictable and uncontrollable”: as it was possible that the parents afterwards felt unforeseen regret, jealousy or guilt, there was no guarantee that the child would grow up in a harmonious family, ignorant of its origins. ⁴⁸

The views of De Guchteneere were not unique. Also other Catholic authors used psychological arguments to back up their moral rejection of AID. For example, as early as in 1950, a certain doctor Vandenbussche wrote that he could “not get rid of the thought that for these children, their fatherlessness will be a congenital anomaly of their psyche”. ⁴⁹ The Belgian National Medical Order used a similar mix of moral and psychological arguments to justify its rejection of AID in 1965. The verdict did state that the technique had great moral implications, but mainly highlighted the lack of knowledge about psychological repercussions on parents and children. In its opinion, donor insemination was “an experiment that exceeds permissible limits due to the total uncertainty in the field of psychology”, especially given the “possibilities of revelation”. ⁵⁰

These arguments about the unknown implications of AID and secrecy were not about deceitfulness or fraud. Opponents of AID did not see honesty as a solution. They simply believed that donor insemination should not happen at all: first and foremost because it was immoral, secondly because it was a psychological risk. Couples who chose for donor insemination faced moral condemnation and psychological pathologisation, but not because they were liars. The morality of disguising the truth for children and the outside world was not questioned; it was rather the feasibility of keeping the secret that became subject to scrutiny.

Secrets in the “Sexual Revolution” (1970s)

After more than fifteen years of silence, Robert Schoysman brought his AID practices into the open together with practitioners of the Catholic University of Leuven. On 17 May 1972, the documentary Het kind van de berekening (The child of calculation) was broadcasted on public television, as part of the weekly scientific show Verover de aarde (Conquer the earth). ⁵¹ The documentary briefly introduced the issue of infertility in general and then explained the procedure of AID in depth, with attention for technical, psychological and ethical aspects. It featured Robert Schoysman alongside two colleagues of the Catholic University of Leuven who had recently begun to offer donor insemination, namely the andrologist Omer Steeno and the psychiatrist Piet Nijs. ⁵² In addition, there was an anonymised interview with a couple who was about to start with AID. The documentary projected a rather positive image of donor conception, even though the interview questions at several occasions forced the interviewees onto the defensive. The television host Piet De Valkeneere confronted them with negative stereotypes about donor insemination, for example, the view that it was an adultery, that the woman would be overly curious about the donor, and that sperm donors were students in need of easy cash. However, by letting the experts—whether by training or experience—correct these stereotypical views, AID was ultimately represented as an acceptable solution for infertility.

The documentary reflected a more general change of attitudes towards AID. In 1975, the Belgian National Medical Order revoked its earlier rejection of AID. It now judged that AID could be a permissible medical act, yet only for married couples. ⁵³ These more tolerant attitudes were connected to technological changes, as the first banks with frozen sperm were being established at academic hospitals, most notably at the Free University of Brussels. ⁵⁴

Criticism against AID did not disappear, but was no longer unanimous. Furthermore, arguments changed in tone. Whereas rejections of donor insemination in the 1950s and 1960s were mostly based on moral-religious arguments, they now were increasingly secularised. Arguments about mental wellbeing grew in importance: views of AID became primarily grounded in popular psychological assertions. For example, at an international conference on artificial insemination that took place in Leuven in 1973, both proponents and opponents delivered lectures on AID, without finding much common ground, let alone reaching consensus. Yet for both, the impact on mental health was essential: proponents and practitioners presented results of AID’s positive psychological outcomes, whereas opponents warned of its disastrous psychological effects. ⁵⁵

Most notable was the talk of the French doctor, psychoanalyst and priest Marc Oraison, entitled “Psychological implications of artificial insemination”. Within a “Freudian framework”, Oraison identified the “subconscious consequences” of AID for all actors involved: the mother, the father, the child, and the donor. In his view, the woman’s motivations were always egoistic: “she wants it for herself”. The man was said to be a masochist, who, like an infant, submitted himself to his wife’s desire. The child would suffer from being brought up in a conflictual and asymmetric relationship, and, in the view of Oraison, “would know, at least subconsciously” that he or she was not related to the father. The donor was represented as an immoral subject, motivated by either money or power. ⁵⁶

In the discussion after the lecture, many opponents of AID applauded Oraison for his attention for the subconscious. Especially the argument that the child would somehow know about its origins, in spite of secrecy, hit a nerve. The psychiatrist Jean-Claude Depreux, for example, commented that he was also convinced that the children would know, which was even more problematic because they would have nobody to talk to about this. For this reason, Depreux feared that donor children would be vulnerable to psychosis and even suicide. In his view, AID should not be used, but if it was, it was better to be open and honest about it. “One has to know in order to be able to mourn.” ⁵⁷

The question if children could be kept ignorant about their origins became more pertinent. Would they sense that there was a secret in their family? Because many mental health professionals, psychoanalysts in particular, believed that children would feel the suppressed and hidden feelings of their parents, truth became an essential factor in the emotional relationship between child and parent. One can imagine that these arguments struck a sympathetic chord in a society in which open communication had become an important value. Expressing feelings and breaking taboos were important topics in the period we now call the “sexual revolution”. ⁵⁸ The younger generation revolted against the parental politics of the fifties, which in Belgium became collectively remembered as the “silent years” (jaren stillekes), because sexual matters were only mentioned in hushed embarrassment. Young adults wanted to raise their children differently: less authoritatively, without taboos, in a relationship based on trust and openness. ⁵⁹ Across Europe, the traditional patriarchal family was replaced with a newly emerging child-centred family, in which parents had equal obligations to the child. By the early 1980s, honesty ranked first among the values parents in Europe (including in Belgium) considered to be important in child rearing, before tolerance, respect and good manners. ⁶⁰

Proponents of AID recognised the importance of mental wellbeing, psychological research and the subconscious, but mainly focussed on the parents. Most importantly, they referred to their careful selection and counselling of intended parents. From the 1970s onwards psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, such as Piet Nijs at the Catholic University of Leuven, gradually became the gatekeepers of AID: they decided who could undergo AID treatment and under which conditions. During screenings, “psy” professionals assessed if the intended parents had come to terms with being infertile (something that was represented as a mourning process), if they were able to rationally separate sex from reproduction, if they had a harmonious marital and sex life, and if they did not suffer from any psychiatric disorders. ⁶¹ Significantly, also their subconscious feelings towards AID and towards each other were taken into account in order to guarantee that the child would grow up in a harmonious family. ⁶²

Interestingly, it was also emphasised that intended parents had to face and recognise their inability to have biological children. This is different from the findings of existing research on the post-war years. For Britain and the United States respectively, Davis and Lewis have shown that advocates of AID presented the procedure of mixing sperm as a way to mitigate the psychological dangers inherent in donor insemination. The idea was that if one granted the couple “a little bit of pleasant doubt”, as one British obstetrician put it, the man could restore his ego and accept the child more easily. ⁶³ In Belgium in the 1970s, however, the man was not allowed the same comfort of deceit. In the words of Frieda Bogaerts, who was responsible for the psychological screenings in Leuven, he could not “deny his infertility”. ⁶⁴ Robert Schoysman also did not evaluate couples positively if they chose AID mainly in order to conceal the husband’s infertility. ⁶⁵

Intended parents had to be honest with themselves, but remarkably, when it came to the donor-conceived child, both anonymity and secrecy were still believed to be beneficial. Anonymity was a condition for secrecy, and was not questioned at all. Although Schoysman admitted that he had used the sperm of the brother of the intended father in a few instances, the consensus was that the use of identifiable donors placed the child in a complex system of family relationships, which was psychologically harmful. ⁶⁶ Nijs believed it was positive if couples had the ability to see AID as a merely technical procedure, in which the donor was nothing but “sperm from an anonymous testicle”. ⁶⁷ In his view, the balance of the relationship could be better maintained if the donor was objectified: anonymity would allow donor parents to experience his gift as nothing more than a technicality. ⁶⁸ Significantly, the importance of anonymity was also stressed by the Belgian National Medical Order. When they in 1975 decided that AID could be a suitable solution for male infertility, they added the condition that “the doctor under no circumstances communicates the identity of the donor to the persons involved or to third parties”. ⁶⁹

Regarding secrecy, meaning that the couple could tell nobody about the husband’s infertility or about AID, opinions became more divergent. The dominant idea was that complete secrecy was better. Various reasons were given for this, for example, that it would forge a strong bond between parents (“our secret”) and protect the child from identity crises, which were thought likely to ensue if the children should ever accidentally discover how they had been conceived. ⁷⁰ Another common argument was that secrecy shielded the child from gossip and bullying: “Our society is very harsh and comments [about AID] can be devastating. Labelling has to be avoided, because this is harmful for both the child and the rearing father.” ⁷¹

Yet there did emerge a certain openness towards AID candidates who had talked to a relative or a friend about their issues. Piet Nijs in particular no longer viewed a third party’s knowledge about the husband’s infertility as an “absolute” contraindication for AID. He still considered this to be a contraindication because it “revealed an inability of the couple to solve, within the couple itself, the problems posed”. However, it was only a “relative contraindication” because a “healthy, open communication” with a friend or a family member could also help the couple to come to terms with their infertility. ⁷²

Telling the child about its origins, however, remained a more thorny issue. Nijs sympathised with new ideas about “a good relationship of trust between parents and children”, but maintained that secrecy towards the child was preferable as long as donor insemination was negatively perceived by others. However, he thought that: “A lot has changed due to the sexual liberation, which has not only significantly diminished the taboo surrounding contraception, but also has gradually weakened the taboo on AID.” Therefore Nijs said to support parents who in the future wanted to tell their children that they had been conceived with donor sperm, yet only if “in the next 20 years there grows an openness regarding AID in the same way that an openness regarding contraception has grown in the last 20 years.” ⁷³

Ultimately, new ideals of openness and honesty had an ambiguous impact on the practice of AID in Belgium in the 1970s. Donor insemination became a subject of public discussion and gained visibility. The practice grew significantly. By the beginning of the 1980s, there were eleven hospitals offering AID, each with their own sperm bank. ⁷⁴ And this was only the tip of the iceberg, as also private gynaecologists offered AID and sometimes owned their own sperm bank. ⁷⁵ At the same time, however, the new emphasis on openness raised concerns. Especially the secrecy towards the child became harder to defend in a society that came to resent authority and taboo, and valued honesty, equality and openness in parenting relationships.

The “Gayby Boom” and the Issue of Disclosure (1980s)

In 1981, Paul Devroey started offering AID to lesbian couples at the academic hospital of the Free University of Brussels. ⁷⁶ In other countries, including in the United States and Britain, lesbian women had gained access to inseminations with donor sperm already in the 1970s, although this practice remained limited to a few fertility clinics and was controversial. ⁷⁷ In Belgium, Devroey was the pioneer — and his decision was not met with applause. Other Belgian universities, for example in Leuven and Ghent, continued to exclude lesbian couples because AID, in their view, had to remain a “medical” treatment for male infertility and because they believed that a child needed both a mother and a father for a “balanced” upbringing. ⁷⁸ Even amongst Devroey’s colleagues, there were not many supporters. By Devroey’s own account, “everyone was against it”. He had to justify himself before the ethical commission of the hospital. ⁷⁹

In order to defend his decision to inseminate lesbian women, Devroey reached out to SJERP, which was short for the “Centre for Social, Juridical and Relational Problems”. Devroey asked them if a psychologist of their team could help him with the psychological screening of intended lesbian AID parents. ⁸⁰ By letting a mental health professional screen candidates, he wanted to refute common psychological concerns about lesbian parenthood, most notably the idea that children would not be able to develop their gender and sexual identities “normally” (in a heteronormative sense) and therefore would become homosexuals themselves. ⁸¹ Once again, the expertise of mental health professionals was used to counter criticism on AID, exactly as it had been the case for heterosexual couples a mere decade before.

SJERP-psychologist Anne Brewaeys was up for the task. She started screening intended lesbian parents, even though she acknowledged that paying “extra attention” to this group in fact was “in part confirming heterosexual norms”. ⁸² Brewaeys was the first of a group of psychologists and pedagogues affiliated to the Free University of Brussels working on the issue of lesbian parenthood. When asked to explain their research activities in a recent oral history interview, Brewaeys answered that they wanted to figure out “whether lesbian women could raise [children] as well as straight couples”. ⁸³ Lesbian couples who passed the psychological assessment, and who became parents after AID, became part of follow-up studies which aimed to bring into view the psychological development of the donor children. ⁸⁴

These studies were important because claims about lesbian families being psychologically harmful for children up until that moment were either purely theoretical (mostly grounded in psychoanalysis or social learning theory) or followed from studies with methodological flaws. ⁸⁵ Findings from studies on other families without fathers (mostly heterosexual single-parent families or divorced lesbian mothers who had their children before their coming-out) were extrapolated to the case of lesbian motherhood, without taking into account a number of confounding factors. For example, the socio-economic status was not systematically studied, even though single mothers often raised their children in a more precarious financial situation than two-parent families. Moreover, the reasons for the absence of fathers were not taken into consideration, meaning that the negative effects of parental divorce or the loss of a father on the development of children, were used as warnings against lesbian motherhood. ⁸⁶

In Belgium and elsewhere, the entrance of lesbian couples into fertility clinics gave rise to a new wave of research in the 1980s. ⁸⁷ Until then, follow-up studies of donor children had remained very rare, precisely because doctors were afraid to reveal the secret if they approached their former patients. Those few empirical studies that did exist focussed on the happiness of the parents. ⁸⁸ Apart from a much-cited article that suggested that donor children were on average more intelligent, there were very few empirical data on the development of donor children, because whomever asked them questions risked revealing the secret about their origins. ⁸⁹

Studies on lesbian parenthood, however, were different because empirical data were gathered. Longitudinal follow-up studies were set up, making use of questionnaires, interviews, and psychological tests. These research methods were possible because AID children born in lesbian families, unlike in heterosexual families, mostly were informed about their origins at a young age. These new studies initially analysed the issue of lesbian parenting, more precisely the impact of the absence of a father figure on the development of the children. However, the focus gradually shifted to another quintessential difference between lesbian and heterosexual donor families: the impact of secrecy. Incited by their work on lesbian AID families, scholars began to consider the long-term consequences of secrecy for the functioning of donor families and the development of donor children. ⁹⁰ Researchers reported that heterosexual donor parents felt stressed due to the uncertainty and isolation resulting from secrecy ⁹¹ , and warned that the provision of false information about genetic origins might damage the relationship of trust between parents and children, if the secret ever came out. ⁹²

Brewaeys, too, shifted her focus to the dilemma of secrecy versus disclosure. She did so because she noticed tensions within heterosexual donor families, which she interviewed as a control group for her work on lesbian parenthood. In her own words:

“I visited these families at home. To my surprise I saw a lot of tension. All of these people had been given the advice “you never tell anybody that you have used a donor and he will remain anonymous forever, because this is the condition for us to treat you”. Yet more than half of all women had told somebody and that gave rise to enormous tension in these families. There was a very significant chance that such a child would get to know [about its origins] in non-favourable circumstances. I began to write about this and talk about it on conferences, telling people “we have a problem”.” ⁹³

Empirical findings undermined earlier assumptions about AID. Firstly, secrecy turned out to be a fiction. Studies from the 1980s found that in a significant number of cases (ranging from 13 to 68 per cent), at least one of the partners, more often the woman, had told a third party about AID. Therefore there was a risk that the child would learn about its origins from somebody other than the parents. ⁹⁴ Secondly, the idea that the donor would be experienced as a technicality, or even would be forgotten, was proven false. Children’s characteristics occasionally evoked thoughts and conversations about the donor, as did questions about hereditary factors by medical practitioners. This was true for both lesbian and heterosexual AID families, but only caused problems for the latter group, since “thoughts about the donor still created tension”. ⁹⁵

By the mid-1980s, the first empirical studies had been published that argued that disclosure was not harmful for donor children, casting doubt on the earlier view that secrecy was in the best interest of the child. ⁹⁶ On the brink of the 1990s, more and more scholars argued that secrecy was not beneficial, but harmful for children. To name but one telling example, in 1993, an international roundtable on the issue of secrecy in donor insemination concluded that: “It has been repeatedly shown in numerous studies that deception and secrecy have a detrimental effect on family relations, and on the psychological wellbeing of the child.” ⁹⁷

Lesbian donor families hence had a decisive influence in shifting professional opinions and advice on disclosure. New emotional norms and cultural ideals of transparency and truth could now be embedded in, and reinforced by, scientific research. As a growing body of empirical studies showed that the truth did not harm donor-conceived persons, pleas for openness became more common. It were now secrets that were considered to be harmful.

Adoption Studies and the Issue of Anonymity (1980s-1990s)

Around the same time that lesbian parenthood gave a new visibility to the issue of secrecy—for the first time there was a group of donor parents that did inform their children—scholars began to project insights from adoption research on the practice of AID. ⁹⁸ Much like the practice of AID, the adoption process had evolved towards openness. In many countries, confidential adoption used to be standard practice, meaning that birth and adoptive parents did not meet, birth parents could have no contact with their children after adoption, and sealed records often concealed the identity of the birth parents. Adoptive parents were sometimes recommended to not inform the child about its origins and, strikingly similar to the case of AID (where the donor had to resemble the infertile husband), matching practices—placing adoptive children with adoptive parents who were similar in appearance— had to make the adoptive family look (in a literal sense) like a biological family. ⁹⁹

However, as the 1960s and 1970s progressed, such confidential adoption practices became the subject of criticism. Experts (social workers, but also psychiatrists) and adopted persons, who in a few countries became organised, began to call for disclosure, culminating in the novel instrument of open adoption. ¹⁰⁰ Telling children about their adoption gradually became the norm. The increase of transnational adoptions from the 1980s onwards accelerated this evolution: because children from Asian or African decent looked different, parents were obliged to tell. ¹⁰¹ One could say that transnational adoptive families paved the way for a new kind of adoption, much like lesbian parents incited reflection on the functioning of donor families.

A new concept entered the debate: identity. The question of how the development of the identity of adopted persons was disturbed by the lack of information about their origins became the subject of a flurry of psychological and sociological studies. ¹⁰² First coined as early as in the 1950s, the term “genealogical bewilderment” was now used and popularised by a growing number of scholars. The idea was that adoptees faced the risk of identity problems because they had been separated from their genetic family. Therefore they more often struggled with behavioural disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts and behaviour. These expert narratives, in the words of Barbara Melosh, “brought the cachet of expert credentials to the growing critique of adoption secrecy”, which at the time was also questioned by adoptee organisations. A growing number of scientists took up the cause of adoption activists by advocating the opening of adoption records. ¹⁰³

Identity also became a key subject in memoires of adopted perons who went looking for their biological parents, which became an identifiable subgenre of autobiographies in the 1970s and 1980s. As Melosh has shown for the American context, search narratives were expressions and vehicles of the adoption rights movement, which aimed to prove false the idea that the adoptive family could completely replace birth kinship. Also in Belgium, adoptees in autobiographical writings underlined that their motivation to search was both natural and intrinsic, driven by curiosity about one’s genetic origins, refuting the idea that search was a symptom of an unhappy upbringing. ¹⁰⁴

Such search narratives also figured as manuals, explaining to other adoptees how to find birth relatives. In a similar vein, newly established self-help groups of adopted people helped each other look for their origins. This evolution was so striking that in 1993, a Belgian journalist headlined: “Back to the roots: a new trend?” The article reported that domestic adoption services received more and more requests from adoptees who wanted to meet their birth mothers. A social worker testified: “In the past, many just sat with that question, now there are more people who start searching.” ¹⁰⁵

International adoption agencies also reported to receive a growing number of requests from adoptees. Although these services in the preceding decades sometimes helped to cover up the identity of the birth parents, they now began to organise so-called “roots travels”, in which adoptees could return to their country of origin and visit the orphanage they came from. ¹⁰⁶ For example, the Ghent adoption service De Vreugdezaaiers stated that a “roots journey” could be important for “the search for one’s own identity”. In 1990, this organisation began with guided tours to countries of origin, although they discouraged meetings with birth parents. ¹⁰⁷

All these evolutions show that questions about disclosure and identity formation at the brink of the 1990s no longer were the exclusive domain of experts, but had become a subject of public discussion. Information, so was the idea, could help adoptive persons mend their fragmented identities. Eventually, knowing one’s origins became established as a right. In 1989, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child stated in Article 8 that a child’s identity had to be preserved, “including nationality, name, and family relations”. ¹⁰⁸ A few years later, in 1993, the Hague Convention made it compulsory to register the identity of the birth parents of adoptees. ¹⁰⁹ Crucially, these evolutions were about more than disclosure. The idea was not only that adopted persons had the right to know the truth about one’s genetic origins. They also were given the right to information concerning the identity of their birth parents. They not only had the right to know they had been adopted, but also from whom.

In this respect, it is significant that the first national legal changes and discussions regarding donor anonymity were justified by referring to research on adoption. The Swedish Insemination Act of 1984, which required donor registration, was based on studies of the welfare of adopted persons and of their wishes to learn about their biological origins. In the words of the Commission of Inquiry: “An obvious condition for the implementation of donor insemination should be –just as with adoption– that it provides in a satisfactory manner in the needs and interests of the future child”. ¹¹⁰ In a similar vein, the British Warnock report referred to adoption research in its recommendation that “the child should be informed of his/her method of conception and that, at the age of eighteen, he/she should be able to obtain non-identifying information on the ethnic origins and genetic health of the donor”. ¹¹¹ In the Netherlands, too, parallels were drawn between adoption and donor insemination. For example, in 1985, René Hoksbergen, an important researcher in the field of adoption studies, argued that a donor-conceived person, much like an adopted person, had “the right to know that his father is not his biological father. For the child, there should be information available about the donor.” ¹¹²

Not only legal changes and discussions drew on adoption research. Also the activism of donor-conceived persons could draw on earlier narratives and ideas about adoption. There are remarkable parallels between search narratives of adopted persons from the 1980s and more recent search narratives of donor-conceived persons. For example, both depict the need to search for one’s roots as a “natural” or even a “genetic” drive, which is unrelated to one’s social upbringing. Autobiographical accounts are structured as quests, in which information is gathered in spite of obstacles. Both donor-conceived and adopted persons borrow in part from the conventions of detective stories, as searchers try to piece together the missing pieces of their past and bring to light hidden information. ¹¹³ In the Low Countries, donor-conceived persons even became included in the popular television show Spoorloos (Traceless), which originally had only helped adopted people to find their birth families. ¹¹⁴

To sum up, two major developments caused change in the practice of AID from the 1980s onwards. Firstly, secrecy in AID lost its naturalness because of the rise of lesbian families. Secondly, pleas for openness regarding adoption had repercussions on the practice of AID. The concepts of identity and children’s rights found their way to discussions about donor anonymity, where they linger on until today.

Conclusion

Historical interpretations are largely absent from contemporary debates about donor conception in Belgium. Although platitudes like “times have changed” are occasionally uttered, fundamentally ahistorical views characterise both sides of the debate. Activist groups of donor-conceived persons tend to emphasise that anonymous sperm donation has always been wrong. The only difference is that the children have grown up. As adults, they have become able to speak out and to use new technologies in search of their donor. Most fertility doctors also think nothing has (to be) changed. In their view, anonymous sperm donation has always been right. Most donor children were and are happy, but their voices are never heard, either because they do not know that they are donor-conceived or because good news does not sell newspapers. Furthermore, controversies surrounding secrecy and donor anonymity are often represented as a 21st-century phenomenon, linked to the rise of commercial DNA testing.

By elucidating changes in attitudes towards secrecy and anonymity from the 1950s to the 1990s, this article has diversified the picture. In a nutshell, this article has shown that from an historical point of view, it is important to distinguish between the issue of disclosure on the one hand, and the issue of donor anonymity on the other hand. Whereas the move towards openness predates donor children’s activism and legal changes by decades, the move towards identifiable donors not only is more recent, but also is grounded in different evolutions.

In fact, the debate on secrecy is arguably as old as AID itself, even though the arguments have changed over time. In the 1950s and 1960s, AID pioneers believed that secrecy protected both their and the child’s best interests. They preferred their involvement in AID to remain a secret in order to avoid deontological charges. The child would grow up in blissful ignorance: without psychological difficulties and without facing others’ moral judgement. Keeping information from children was not considered to be problematic, not even by Catholic opponents of AID, who condemned the practice on moral-religious grounds. Based on the views of American psychologists, however, they did question the feasibility of secrecy: could parents know for sure they would not slip their tongue when faced with emotional difficulties?

Such references to psychology gained importance in the 1970s, when religious arguments lost persuasiveness. Opponents of AID put forward that children would feel the suppressed feelings of their parents and would be psychologically harmed by the secret. This argument became particularly powerful in the complex movement of “sexual revolution”, when openness became a parenting ideal. The practice of secrecy in AID became more difficult to defend in a society that increasingly valued honesty, trust and transparency, also in child-parent relationships.

In the 1980s, the issue of secrecy became tangible as a result of the lesbian baby boom. For the first time, there was a group of donor parents that did tell their children. New empirical research proved wrong many earlier assumptions about AID, for example, revealing that complete secrecy was a fiction. Based on comparative follow-up studies, more and more scholars argued that disclosure was not harmful, but beneficial for children. One could argue that the cultural ideal of honesty was given expert credentials. This was crucial in shifting professional advice on the matter: donor parents were increasingly given the advice to inform their children about their origins. However, these pleas for disclosure initially were not about giving information about the identity of the donor. In other words, lesbian families challenged the tenets of secrecy, but not of donor anonymity.

Yet donor anonymity was challenged from a different angle. The broad consensus about donor anonymity began to crumble in the 1980s, under the growing influence of adoption research, which was centred around questions of identity formation. The first national legal changes regarding donor anonymity were justified by referring to research on adoption, more particularly to studies on the psychological wellbeing of adopted persons and of their wishes to learn about their biological origins. Ideas about “genealogical bewilderment” not only became the subject of a flurry of studies, but also became popularised in search narratives of adoptees. It appears that these ideas and narratives were important for the activism of donor-conceived persons in later decades, as they made use of similar discourses and arguments. These links between debates about donor conception and adoption have not yet been subject to sufficient historical scrutiny and constitute an opportunity for future research.

Taken together, this article has shown that current controversies cannot be fully explained by legal or medical changes. Discourses about disclosure and anonymity mattered and always went beyond practicalities and technicalities. Ways of thinking about AID were also intertwined with wider cultural evolutions, including changing psychological notions, child-parent relationships, ideas about identity formation and children’s rights. Only by relating the history of donor insemination to changing cultural perceptions of secrecy and identity, may we truly understand how non-disclosure and donor anonymity have evolved from common-sense matters of good clinical practice to controversial remnants of the past.