PCOS, Acupuncture, Surrogacy & Donor Gamete Babies

In this article published by NewsMax (which my dad sent me), they discuss a recent study performed by Elisabet Stener Victorin at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In it, they studied women diagnosed as having polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).

During the study, one group of women with polycystic ovary syndrome received acupuncture regularly for four months. They received a type of acupuncture known as “electro acupuncture”, in which the needles are stimulated with a weak low frequency electric current, similar to that developed during muscular work. A second group of women were provided with heart rate monitors and instructed to exercise at least three times a week. A control group was informed about the importance of exercise and a healthy diet, but was given no other specific instructions.

The results showed more normal menstruation and significantly lower testosterone levels in the group who received acupuncture.

My mom sent me this article (yeah, sounds like I no longer have to do any of my own research) about children born via surrogacy, egg donation and sperm donation. Polly Casey from the Centre for Family Research at Britain's Cambridge University studied nearly 200 families – 128 with children born using assisted reproduction of one of the types mentioned above and 70 conceived without ART. She found that “the family types did not differ in the overall quality of the relationship between mothers and their children and fathers and their children”.

The article also discusses parents’ intentions as to revealing donor and surrogacy issues to their children and what they actually chose to do by the time the children were seven years old.

How much of us is our genes?

In 7th grade in Israel, the kids spend the entire year researching their families. They interview them one-by-one, create family trees, and discuss traditions and recipes handed down from generation to generation. The grand finale is an evening in which everyone prepares a family recipe and brings it to the school and then listen to a whole lot of speeches about what our roots mean to us.

Some of the speeches annoyed me. I know that there's a girl in the 7th grade who was adopted shortly after birth and there could be others, so statements like, "If we don't know our past we will never know our future" just sounded wrong to me. Do adoptees feel that the parents who raised them had no impact on their lives? And how about kids born from sperm or egg donation? How do they feel when they hear things like this? And then we can go to an even simpler example - what about a child who grew up in a single parent home because one parent just walked out one day? (I can think of several readers of this blog who were in that situation.) Does the fact that a parent was far from perfect mean that they don't have a chance to be amazing people?

I realize that schools can't ignore the fact that most children have two pretty-much-OK biological parents, both of whom they have contact with on a regular basis, but is there some way to make everyone feel like they're OK even if they don't know exactly what their genetic heritage is? Thoughts?