Adoption via Kidnapping

An article in the New York Times provides a story about child abduction in China that illustrates by contrast some of the cultural biases in Western/European culture regarding non-paternity events. Some time ago China implemented a one-child policy in order to stem population growth. In a society that traditionally relied on sons to support parents in the old age, this meant that some families with a girl were left without sons. In response, an illegal market has developed for kidnapped toddler boys – stolen from their parents, these boys are sold to families who want a son. This forced adoption results in what is clearly an NPE, but certainly of a different sort than we usually consider.

The article is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/world/asia/05kidnap.html

Cryopreservation World Record

We’ve previously mentioned the potential problem of asynchrony brought about by cryopreservation technology. That is, a man could have his sperm frozen and it could then be used at a much later date to fertilize an ovum. Today’s news brings this example:

“CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Fertility specialists of Reproductive Endocrinology Associates of Charlotte (REACH) herald the successful birth of a baby girl March 4 who was conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF) at their laboratory with sperm frozen for 21 years, which they believe ties the world record for the longest-frozen sperm used to create a baby with IVF.”

The complete article is found at:

http://news.prnewswire.com/ViewContent.aspx?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/04-09-2009/0005003850&EDATE=

Post-Mortem Sperm Recovery

Lest we think that some of the more unusual methods of assisted reproduction never actually take place, here’s an example of post-mortem sperm recovery with the intent to use it to impregnate a surrogate mother:

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/04/08/0408evans.html

In this case there would be no apparent non-paternal event, since the biological father would be known, but a family history research of the future might wonder at the birth of a child so long after their father’s death.

A Downside to Artificial Insemination

A recent article in New Scientist illustrates a downside to assisted pregnancy – in this case the sperm used to artificially inseminate a woman passed on so-called fragile X syndrome to the resulting child. The story is at:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227032.400-sperm-bank-sued-under-product-liability-law.html

One lesson from this is that when the family historian is looking for physical traits that might signal the source of a non-paternity event, they can be misled by recessive or ordinarily unexpressed genes that show up in the child but are not seen in the biological parent.

Modern Baby Swapping

A case of baby swapping in a modern hospital came to light recently. In this case, the substitution was discovered after the baby girl was given to the wrong mother to breastfeed just once, but it illustrates that even with better infant identification routines, mistakes happen. Here’s the story:

http://seacoastonline.com/articles/20090405-NEWS-904050348?tastethesametome

Orphan Trains

As I mentioned earlier, whenever an adoption occurs, the potential for a non-paternity event is created. Memory of the adoption is lost over time and a new genetic component is added to a family’s descendant population. 

Three relatively recent cases of mass adoption under unusual circumstances come to mind when thinking about NPEs. These are the so-called Orphan Trains of the late 19^th and early 20^th century here in the United States, the forced adoption of the babies of leftist intellectuals murdered during the Argentine junta’s ‘dirty war’ and the adoption of Jewish children by families hiding them from the Nazi extermination camps in the 1930’s and ‘40s. I’d like to take some time to talk about each of these, since they each created a pool of potential NPEs. Let’s start with the Orphan Trains.

The Orphan Trains had a humanitarian goal – to take urban children whose parents were either deceased or unable to care for them and transport them to rural areas where families were willing to take them in. These relocations went on from the early 1850’s to the late 1920s. The technique originated in New York and Boston but was used by a number of eastern cities, some as far west as Ohio. It was driven by multiple motivations: the myth of a pure and bucolic countryside as opposed to the evil cities as places for the children to be raised to adulthood; the desire to unburden agencies of children so others could be cared for; the disposal of children who had run afoul of the authorities; and, of course, a no less real belief that this was a better fate for the children than living in an institution. Estimates of the number of children removed from cities in these programs are upwards of 200,000. 

Children from orphanages and foundling homes as well as some from the equivalent of juvenile detention facilities were put on trains with agents who guided them to a new location. Notice of the availability of children was usually made in the local newspaper. On arrival the children were put on display and claimed by families willing, for a variety of reasons, to take them in. The degree of formality in assigning children to families varied widely. Some agencies insisted that children be ‘indentured’ or apprenticed or formally adopted – this means that a paper trail exists that could be discovered if an NPE is observed through a DNA mismatch. In other cases, no formal adoption was required, although it may have taken place at a later time on the family’s own initiative. Some agencies kept records of which children were sent to which towns and some of those records have been preserved; other agencies did not maintain good records.

The motivations of the families taking in the children varied. Some farmers were just looking for a spare farmhand or a maid. Others did so out of a genuine wish to help. The treatment of the children was as varied as the families that took them in. Some children became an integral part of their new family, others were mistreated and ran away, and still others remained with the family that took them in but never were integrated into the family’s line and left upon reaching their majority.

The agencies that set up the Orphan Trains were sponsored by different groups – some religious and others civic. In general, the religiously based groups might take children of any religious background but put them into families from their own religious orientation. So in tracing back from a discovered NPE, the family historian cannot count on a match between the accepting family and the child’s real (if any) religious background.

Cryopreservation

A 12-page insert in my morning paper offers articles on fertility and pregnancy mixed in with ads from fertility clinics and drug companies. We’ve talked before about various aspects of assisted pregnancy and its implications for non-paternity events. This morning’s insert brings up another aspect – the ability to preserve eggs, sperm and embryos for long periods of time, usually via cryopreservation or freezing.

Preservation itself, one might think, would have no implication for NPEs. However, it offers the opportunity to shift fertilization or pregnancy in time and to create asynchronies in what is usually a synchronous process.

Let’s consider sperm preservation first. Artificial insemination relies, generally, on the preservation of semen samples from donors that are then used to impregnate women. (There are exceptions – a case a few years ago involved a doctor in New Jersey who would ‘generate’ his own ejaculate on the spot and use it to fertilize his patients. He sired quite a few kids before the practice was discovered.) By preserving the semen, a woman may become pregnant with a man’s child after his death. Obviously, this isn’t limited to the artificial insemination case. Sperm is now preserved by in vitro clinics, by men who are about to undergo radiation treatments and by men who are about to go overseas to war in anticipation of injury or incapacity.

There are also new techniques for harvesting viable sperm from the recently deceased, or so the lead article in the insert informs me. The point here is that the recovery and preservation of semen offers the possibility of men siring children long after their own death, and perhaps with women they did not know. Newer technologies that preserve ova offer this same possibility in the case of women.

So how long do frozen sperm and ova remain viable? A Mayo clinic study found no difference in fertility between fresh or frozen sperm, but the freeze interval was not specified. There has been at least one case where sperm frozen for 19 years was used successfully to fertilize an ovum and resulted in a full-term pregnancy. Studies done with other species indicate that sperm frozen in liquid nitrogen (about -322° F) remain viable for remarkably long times – trends in viability decreases indicate that frozen sperm could still be viable after 10,000 years. Ova freezing is a newer technique and viability is not as high as for sperm, although that could improve as studies continue. At least so far, freezing embryos has been more successful than freezing ova.

We have the possibility with these new techniques for children to be born long after their biological parents have died. The imagination reels at the variety of NPEs made possible through intent or accident. What family historian is prepared to tease out actual inheritance when generations could pass between parents and the birth of their children?