Terminology Defined

Sometimes words are most easily clarified by looking up their definition in the dictionary. Typically, placing or donating parents tend to use the term ‘donation’, while receiving or adopting couples tend to use the term ‘adoption’. The basis for this is largely psychological.

Donation is used in the sense of ‘giving a gift’ and offers an emotional separation from the embryos that the phrase ‘placing for adoption’ does not.

Yet for you, the family wanting to parent the children born from such a gift, the term ‘adoption’ makes more emotional sense. You will be giving birth to a child. Adoption is the term that both legally and socially explains the transfer of parental rights associated with a traditional adoption. Adoption also helps to describe and explain to your child the way in which you became a family, since children are ‘adopted’ rather than ‘donated’.

Adoption processes provide you, your donor and your children with social/emotional guidance and support in addition to the medical treatments provided by a fertility clinic. Adoption programs give the donating family the option of choosing the receiving family and mutually determining the level of future interaction between families.

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