Slogans on T-shirts have been causing controversy for as long as the T-shirt has existed. So it’s not surprising that a picture of a young boy in a shirt bearing the slogan “My daddy’s name is Donor”, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune two years ago, should have so offended Elizabeth Marquardt, of the Institute for American Values, that she felt compelled to write a book bearing the same title.

What was it that so offended her? The T-shirt is offered by a company called Family Evolutions, founded by a lesbian couple whose son modelled the shirt. The co-founder, Stacey Harris, says that the T-shirt is empowering. “We want to lift the taboo surrounding donor conception so that kids don’t feel that their coming into the world is a shameful secret,” she says. “Kids who are empowered will grow up well-adjusted.”

Marquardt, however, was “shocked and angered”. Why? “Not because the parents are lesbians,” she says. “Not because they are raising children. Both realities are fine with me. What troubles me is that children today are being raised in an era of increasingly flexible definitions of parenthood, definitions that often serve the interests of adults without regard for children.”

The T-shirt was brought to Marquardt’s attention by a member of the growing online community of donor-conceived adults who are angry about the nature of their conception. Narelle Grech, 22, is a donor-conceived activist living in Melbourne, Australia: “The poor kid wearing the shirt is basically being told that his dad is not important and is just a donor. I am sure he is one of many donor-conceived people, like myself, who are made to feel like they cannot be sad about the loss of their birth fathers.”

Marquardt challenges the assumption that advances in reproductive technologies are an unequivocally good thing, arguing that debates about methods take into account only the wishes of the parents, not the children.

Marquardt has solicited the views of donor children from across the world. These “babies” are now grown up (one of the most vocal voices is pushing 70) and many are very unhappy. “They tell me that their early attempts to make sense of their origins were made more painful by the people around them who insisted that it shouldn’t matter,” Marquardt reports. “That they should be glad to be alive. That they shouldn’t torment the parents who raised them. That they are silly and deluded for thinking that some guy who went into a little room with a dirty magazine holds a key to their identity.”

But where is Marquardt coming from? The child of a broken home, she has argued in a previous book (Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce) that Western society underplays the effect of divorce. She claims to feel kinship with the offspring of donor conception who, similarly, are “not supposed to have a story” because it might conflict with the reproductive “rights” of the individual: “This debate is dominated by adults’ rights: the rights of same-sex couples, the rights of infertile adults, the rights of singles. But we also have to hear and respond to children’s pain when they lose the ability to grow up with their own mom and dad, whether it’s due to donor conception, or parental abandonment, or divorce.”

Marquardt is prepared to concede that the donor offspring she has spoken to may not be representative of the group. “It is possible that the young people most troubled are the ones who reach out to others.” She therefore plans to embark on a representative study involving 900 individuals and a control group to measure attitudes among the donor offspring community.

Olivia Montuschi, of the UK based Donor Conception Network (DCN), believes that the results of such a study will force Marquardt to eat her words. Montuschi is frustrated that she is speaking out so vocally before collating the evidence.

Montuschi and her husband conceived their two children using donor sperm in the mid-Eighties and were in the vanguard of parents who decided to be open with their children, despite the advice being given by the medical profession. “We believed that our children had the right to be told,” says Montuschi. “In my experience, donor-conceived adults and young people who feel angry are those who found out late and in less than ideal circumstances – during a row, a medical emergency, or following a bereavement.” The DCN welcomed the recent change to the guidelines by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in the UK advising fertility clinics to counsel parents on the benefits of disclosure. Montuschi and her contemporaries were advised: “Go home and make love. Who knows, perhaps one of your husband’s sperm will beat the donor sperm to it – then you can pretend it is his baby!” Now parents are encouraged to undertake counselling before the process. This appears to have brought about a sea-change in attitudes to disclosure. A study by Dr Susan Golombok published in the journal Human Reproduction in 2006 reported that 54 per cent of UK parents who had used donor sperm had opted for disclosure while 78 per cent of parents using egg donation had made the same decision (an interesting disparity that highlights the stigma still attached to male infertility).

However, these figures were compiled before the removal of donor anonymity in the UK, a move that some claim will have a negative effect on parental disclosure. Since April 2005, anyone registering to be a donor has done so knowing that a child can seek identifying information once he or she reaches 18. The BMA has opposed the move, concerned that the removal of anonymity may harm openness between parents and children. “Parents who are unwilling for their child to make contact with the donor may be less likely to tell their child they were donor-conceived,” says a spokesman.

Little is known about the effects on the children where parents tell them. Professor Blyth recently conducted a study involving 16 UK families who had disclosed: “The study showed that parents can tell their children and it doesn’t wreck the family,” says Professor Blyth. “The kids were comfortable about their identity and enjoyed positive relationships with both parents.”

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