Sometimes, there's no better way to describe an emotion than with a far-from-technical term.
Take "FLK syndrome" -- that's a classification I learned from a former social work mentor (who shall remain nameless for her own good.) The acronym refers to discernible differences in the number of abused Kids who are cute versus those who are -- to be more polite -- less attractive. Really. Studies exist.
Those of us on the edge of Expert aren't the only ones who use shortcut language, especially when it comes to conditions or scenarios so laden with psychological baggage that the utterance makes hearing it palpable.
For example: "yuck"... In the child therapy arena, the term "yucky feelings" is common because we all know that "ew" factor. It's a lot easier to sense the shiver up your spine than to use professional jargon to explain it. For me, it's what happened when I ate brussel sprouts. You might like 'em, but chances are good that no matter what your station in life now, there was certainly a yucky feeling or two along the way.
Even clinically trained pros get yucked out. Psychologist and infertility expert Andrea Braverman, Ph.D. headed up a team that looked at "the yuck factor" experienced by ART professionals around the topics of male and female gamete donation.
Braverman, who's been in the business a very long time, went to the trouble of distributing the survey to all attendees at three pro-focused ART conferences, receiving 151 submissions. Most of the respondents (almost 69%) were nurses and most (81%) had at least one child.
Overall: no yuck factor regarding comfort level with alternative family building options. That's good.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a majority aren't feeling comfy with gender selection, whether for reasons of pure preference or family-balancing.
One area that could definitely be labeled as things that make you go "ew" is notable in this era of call for increased transparency between donors and offspring. 52 percent get queasy about sperm/egg donors meeting resulting offspring. Similarly, 49 percent are grossed out by 18-year-old kids searching for their genetic parents.
I find Braverman's research especially intriguing as it is juxtaposed today at the annual ASRM meeting against a cluster of reports on the heightened emotionality of third-party reproduction, in these cases specifically the use of donor sperm.
In one study of an open-identity sperm bank program, they found that of the about-30 percent of eligible offspring (women more often than men) wanting to learn identifying details about the guy who donated sperm to create them, offspring raised by single women were more often the requestors of such data.
Another study describes simply that while most donor offspring are okay with how they came to be, they still believe that identifying info on donors should be available.
It could go without saying (but it adds to the big picture of emotionality) that men and women going through infertility reported that using donor eggs and/or sperm to have a baby would indeed increase their stress -- and in some cases lead to marital problems.
Finally there's the interesting tidbit that even though male infertility, with resulting need for sperm donation, is as common as female causes, a team of urologists explored the Web and decreed that ART clinic sites are woefully lacking in addressing -- or even mentioning -- male factor infertility and the use of donor sperm as an answer.
Yuck.
FLK as I have heard it is a potential indicator of a child with a developmental disorder (e.g. chromosomal, foetal alcohol). But it can sometimes be followed in a baby's notes with "nah, seen the parents now!"
Posted by: katie | November 14, 2008 at 05:15 PM