I was extremely disappointed with the ABC Primetime piece. I had not realized that ABC News had gone “tabloid”. They lied to me about the story content and I believe that inclusion of Donor 150’s pictures and comments took away from the integrity and dignity of the story.
Ryan was cringing at all the “smart” talk. We’ve been through it before though, so he takes it all with a grain of salt.
I loved seeing Todd and the kids (so cute!), that was very special for me as I usually don’t get to see the matches made on the DSR. Reliving the Ryan and Anna meeting was fun too. They filmed so much wonderful footage during our weekend together. It’s too bad that they didn’t include some very important interview dialog with Anna’s parents, most especially her father. In his interview he spoke very eloquently about what it means to be a parent to a donor child and how important it was for him to acknowledge Anna’s curiosity. His interview was very emotional and touching and could have been very educational and helpful to so many donor families on the fence about telling their kids, and/or acknowledging their curiosities.
By referring to the donors as “dads”, this put a lot of people off. Understandable. The whole “Who’s Your Daddy” thing is outdated and I thought we had moved beyond it. This could have been a great opportunity for ABC to take this story to a new level of inquiry and education. Instead, they sensationalized and implied that picking a donor by his “beefcake” picture was regular practice. Shame on them.
Big picture, is that the message did get out there, and so many folks have been coming to the DSR and matching since last night. So all is good in the end.