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A generation or two ago, adoption was often a family secret. The rule was: Hush, hush. Don't tell. What they don't know won't hurt them.
But secrets have a way of slipping out. And when the truth was finally told - by a drunk uncle, an aging parent - the child, even if already an adult, experienced shock, confusion and betrayal.
Today, adoption experts almost unanimously agree that honesty is the best policy. There isn't as much consensus, however, when it comes to high-tech family-making.
Some 100,000 children have been born of donor eggs in America since 1984. The vast majority apparently don't know it.
Many fertility doctors counsel their patients to never tell children born from these arrangements that a donor egg was involved.
"We are more likely to recommend that people do not disclose," said Eli Reshef, medical director of the Bennett Fertility Institute in Oklahoma City. "If they cannot meet the egg donor, ever, who benefits by such disclosure?"
Mark Sauer, director of the Center for Women's Reproductive Care at the Columbia University Medical Center, is a...