Many childless couples are only too happy to “adopt” embryos that are scheduled for destruction at fertility clinics, but one child born of such an unnatural “union” says knowledge of her origins has caused her nothing but pain in life.

The Daily Mail is reporting on the incredibly heartbreaking story of Gracie Crane of Birmingham, England who was adopted from a fertility clinic by Nita and Dominic Crane.

A mixed-race child, Gracie was born in 1998, which was seven years before amendments were made to the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act allowing children born via donor conception to trace their genetic parents. Therefore, she has no legal right to find her biological parents. And because she has no genetic link to the parents who adopted her, she grew up feeling like a child without a home.

“If I cannot be looked after by somebody I am genetically part of then I don’t feel I’m part of a family,” she says. “Families are like packs, they look alike, but I don’t resemble anybody I know.”

So desperate to feel like she belonged, Gracie once tried to scrub her face white with a pumice stone and dyed her hair red to look more like her mother, but it didn’t work, because her feelings were not just skin deep. They were coming from within her very soul.

And this is why she has decided to speak about what it’s like to grow up knowing that you began life in a test tube, were left behind in a clinic by your natural parents, then implanted in the womb of a stranger.

“I would like to be a mother one day so I can finally have someone I’m genetically related to, but if I can’t have children naturally I would never have one through donor conception,” Gracie said. “I wouldn’t put anybody else through what I’ve been through. Knowing that the two people I love most don’t look like me and that I am not biologically related to them has been really tough.”

She adds: “There are times I’ve wished I’d never been born — as much as I love my parents, it’s just so sad not knowing who I am and where I came from.”

Gracie’s pain is clearly upsetting to her parents who love her dearly, along with Gracie’s mixed race “siblings”, Ellie 14 and Marcus 10, who are genetically related.

The only thing the Cranes can tell their daughter is that her genetic parents were a couple in their 30s, a white housewife and a machine operator who was half Afro-Caribbean and half white British. The couple had a son via IVF using an embryo created from their egg and sperm. Three other embryos created in the same “batch” were frozen until the family told the clinic that they had no plans to extend the family. The left-over embryos were then scheduled for incineration but the couple agreed to donate them for adoption.

Nita and Dominic Crane were just such a couple. They had been trying for years to have a baby and were still recovering from their third failed IVF attempt when the clinic called to ask them to consider adopting one of the left-over embryos. Although they were planning to use a donor egg with sperm from Dominic for their next attempt, they thought the offer of a viable donor embryo was a “gift from God” and agreed.

All three embryos were implanted but only one did so successfully – Gracie – who was born nine months later.

“Given how Gracie feels, perhaps we were naïve, but we wanted a family and believed this was the most likely way of achieving that — so it was like all our prayers had been answered,” Nita told the Mail. “I thoroughly enjoyed carrying Gracie for nine months and loved her from the moment I held her in my arms. She has always felt just like my own flesh and blood.”

But the couple admits they couldn’t have known at the time what impact their decision would have on the child.

Although they gave her a happy home, Gracie has struggled to accept her unusual origins and recently agreed to speak on behalf of the Donor Conception Network, a support group for couples considering IVF and embryo adoption.

“I was honest about my feelings and found it easier than when I was asked to do a talk at school about donor conception a couple of years ago,” says Gracie. “That time I stood at the front of the classroom and just cried. I didn’t want to tell the other kids about how I started life so they had to make do with reading the information I’d pinned to the walls behind me.”

Gracie believes the circumstances of her birth were wrong and realizes that as much as she wants to help, there’s no easy way to prevent other children from suffering the way she has.

“Anyone considering starting a life which has already been started somewhere else shouldn’t just think about their desire to have a baby and take the fastest option,” she says. “They should be as selfless as possible and think about how the child will feel growing up — speak to people like me and my parents.”

Gracie’s story is one of many being told by children who have been born via various forms of assisted reproductive technology which deny them the right to know their biological parents.  Only they can describe the hardships that unnatural origins such as these can cause upon a human being.

This is why the Church unequivocally teaches that God’s plan for human life is the only plan, and is why every child “has the right to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage” (Donum Vitae, 1987).

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