My Daddy’s Name is Donor concludes with nineteen recommendations (found on pages 77-81) addressed to leaders in the law and health policy and practice; media and popular culture; parents and would-be parents; and civic, social, and religious leaders in the U.S. and around the world.
Over the next few days I’ll share a few of these recommendations at a time in blog posts.
We welcome your reactions.
Excerpts from the nineteen recommendations in the conclusion of My Daddy’s Name is Donor:
To leaders in the law:
End anonymous donation.
The U.S. should follow the lead of Britain, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and other nations, and end the practice of anonymous donation of sperm and eggs. Registries should be supported that help those born before the law is changed to find their biological kin, when mutually agreeable.
 Protect the right of children to be born from identified, untampered-with egg and sperm.
In line with Canadian bioethicist Margaret Somerville’s recommendation, the right of children to be born from one identified, untampered-with sperm and one identified, untampered-with egg should be legally affirmed.[i]
In family law, recognize that the value of “intentional parenthood” is actually contested, with little empirical basis thus far to support the idea that intentional parenthood is good for children.
In family law there is an increasing trend to recognize the legal parent as the person who “intended” to be the parent. Yet listening to donor offspring reveals that “intention” is actually a far more problematic term than its proponents in family law suggest.
For some donor offspring, the very deliberateness or “intention” with which they were separated, before their birth, from a biological parent is precisely the problem. Moreover, the one group of young people in our study whose conceptions were 100 percent fully intended – that is, the donor offspring – is the same group who, on the whole, are reporting more negative outcomes and experiences of loss, hurt, and confusion. Contrary to the arguments put forth by legal scholars who advocate for a guiding principle based on “intentional parenthood,” there is not an empirical basis to suggest that “intentional parenthood” is good for children[ii], and there are substantial reasons to question that principle.
To the extent that donor conception occurs, the state should treat donor conception like adoption.
 Adoption is a child-centered institution that seeks to find parents for children who need them. The state and adoption professionals operate amid a rigorous array of laws and practices, honed over many generations of adoption practice, still admittedly imperfect but designed explicitly to protect the best interest of the child, to keep children with biological kin when possible, and to prevent any practice that suggests a baby market. Donor conception, by contrast, currently operates as a market designed to procure children for adults who want them. There is no state screening of prospective parents. There is no requirement to enact policies that ensure the best interest of the child. The idea that children might need to know and be in contact with their biological kin is treated as a non-issue. Those who support the practice of donor conception often claim it is no big deal because it is “just like” adoption. If so, then treat it like adoption.
[i] See her many writings including a compilation of her lectures delivered in 2006 under the auspices of Canada’s prestigious Massey Lectures, found in Margaret Somerville, The Ethical Imagination: Journeys of the Human Spirit (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2006).
[ii] Advocates often conflate the idea of “intentional” parenthood with the presumed good of having “wanted” children or avoiding “unplanned” pregnancy. But the existing data on outcomes for children of unwanted or unplanned pregnancies is unclear. The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy cites studies that find poorer outcomes related to cognition and emotional development in young children, among other factors. They also correlate unplanned pregnancy with future relationship instability of the mother, and they note that, as one might strongly suspect, most abortions are the result of unplanned pregnancy. At the same time, the majority of unplanned pregnancies are found among unmarried women, so outcomes for children of unplanned pregnancies could be confounded by well-documented outcomes for children born outside of marriage. See http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources/pdf/fast-facts-unplanned-key-data.pdf and http://www.thenationalcampaign.org/resources/pdf/briefly-unplanned-pregnancy-among-20somethings-the-full-story.pdf In the legal realm, if advocates of intentional parenthood want to make their case based on empirical data, they have a lot more work to do.
Categories: My Daddy's Name is Donor
Ah, I’ve been waiting for the right post to say how happy I am to see Margaret Somerville’s recommendation up at the top of the list. I was expecting to see it, as David Blankenhorn has already commented on the rights of children here:
2. Every child has the right to a natural biological heritage, defined as the union of the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg. Society should typically refrain from actions that would efface or deny the child’s natural biological heritage, or what the French philosopher Sylvianne Agacinski calls the child’s double origin.
I have a rather important question, though: Is saying the right to be created from untampered-with egg and sperm (or equivalently, a “natural biological heritage”) “should be legally affirmed”, the same thing as saying what the President’s Council On Bioethics recommended in 2004, that Congress should “prohibit attempts to conceive a child by any means other than the union of egg and sperm.”?
Perhaps when you make a more detailed post on
oops meant to finish that with a request to write a post on the various ways that we might accomplish that recommendation. Is it worthy of a Constitutional Amendment? Do you see the right to use donor gametes or tampered-with gametes being decided in court? Is it tampering, in your view, to create sperm from a woman’s stem cells, or eggs from a man’s? Is it tampering to try to “fix” a person’s genes?
Also, does the “identified” part impact laws about one-night stands? Seems to me it might lump failure to get your date’s social security number before having sex in with sperm donation.
[...] Yesterday I posted the report’s recommendations to leaders in the law. [...]
[...] last two nights I posted our report’s recommendations to leaders in the law and to leaders in health policy and [...]
[...] posted over the last several nights our recommendations to leaders in the law, health policy and practice, and to parents and would-be parents. The full set of nineteen [...]