Linda Kingston asks:

I think that conception by donor eggs and sperm should be illegal. I also think that surrogacy should be illegal. What do you think about this?

Olivia Montuschi (Donor Conception Network UK) writes:

As Susan Kane says in her Bio-News article,

‘In some areas, such as whether lying to your children is harmful, the answers are known. Other areas, such as the question of “intentionality,” are truly new frontiers.’

She goes on to recommend curiosity and high quality investigation of this new area.  In order to do this, it is important and helpful that the values, ideology and it seems in the USA, religiousaffiliation, of commentators is known.  I am not an academic and have no pretense to be so, so will couch my own biases in terms of assumptions -

My assumptions about intentional parenting come from my own experience as a parent of two donor conceived adults and 18 years experience of talking with parents and donor conceived people.  I assume that donors do not intend to be parents.  I assume that parents are people who intend to provide the secure and loving care and environment that is important for the healthy physical and psychological growth of human beings. I take as read that it is important to be open with children from early years and that donors should be identifiable to offspring from age 18, or possibly earlier if a known donor. I have no religious affiliation.

I would be grateful for a similar statement of assumptions from Elizabeth Marquardt so that it is possible to establish clearly the base she is coming from.

Many thanks.

Welcome. In just a couple of minutes (2:00 p.m. est) we’ll be getting started with our interview with Elizabeth Marquardt on the new report “One Parent or Five“. I will post the questions you have submitted and Elizabeth will post her responses. Comments will be open — we will bring forward any comments that are thought provoking and continue the conversation. Thanks for being here — any last minute questions can be sent to us at web@americanvalues.org.

In order to hear from additional readers of FamilyScholars, we are asking all commenters to abide by the three comment rule. Effective immediately, please limit your comments to 3 PER POST. All comments after your third one will be deleted. Thank you.

Because of the inability of some commenters to adhere to our civility policy, comments will now close after 35 comments. Commenters are urged to make their arguments concisely and to stick to the content of the post. Those who fail to adhere to our comment policy will be banned.