Ruth Institute Blog

by Margaret Somerville

For whose benefit are these children created? Their own? Or their parents?

Two stories concerning the donation of gametes – sperm and ova – appeared recently in the media.

One related that a “virtual” sperm and egg bank is being established that will only accept offers to donate from “beautiful” people. Internet polling will determine who is beautiful enough to do so. The goal – informed by the principle that “everyone deserves a beautiful child” – is to enable “ugly” people to have beautiful children.The other story was that New Zealand will possibly allow “double donation”; that is, would-be parents would be able to use both donated ova and sperm to create embryos (a practice that is not legally prohibited, although still fairly uncommon, in Canada). As Diane Allen of the Infertility Network argues, this “cannot be construed as any form of infertility ‘treatment,’ but, rather, the deliberate manufacture of babies to meet consumer demand.”

What do we, as a society, owe to the resulting children, especially when we are complicit in their coming into being, by approving and funding the technologies used to create them? They are the people most profoundly and directly affected. They will live their lives as “donor-conceived adults,” “genetic orphans,” as many of them call themselves.

Donor conception may be a completely avoidable human tragedy in the making, one for which we might be holding a truth and reconciliation commission at some future date, when offspring ask, as some are already doing, “How could you have done this to us? How could you have allowed this to happen?”

Is donor conception the 21st-century version of the wrongs we now recognize we did to some children in the 20th century? Are we repeating in a new context and in new ways the terrible errors and grave injustices that occurred with Australia’s “stolen generation” of aboriginal children, the United Kingdom’s “home children” sent to Canada and other British Commonwealth countries, and the “scoop” of native children from reserves into Canadian residential schools and white adoptive homes, all of which deliberately separated children from their biological families.

In all these instances, our intentions, as is true in donor conception, were to “do good.” In donor conception, however, we primarily intend to “do good” to the adults who want a child, rather than to the child, as was the motive – although a grossly mistaken belief – in the other historical wrongs I have mentioned.

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