As a donor-conceived adult, I would like to know my real father
By Elizabeth Howard, The Conservative Woman:
The anguish of infertility is well known. Most people know someone who has struggled to have children, and no one would deny the pain people endure when they know they cannot have children of their own.
This desire to have children is so strong, so fundamental, that scientists seem to acknowledge almost no limits to the quest to cure infertility, and give infertile couples that which they most desire: a child.
So it is that the desire to have a child of one’s own has become a de facto right, or so it seems. Yet this “right”, when it uses so-called “donors” in order to be achieved, tramples over the rights of the children who are born in this way. Because if a child is born of “donor” gametes, he or she will be deprived of the chance to know and be brought up by his or her biological parent or parents.
There is no legal right to have children. But there is a legal right (under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to a family life. The full enjoyment of this is denied to donor-conceived children. There is also an outright ban on slavery. But when gametes and even embryos are bought and sold, what is this but slavery? People sell their own children—or their gametes, with the express intention of creating children that they will never know. This is strong language, I know, but people who do this can’t really be blamed. The donors are told that they are doing something altruistic, and the would-be parents are told that this is a perfectly acceptable way to overcome infertility.
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