Children of Sperm and Egg Donors Seek Information

This article is not as well researched as you say. I encourage you to follow up with Caroline Lorbach from The Donor Conception Support Group Australia http://www.dcsg.org.au/ to clarify Cheryl Miller's "facts". Caroline is a much better source to gain perspective on this matter. She commented on this article (reposted below:

Caroline Lorbach
Sometimes I want to scream! The line that there will be no sperm donors if we end anonymity & give rights to donor conceived people is so often trotted out with no backing in reality except for maybe a few badly researched newspaper articles. Yes, many clinics in the UK did have a drop in donor numbers around the time of their legislation starting. But, can we directly attribute that to the legislation? I have had direct experience of these “shortages’ having helped a clinic here in Australia in the 1990’s with an advertising campaign which took their waiting list from 2 years down to “zero” (they still kept a compulsory 6 month wait to allow people to further think through their decision to use donor conception. There have always been times of “drought” in sperm donor numbers. Back to the UK while most clinics in the UK had very few donors or none at all – guess what? Very few clinics in the UK do their own recruitment of sperm donors; they get sperm from other clinics or wait for men to “come in off the street.” There were 2 clinics in the UK who after a while wrote papers about the fact that they had plenty of donors because they had active recruitment programs plus they provided their donors with plenty of information services. One was the London Women’s Clinic and the other, I think, was in Manchester (don’t have the info right at hand).
Here in Australia the year after the Victorian legislation banning anonymous donors they had more donors than the year before. In New Zealand where all clinics voluntarily stopped using anonymous donors well over a decade ago some clinics also found that they had more donors when they allowed the donors to be identifiable. And I purposely use the word “allow” because it was the clinics who themselves decided on the anonymous system, they did not give donors a choice.
Donor conceived people should have the same rights as adoptees have in most countries. Here in Australia adoptees were given the right to know who their biological parents were in the 1980’s (dependant on state) even though in many states those parents were guaranteed that they would remain anonymous (in some states this was guaranteed by law). Luckily governments here decided to overturn that system as not being in the best interests of adoptees. I believe that just about everybody believes that this is definitely the way that things should be in adoption. Why should donor conception be any other way?
The Donor Conception Support Group of Australia Inc. is currently running a petition to present to our Federal Government to give rights of access to information for all donor conceived people in Australia. Please sign it at www.dcsg.org.au (follow the link on the homepage).

It's always nice to hear another side to the story, but everything I've read and experienced, including information from my own clients from Australia and the UK, points to a dramatic drop in the men and women willing to donate their sperm and eggs when a government restricts donors' anonymity or the ability to pay them or both.

I didn't think the article was promoting anonymity, but rather shedding light on the children of donors and their plight when they seek medical care with no information regarding one-half of their health history and that a solution, while not perfect, needs to be addressed so that at least in regards to their health, the children are better informed than they are now.

Stephanie M. Caballero, Esq
www.surrogacy-lawyer.com

Stephanie,
Before you reach any kind of personal (or "professional") conclusion I hope you take the time to speak/exchange emails with Caroline Lorbach. www.dcsg.org.au

I am paraphasing a point that has been brought to my attention by another 'donor' conceived advocate who lives in the UK.

"The drop in the number of UK sperm donors cannot be so easily blamed on ending 'donor' anonymity. The 'donor' numbers (and numbers of suitable donors, whose sperm can be frozen and defrosted) have been falling for 20 years.

There are many social factors beyond our control that have been at play. There would still be sufficient donor sperm available in UK clinics if it was only being used to circumvent male factor infertility, as the availability of ICSI has meant that many people who would previously have needed donor sperm can now conceive their own biological children. The current shortfall between sperm supply and demand has mainly been caused by the exponential growth in the number of non-infertile single women and lesbian couples accessing ART.

The issues surrounding infertility and involuntary childlessness cannot adequately be summed up in one sentence or one article and nor can the reasons why there are insufficient donor gametes to meet the unprecedented demand, or even if that demand is justified. DONOR CONCEIVED PEOPLE HAVE A HARD ENOUGH TIME WITHOUT JOURNALISTS STIRRING UP HATRED AGAINST THEM WHILST FURTHER IMPLYING THAT THEIR IMPOSED SITUTATION IS MERELY A MINOR INCONVENIENCE OF IMBALANCED INTERESTS." (emphasis mine)

I'd ALSO like to bring attention to this comment, posted to this article, made by Bill Cordray (a donor conceived man who is one of our most out spoken public advocates).

"Bill Cordray, January 27, 2009

Tonio wrote: “I do not believe that anyone has an unqualified right to know who his parents are.

It's not the state withholding records, it's the doctors.”

Good point. There is no law in any state that gives a doctor the power to prohibit access by a donor conceived people (DCP) to the records of their identity. There is also no law preventing them from exercising this presumed prohibitive power of procreative preclusion. States wash their hands of their responsibility to the public to regulate infertility medicine. When DCP protest, the doctors say they are giving infertile people choice. In reality, the whole system is set up by doctors to promote a lucrative business that is self-governing, Laissez-faire, libertarian, whatever. The point is they make all the rules that ultimately do not protect anyone more than their own selves. They institute protections to sheild themselves from accountability, not to protect children, infertile people, sperm donors but only themselves. Donors and intending parents come to doctors and have to play by their rules, without any say in contracts and without recourse to state laws or even guidelines. State legislatures, courts, and governors have had no idea what the doctors are doing and cannot act without risking a counterattack by one of the most powerful lobby groups around, the AMA. The history of DI goes back to 1884. It’s cloak of secrecy and binding “contracts” have made its practices virtually unknown to society and therefore state governments. Until DCP came forth to speak out, no one knew that there was even anything possibly wrong with such an altruistic mission as helping barren women to have children. Now that governments know something about us does not mean that the “rights” issues are resolved but only that no one has expressed these issues effectively yet and so society is still ignorant of the profound sense of injustice that we DCP feel. We see our rights as being violated by such a system but we have not found the same kind of voice as Martin Luther King to make society understand it in their heart.

“[Tonio]: The doctors are withholding records to fulfill their contractual obligations to the donors.”

Well, this is meaningless since it is the doctors that created these contracts and who are the source of our disenfranchisement. The contracts have cleverly pitted the “rights” of infertile people against the “rights” of the donors, with the central figures (DCP) left without a voice, since we did not yet exist until after the contracts were signed. This manipulation of a balance of rights is meant to keep the prime mover in the background, as if he played no part and was just a “provider” instead of the creator of the whole system. Why does it seem that the DCP are such threats to grown adults deliberately chose to deny the DCP access to their identity? If we are so frightening that the contractual parties need protection from us, then why were we created in the first place? Certainly we are not created for our own sake, but for the interests of future parents, the ego of donors, and the profits of the doctors.

“[Tonio]: Absent of any legally enumerated right to know one's parentage, the state is passively enforcing the contract by failing to overturn it.”

That’s not really plausible since such contracts existed decades before any government was even aware they were being written. In addition, the validity of these contracts have never been seriously challenged in US courts and may be totally indefensible, much like the various yellow-dog contracts common during the era of laissez-faire Economics, prior to the Great Depression, until the Supreme Court struck down the Sanctity of Contracts tenet before the beginning of WW2. And yet these untested contracts, 70 years later, are somehow given an air of sacred script even though they expressly restrict the rights and interests of DCP, those of us who are now human beings because of the contracts but had no voice in how these writs would so deeply affect us. By the way, the concept of a donor’s right to privacy has no definition or principle that is consistent with the Rights of Privacy as first suggested by law student Louis Brandeis (not codified, by the way, until Brandeis was on the Court) and later expanded by Roe v. Wade and other decisions. As part of the contracts that infertility doctors and clinics have written, a donor’s right to anonymity is a legal invention, made up out of thin air, not by legislatures or approved by courts, but by doctors themselves who have presumed this power to define who has rights and who doesn’t in DI.

[Tonio]: “DONORCONCEIVED: Philosophers spout off this sort of thing all the time. There is a difference between philosophy and law. I realize you want the law to say something different than what it does, and I take no joy in pointing this out to you, but we are a nation of written laws, not of philosophical opinions. Wikipedia, and donor-conceived support sites, are not legal references. Sorry.”

I suppose you are correct in the strict sense but please remember that it was a political philosopher who pointed out that the natural rights that Jefferson proclaimed are as much a part of our heritage as those mere civil and social rights that change with every session, vary from state to state, and get clarified by court decisions, evolving over time and expanding in greater freedoms. After Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney declared in his Dred Scott Decision that Negroes were not citizens, Abraham Lincoln said that all Americans had naturally endowed rights, even black slaves, which are inherent, superior to civil and social rights, and not subject to majority rule. Out of this philosophical opinion came the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fourteenth Amendment that actually codified Jefferson’s natural rights, Johnson’s Civil Rights Acts, and the eventual election of a President who would not have been considered a citizen if Taney’s decision remained as the only legal precedent. Rights evolve and become codified when those of us who suffer injustice commit to the fight for the recognition of our natural rights. All we would need is action from President Obama to ratify the UN Charter on the Rights of Children and we would have enough precedent to push for the legal recognition of what we already know is our natural right to know our identity. WE DCP SEE ANONYMITY AS A SOCIAL PROBLEM THAT RESTRICTS OUR IDENTITY INTERESTS AND SO WE ARE NO DIFFERENT AS MORAL ENTREPRENEURS AS OTHER RIGHTS ADVOCATES AS KING, ROSA PARKS, BETTY FREIDAN, MARIO SALVO, SAMUEL GOMPERS, AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN." (emphasis mine)

You make very good points and I want to say that I cannot possibly understand what it is like to not know one half of who created me. I know my father and I know my mother and while my background only goes back as far as my grandparents, that is information that many donor children would do almost anything to have.

I do wonder if the decline in sperm donor availability in the UK has to do with single and lesbian woman utilizing sperm donors. If that were true, wouldn't that be the case across the world, including here in the U.S?

Just as in adoption in previous years, I agree that something needs to be done to give the children of donors information, especially medical information. I have a friend who used a sperm donor to create her child 18 years ago and she has no picture of the donor and only a few brief statistics on him and while her child has always know how he was created, she regrets that she does not have more information for him.

Thank you Stephanie. I agree, something definitely needs to be done and I would even argue that medical information is no where near enough but that is for another debate. I posted a rebuttal to Cheryl Miller's article "Who's Your Daddy" that was written by a donor conceived man from Australia on my blog at Proud Parenting. http://www.proudparenting.com/node/2576