Abstract
The
vast majority of gamete donations worldwide are made anonymously, and
in some countries, including Spain, France, and Denmark, the anonymity
of donors is explicitly protected by law. Nonetheless, a growing number
of countries have called into question the morality of such practices
and are enacting laws allowing children access to identifying
information about their gamete donor. A significant reason for the
growing legislative support for nonanonymous gamete donations is the
belief that donor-conceived children have a fundamental moral right to
know their genetic origins and that the right should be legally
protected. A variety of factors, such as the increasing number of
children born by means of gamete donation, advances in genetic science
and technology that make it easy to discover the identity of a person's
genetic parents, and the widespread belief that genetic information is
important for protecting people's health, have made this alleged right
quite salient, even leading some to challenge the
ethical
appropriateness of gamete donation practices altogether. Often,
however, this right is assumed rather than explicitly justified. The
purpose of this paper is to call into question the
ethical
justifications that are often thought to ground a right to know one's
genetic origins. Proponents of a right to know this information usually
argue that such a right protects at least three vital interests: the
interest of donor-conceived people in having strong family
relationships, their health interests, and their interest in forming a
healthy identity. These different interests might be protected by
different aspects of the right to know one's genetic origins: knowing
one's mode of conception, accessing medically relevant information, and
accessing identifying information about one's genetic parents. I will
discuss each of these interests and explore whether and how they might
be set back by an individual's lack of access to information about his
or her genetic parentage. I will also evaluate whether donor anonymity
policies are, as many of their opponents argue, morally impermissible
because they fail to protect these important interests.
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