Donor-Conceived and Out of the Closet UPDATED
This article profiles the organizaiton Anonymous Us, “a no-names online story collective for donor-conceived people, their families, donors, and medical professionals.”
“Currently, in the United States, you need a license to sell a condo or cut hair in a salon, but not to broker human life. The $3 billion fertility industry goes largely unregulated, offering blank pages to those searching for information where the rest of us are free to access vital statistics of public record. “I’m not a treatment, I’m a person, and those records belong to me,” says Pratten.”
“The U.K., Sweden, Norway, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Australia have legislated for more transparency pertaining to sperm and egg donation. In those countries it is illegal to sell the means to human reproduction, clinics are licensed, donors are routed through a central agency and cannot be anonymous, and the number of donations is limited. Activists would like to see the same thing happen in the United States.”
In studies across the spectrum of beliefs ” the majority of donor-conceived adolescents are curious about their biological origins.”
Donor-Conceived and Out of the Closet
[Newsweek 2/25/11 by Alessandra Rafferty]
Update: In Canada, anonymous donors have been the norm. Donor-conceived offspring are looking for information about their background.
“The long-running battle of Olivia Pratten to change the law preventing her from finding out information about her biological father is heading for the B.C. Court of Appeal on Tuesday.
Lawyers for the B.C. government are expected to seek to overturn a ruling that last year struck down as unconstitutional the anonymous sperm-donor law. The appeal is scheduled to be heard over two days.
Pratten, who was born in B.C. but now lives in Toronto, has been trying unsuccessfully for 10 years to find out details about her biological dad, who was an anonymous sperm donor.
The May ruling by B.C. Supreme Court Madam Justice Elaine Adair suspended her decision for 15 months to give the B.C. legislature time to redraft the Adoption Act to bring it in compliance with the Charter of Rights.
But instead of passing new legislation, the government has opted to appeal the ruling.
Pratten believes the government is just stalling for political reasons that are unclear to her.
“In my eyes, it’s a delay tactic,” she said of the government appeal. “They don’t want to deal with it, but that’s been the problem since whenever we’ve done this. It gets bounced around between provincial and federal governments and no one wants to deal with it.”
Pratten added that while it’s been frustrating, scholars and legal experts have told her that the case will likely wind up being appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada in any event.
The judge found that the law was unfair because it allowed adopted kids to find out information about their biological parents, but prevented donor offspring such as Pratten from finding out anything about their parents.
“In my view, the evidence in this case provides strong support for the conclusion that the circumstances of adoptees and those of donor offspring with regard to the need to know and have connection with one’s roots, are closely comparable,” said the judge.”
Anonymous sperm donor law goes before appeal court on Tuesday
[The Province 2/12/12 by Keith Fraser]
May 19, 2011 the ruling was to ban anonymous sperm donors in Canada. See Canadian court bans anonymous sperm and egg donation [Nature 5/27/11 by Alison Motluk] One of the comments indicates that this is already banned in “the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Austria and New Zealand, as well as in the Australian states of Western Australia, South Australia & New South Wales.” Of course the US-based “American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), an advisory and advocacy group for the American fertility industry, says it will strongly oppose any move to ban anonymous donations. “We think that people ought to be able to build their families the way they see fit,” says Sean Tipton, a spokesperson for the ASRM. “And you don’t change the rules in the middle of the game.”
This is about the right for people to know who they are, just like adoptees.
“Wendy Kramer, founder of the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR), a website where donor-conceived people can find genetic relatives, says that the key is in education. “Sperm banks need to properly educate and counsel donors about what it means to be an open donor,” she says. She points out that 1,214 gamete donors are currently on the DSR to find genetic offspring.”
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update 2: “Olivia Pratten had long ago come to terms with the reality that she would likely never know the identity of her biological father.
Pratten was born in Nanaimo, B.C., in 1982 after her parents, who couldn’t conceive on their own, turned to sperm donation.
When, at 19, she asked the doctor who oversaw the procedure for more information about the donor, he refused. When she pressed the issue in court, she was told the records related to her case had been destroyed.
With the Supreme Court of Canada announcing Thursday it will not hear her case, Pratten says more children like her will have no way to learn the identities of the sperm donors who helped bring them into the world.
“My files were destroyed, and that was legally allowed — the fact that that’s fine is not OK, it’s a step in the wrong direction,” Pratten, now 31 and living in Toronto, said in an interview Thursday.
“I never wanted anyone to be in my situation again, and unfortunately, as a result of this ruling, there will be more people in my situation.”
Pratten filed a legal challenge five years ago, arguing her charter rights were violated because the B.C. government had nothing in place to preserve records from sperm donations or make them available to the children conceived through such procedures.
She argued children conceived through sperm donation should have the same rights to access information about their biological fathers as children who are adopted. Her lawyer said such children have a right to know their medical history and prevent themselves from unknowingly engaging in a sexual relationship with a half-sibling.
The B.C. Supreme Court agreed with her, concluding anonymous sperm donation “is harmful to the child” and striking down sections of the province’s Adoption Act as unconstitutional. The judge in the case also ordered a permanent injunction against the destruction of donor records.
But the victory was short-lived.
Last fall, the B.C. Court of Appeal overturned the lower court’s decision, ruling there is no constitutional right to know the identity of one’s parents.
Pratten asked the Supreme Court of Canada to intervene, but on Thursday, the high court said it would not hear the case. As usual, the court did not provide its reasons for refusing to hear the appeal.
Pratten said she never expected the legal challenge to provide her answers about her own past, since she knew the records had been destroyed.
Rather, she wanted to ensure the law would catch up to a world in which reproductive procedures such as sperm donation — and the children they create — are becoming more common.
“This is an area that has no legislation on it, and there’s more people who are conceived this way,” she said.
“Women are delaying their fertility, more people are using egg donors and surrogates. More and more people are like me. The issue is not going away.”
Lawyers for the provincial government argued in court that practices around sperm donation have changed significantly since Pratten was born.
Today, a woman seeking donor insemination in B.C. can obtain detailed social and medical information on the donor, even if the donation is anonymous, government lawyers noted.
Adopted children born in B.C. have been able to learn the identity of their biological parents since 1996, when the province changed the law to allow children to access such information.
However, the law allows parents who gave up children for adoption before the 1996 changes took effect to block the child’s ability to learn their identity.”
Supreme Court rejects sperm donor identity case
[CTV News 5/30/13 by James Keller]
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