1. A recent literature review concludes: ‘Following conservative estimates of more recent studies in countries with open records policies, about 50% of all adopted persons will, at some point in their life, search for their birth parents’ (Müller, U., and Perry, B. ‘Adopted Persons' Search for and Contact With Their Birth Parents I: Who Searches and Why?’, Adoption Quarterly 4 (2001): 5–34, p. 8). These numbers have recently been increasing (p. 9), perhaps in response to greater awareness and acceptance of such searches. The offspring of donated sperm and eggs have also begun to search for their biological families, often via the Internet. See, for example, the Donor Sibling Registry (http://www.donorsiblingregistry.com/); the Donor Offspring/Parents Registry and Search Page (http://www.amfor.net/DonorOffspring/); the ‘Donor Offspring’ page of the Donor Conception Support Group of Australia (http://www.dcsg.org.au/); the UK Voluntary Information Exchange and Contact Register (http://www.ukdonorlink.org.uk); and a report of a registry for donor offspring in Japan (Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, July 5, 2005,http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/living/12058l73.htm). A series by David Plotz in the online magazineSlateresulted in many inquiries from donor offspring seeking their biological families (http://slate.msn.com/id/98084/); Plotz discusses these inquiries, and many other aspects of donor conception, inThe Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize perm Bank(New York: Random House, 2005). See also a website devoted to the CBC documentary ‘Offspring’ by Barry Stevens (http://www.cbc.ca/programs/sites/features/offspring/), and an op-ed entitled ‘Give Me My Own History’ by one of Stevens' half-siblings, David Gollancz (The Guardian, May 20, 2002,http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,7l8666,00.html). On the similarities between donor conception and adoption, see Eric Blyth, Marilyn Crawshaw, Jean Haase, and Jennifer Speirs, ‘The Implications of Adoption for Donor Offpsring Following Donor-Assisted Conception,’ Child and Family Social Work 6 (2001): 295–304.
2. In discussing gamete donation, I am going to gloss over the many variations in this practice, in which single adults, homosexual couples, or infertile heterosexual couples cause a child to be conceived with donated sperm, donated eggs, or both, often but not always with the help ofin vitrofertilization or gestational surrogacy. Locutions designed to maintain strictly neutrality among these variants would be unwieldy, and so I avoid them in favor of shorter but admittedly less precise locutions. For example, I generally speak of donor parents and custodial parents in the plural, although there may be only one of each. Generating the relevant disjunction of variants is left as an exercise for the reader. Cases of gamete donation often have other potentially controversial aspects. For example, there is often only one custodial parent, or no custodial parent of one sex or the other. Creating children with the intention that they not have a custodial father, or alternatively a custodial mother, is potentially just as problematic as creating children divorced from their biological origins. But these problems are a topic for another paper.
3. The Convention is posted at See Eric Blyth and Abigail Farrand, ‘Anonymity in donor-assisted conception and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child,’International Journal of Children's Rights12 (2004): 89–104. TheImplementation Handbook for the Convention on the Rights of the Childmakes clear that the term ‘parents’ in this clause includes biological parents in the first instance, and that the Convention therefore militates against the practice of anonymous gamete donation (Rachel Hodgkin and Peter Newell,Implementation Handbook for the Convention on the Rights of the Child[UNICEF, revised edition 2002], pp. 117–19). For some social-scientific and legal perspectives, with further references, see: Michael Freeman, ‘The new birth right? Identity and the child of the reproductive revolution,’ TheInternational Journal of Children's Rights4 (1996): 273–97; A.J. Turner and A. Coyle, ‘What does it mean to be a donor offspring? The identity experiences of adults conceived by donor insemination and the implications for counselling and therapy,’Human Reproduction15 (2000): 2041–2051; Lucy Frith, ‘Gamete Donation and Anonymity,’Human Reproduction16 (2001): 818–824;Truth and the Child: A contribution to the debate on the Warnock Reported. N. Bruce, A. Mitchell, and K. Priestley (Edinburgh: Family Care, 1988);Truth and the Child 10 years on: Information Exchange in Donor Assisted Conception, ed. Eric Blyth, Marilyn Crawshaw, and Jennifer Speirs (Birmingham: British Association of Social Workers, 1998). The material cited here argues that donor-conceived offspring should have access to information about their biological parents. In this paper I argue for a stronger conclusion—that donor conception is wrong. In my view, the reasons for concluding that children should have access to information about their biological parents support the stronger conclusion that, other thins being equal, children should be raised by their biological parents. For many children already born, other thins are not at all equal, and adoption is therefore desirable; but as I argue below, other thins are indeed equal for children who have not yet been conceived.
4. The arguments of this section can also be couched in the more technical terms of Kantian ethics. See my ‘Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics’, to appear inSelf to Self(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’ (Ethics 109 [1999]: 338–74), to be reprinted in the same volume.
5. Bernard Berenson, Sketch for a Self-Portrait (London: Robin Clark, 1991).