A newly enacted law in the state of Washington now gives children conceived through donated ova and sperm (obtained from agencies and clinics in Washington) the right to access donor information and medical histories. There is an “opt out” provision, but more clinics are moving toward instituting similar measures. The demand to know who’s your daddy or mommy for that matter is huge and only likely to increase given the robust use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) in the United States and wide use of the Internet to track down everything, from rare memorabilia to parents.
The law dramatically departs from traditional ways of going about regulating assisted reproduction. For starters, there aren’t any regulations at the federal level, except that clinics must report their “success rates.” Even that reporting is a little dubious—after all knowing that a child was successfully conceived tells us very little at all about physical and cognitive development after birth. And, while legislatures have actively pursued other ways to monitor and control women’s reproduction, including passing broad criminal laws that ostensibly could hold women liable if they harmed their fetuses by falling down steps, relatively minimal attention has been given to regulating assisted reproduction. With an estimated million or more children living in the United States born through donated sperm and ova, the time has come to figure out what models make the most sense.
In parts of Europe identity disclosure is mandatory. One justification for the disclosure is to help facilitate better information gathering in cases of illness or debilitating genetic medical conditions. But kids want to know about their genetic relationships not only to figure out if they might have a genetic predisposition for heart disease. Indeed it’s simply personal. Kids want to know where they came from.
The challenge for the ART industry and American consumers who use it is figuring out how to reconcile our social and legal commitments to privacy and contract. What about if those who contracted for services don’t want their kids to know they were born through ART or surrogacy? Will donors stop providing these types of highly intimate, but clearly very much in demand services if they have to disclose? Economists call that possibility “crowding out.” It means that traditional donors may exit the system for fear of identification and they may be replaced by a possibly less “ideal” but more willing group of donors.
This brave, modern era takes us into the space of reconsidering what it truly means to be a father or a mother. Wendy Kramer reported on ABC this week that her registry has connected one guy to over 70 kids. Once upon a time it made sense to think about “parents” as the ones who raised the kids. Now, it seems that children of technology may want something more and the state of Washington is the first to respond. Legally, the Washington law makes it easy—if you don’t want to disclose, opt out or simply don’t donate. But this becomes a bit tricky too. Remember adoption laws that once provided for anonymity—those became chipped away at the ground level long before legislatures got involved.
So, for now, when inquiring minds in Washington ask, “Who’s your daddy?,” children born through donor sperm and ova will have more than the parents at home to turn to or a bar code from a test tube. They will have a real name, but only time will tell if that means anything more.
