Conceiving People : Genetic Knowledge and the Ethics of Sperm and Egg Donation

Abstract

Each year, tens of thousands of children are conceived with donated sperm or eggs, aka donated gametes. By some estimates, there are over 1 million donor-conceived people in the United States and, of course, many more the world over. Some know they are donor-conceived. Some don’t. Some know the identity of their donors. Others never will. Conceiving People: Identity, Genetics and Gamete Donation argues that people who plan to create a child with donated gametes should choose a donor whose identity will be made available to the resulting child. This is not because having genetic knowledge is fundamentally important. Rather, it is because donor-conceived people are likely to develop a significant interest in having genetic knowledge and parents must help satisfy their children’s significant interests. In other words: because a donor-conceived person is likely to care about having genetic knowledge, their parents should care too. Questions about what the donor-conceived should know about their genetic progenitors are hugely significant for literally millions of people, including donor-conceived people, their parents, and donors. But the practice of gamete donation also provides a vivid occasion for thinking about questions that matter to everyone. What value, if any, is there in knowing who your genetic progenitors are? To what extent are our identities bound up with knowing where we come from? What obligations do parents have to their children? And what makes someone a parent—the person responsible for lovingly raising a child—in the first place?