Family history

Philosophical Papers

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 357-378

  Velleman, J David ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84944520313     PISSN: 05568641     EISSN: 19968523     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/05568640509485163     Document Type: Article

References (13)

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 magazine Slate resulted 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, in The 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 of in vitro fertilization 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 Rights 12 (2004):89–104. The Implementation Handbook for the Convention on the Rights of the Child makes 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,’ The International Journal of Children's Rights 4 (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 Reproduction 15 (2000):2041–2051; Lucy Frith, ‘Gamete Donation and Anonymity,’ Human Reproduction 16 (2001):818–824; Truth and the Child:A contribution to the debate on the Warnock Report ed. 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 in Self 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).
6. Exodus 2:22. The speaker is Moses, who not only is a stranger among the Midianites, where he has fled from Pharaoh's court, but has been a stranger all of his life, ever since his mother set him afloat on the Nile.
7. I call it a ‘so-called gift’ because it has no intended recipient. It is a ‘gift’ that is launched into the void, where some as-yet nonexistent person may snag it. Such untargeted benefits do not fit our usual concept of gift-giving.
8. Here I am introducing the ‘non-identity problem’ first discussed by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1984).
9. See, for example, Pacific Reproductive Services (‘Making the Most Important Decision of Your Life’:http://www.pacrepro.com/why_prs.htm); Xytex Corporation (‘Creating Families Through Innovation’:http://www.xytex.com/patient/faq.html); California Cryobank (‘Reproductive Tissue Services’:http://www.cryobank.com/). A perusal of these and similar sites suggests that the new ideology of the family is actively spread by an industry in support of its commercial interests.
10. Framing the considerations in this way makes clear their application to the case of single women who use artificial insemination to create children whom they intend to raise on their own. Children can of course be successfully reared by single mothers, if necessary. But children can be successfully reared, if necessary, in orphanages as well—a fact that cannot justify deliberately creating children with the intention of abandoning them to an orphanage. (Imagine a woman who would like to have the experience of conception and childbirth without incurring the responsibility for raising a child.) Just as the serviceability of orphanages cannot justify procreation in reliance on their services, so the serviceability of single parenting cannot justify the creation of children with the intention that they row up without a father of any kind.
11. The importance of narrative self-knowledge is stressed by David Gollancz in the essay cited in note 1, above.
12. See my ‘Narrative Explanation,’ The Philosophical Review 112 (2003):1–25.
13. While this essay was in press, I learned of the following additional resources on donor conception. Since August 2005, New Zealand has required all donor-conceived births to be recorded in a Human Assisted Reproductive Technology (HART) Register (http://www.dia.govt.nz/pubforms.nsf/URIVHARTbrochure.pdf/$file/HARTbrochure.pdf). The HART Act requires that information about donors be made available to their offspring at age 18. In addition to the publications listed in note 3, see:Jacqueline A. Laing and David S. Oderberg, ‘Artificial Reproduction, the “Welare Principle”, and the Common Good,’ forthcoming in Medical Law Review (2005); Alexina McWhinnie, ‘Gamete donation and anonymity:Should offspring from donated gametes continue to be denied knowledge of their origins and antecedents?’, Human Reproduction 16 (2001):807–17. Thanks to Rupert Rushbrooke for these references.