Lesbian mothers should be on birth certificates

Because being a donor is not the same thing as being a parent.

It's no more rewriting biology than having the mother's husband on the birth certificate. Yet no one (for what reason I simply can't imagine) questions this.

I agree with you on this one.

@Triplemove , thank you for being so gracious. I appreciate it. I have so much respect for same sex parents and I'm sorry about my flippancy. I am now taking tne time to really read and digest before responding.

So at 18 does the child get identifying information on the other children? Their half siblings?

What if those siblings are not yet 18? Does it mean the circumstances of their birth are known to the 18 year old half sibling, but not to them?

Very interesting discussion btw. Thought provoking.

The thing is that homosexual couples are already more likely to do donor conception in ways that are child-centered. Not universally, of course, there are always bad actors.

But when you recognise from the beginning of your fertility journey that you will need to use a donor, you’re probably more likely to do things like a reading donor conceived sub reddits and look at all the ramifications. You will inevitably tell your child. No one in these cases is disputing that the child has a donor. Your concerns for donor conceived children are admirable, but they affect mostly children born to straight couples. Unless they effectively address that they seem disingenuous.

You have still not addressed how these kinds of regulations will be practically implemented to include hetero couples, who are the primary users of egg donation.

I do not believe that anyone has a right to a child, nor do I believe in comercial surrogacy, But pretending that a patriarcal society will allow, or pay for, universal DNA testing is unrealistic and allowing all the donor conceived children just to slip through because of this but demand it of lesbian couples is discrimination. As long as straight couples can have the social parent listed on the birth certificate solely based on the parent’s partnership, the lesbians can too.

The child is the most important individual in this in my view. It is the biology that is important

@ChokkaQuokka - I think you're quoting the wrong person. @TangledRoots thinks there should be no donor conception unless the donor is named on a child's birth certificate.

I agree with you that the protections provided by the HFEA and the equivalent body in Australia provide protection to DC children. They do not need to be named, it serves no purpose. They are traceable and that's what matters.

We have always had adoption certificates though so the concealment was the parents choice. The same for heterosexual couples with donations - this would be easy to conceal.

In a lesbian couple it would be harder to conceal as it is quite obvious that you need a sperm donation which is available to children when they get to 18.

I'm still undecided around the ethics around gamete donation but let's not pretend the recent hand wringing about this is anything but homophobia as this has been happening for years with heterosexual couples.

In the past it was ‘embarrassing and shameful’ to have father unknown on a birth certificate. Still happened though.

So what if it is embarrassing and shameful for the truth to be on a birth certificate where donor gametes are used?

We are still reeling as a society from young women being pressurised to hand their children up for adoption and adoptive parents being able to conceal the truth from their children about who they are.

Now the same thing is happening with the rise in gamete donation and surrogacy.

I have been worried about anonymous gamete donation, surrogacy, the child’s rights for a long time. Long before Italy made this move.

The fact that this seems to be on the increase - this demand-fuelled industry, riding on this spurious ‘right’ to have a child, which infers a ‘right’ to opposite sex gametes and ‘right’ to use a womb. It is becoming more urgent to do something about it.

Now you’re grasping at straws.

In Australia at least, there are limits on how many families many one donor can donate to. From memory, it’s five.

Appropriate regulation of gamete donation addresses your concern. There is no need for birth certificates – a public document that confirms the existence and identity of the child – to be the vehicle for enforcing such regulation. You’d have to search millions of birth certificates to check. That’s just not practical. And it exposes family matters to public view unnecessarily.

Ask yourself if you were worried about a perm donors not being named on birth certificates prior to you learning that lesbian non-birth mothers were named.

Then the illicit trade needs to be discouraged.

Your suggestion is much more likely to fuel the trade in illicit sperm donations, resulting in much greater likelihood of situations where men have 200 children.

Indeed. Especially since some individuals may be the genetic parents of hundreds of children. I heard that there can also be sexual attraction between people who have been separated from their bio relatives from birth and then meet them as sexually mature adults. This increases the risk.

I think there will soon be problems from people ending up with future partners who are actually relatives without knowing it, especially as not all donors go through official agencies and some are very keen on spreading their genes.

I am also horrified to think that a mother who uses a donated egg does not have the right to know whose egg it is. It could be someone she knows, it could have been obtained unethically. It’s a huge deal bringing a person into the world and the birth mother should also be fully informed about it.

I don’t think people should be shielded from the magnitude and enormity of what they are doing when they donate their gametes - just so that they are more willing to do it - to meet the demand. It’s unethical.

I think this needs to change. Donors shouldn’t be anonymous.

Donors via U.K. fertility clinics are not named @TangledRoots. I don't think they need to be either. They all have a donor number and the HFEA know their name. This is released to the child at 18 if the child wishes. It is not the parent's decision. I cannot find out the name of my donor unless my child chooses to tell me.

I think being named in the additional ‘donor’ section of the birth certificate, should protect donors from being sought for child support, so they would not need to remain anonymous.

Ideally the child should have all the information about who they are. Since it is possible for lesbians to use donors informally, then it is possible to have ‘father unknown’ on birth certificates, just like heterosexual mothers.

You have a very fixed interpretation. You can’t see this for what it is.

Mothers who give birth are the ones register that birth of the human being they gave birth to. This is the same for mothers of any sexual orientation. This should continue to be the case.

I am suggesting that, where a donor egg is used, this woman should also be documented, for the child’s benefit, in an additional information section of the birth certificate (so that all children’s birth certificates equally show whose womb they came out of and also who their genetic mother is, if that person is not one in the same).

Currently fathers do not need to be on birth certificates in order to register birth. I think this should continue to be the case, because it would not be practically possible to obtain the consent of all fathers to be on birth certificates, and insisting on this information could slow down registration of the birth which needs doing asap.

However the goal should be to have all of the information, for the child’s benefit, so if a formal sperm donor is used, where medical/legal agreements have been signed, the mother should present the information to the registrar and the genetic father should be named in the ‘donor’ section as the genetic father. This would be the same for women of all sexual orientations who register births of their babies.

I believe that only biological parents (the woman who gave birth is still biological, if not genetic) should be on a birth certificate. This means that where a sperm donor is used, then the ‘father’ should not be named on the main part of the birth certificate, there should only be an entry in the additional section for donors as the genetic parent. This would be the same for couples of all sexual orientations.

Anyway kudos to @SapphosRock for dispelling myths in this thread. It's baffling that people who haven't bothered to check what the law is and why are shouting about this. Maya Forstater's lawyer Anya was really good on twitter about this as well.

I disagree. I'm a lesbian who's followed discussions about donor conception and it's led me to be against anonymity. The way it functions today, there are kids out there with way too many half-siblings, they don't know their medical history, the ethical issues are too much in my opinion. (My niece was concieved through anonymous donor, if it turns out she deals with conflicting thoughts about this i'll support her the best I can).
That being said, better rights for donor concieved children as well as legal rights for different types of families can coexist. When lesbian parents were notified that they'd be taken off legal documents, but heterosexual parents of donor concieved children didn't, that was homophobia.