tto think it should be illegal to travel abroad for anonymous egg/sperm donation?

[ZoeCM]

If the government can ban people from travelling outside the UK for FGM, why can't they ban this? It's absolutely appalling that clinics will destroy all records of a child's biological parent in this day and age. Yes, the child can potentially trace their parents through companies such as AncestryDNA, but there's no guarantee they'll be successful. It's a massive abuse of power.

Anonymous donation is all about what's best for the recipients and the donor, never the child. AIBU to think it should be illegal to travel abroad for this purpose?

Your vitriol is misdirected. I don’t think many people travel abroad for donation because it’s anonymous. They do it because it’s substantially cheaper. I’ve spent years on infertility forums having gone through IVF and can tell you a LOT of people struggle with the moral dilemma of anonymous versus affordability. Fertility services are extremely expensive in this country. Unless you have experienced the pain of infertility yourself, please don’t judge others doing whatever they can to alleviate that pain.

I am more worried by the idea that in one city a man can donate sperm to multiple women whose children will grow up not knowing who they are related to in a small area. Lots of room for children to end up in difficult situations when it comes to marriage/breeding for my liking.

Had I been in a position where I needed sperm, I'd rather it was from miles away than round the corner for this reason.

I don’t think it is always cruel to keep parentage anonymous. In cases of rape for example. Especially gang rape or rape in war zones. There are thousands of young adults in Rwanda right now who’d rather not know they were conceived when their mum was a teenager tied to a tree naked and raped by dozens of men for months, and that is how she got pregnant with them.

And there are female captives right now in Gaza or Israeli jails being raped- you think that these women would be cruel to keep from any child how they were conceived?

If the parents are responsible and let the child know that they are born from donor sperm/eggs then the children will know to register on the donor conceived person website so they can avoid this.

Equally if everyone had the option to find their genetic history they would know they didn’t share a donor with their girlfriend!

Your comparison makes no sense. FGM directly harms a child and is illegal. Creating a baby through donated eggs or sperms doesn't of it itself cause harm, though a child/ adult so conceived may feel bereft later in life by not knowing anything about their biological parent/s. The intent is not to harm a child however, but to create one. It's not illegal to create a child yet withhold or not know the identity of a parent.

As for travelling abroad to do either thing - it's not readily identifiable that either activity is likely to take place since people are usually free to travel at will to many places and could easily lie if asked the purpose of their journey.

Your thread sounds like it should be about whether anonymous donation is ethical, which is a possibly valid discussion. It doesn't need to refer to FGM at all.

I am totally against anonymous gamete donation as I think it's dreadful for the child and just about the parents.

However, we do not want to get ourselves into the situation I read about in Israel where mothers who had babies abroad at an advanced age were asked to prove they were genetically related to the child because Jewishness (and therefore I think Israeli citizenship) is through the mother's line.

I don’t think people who perpetrate FGM are setting out to ‘harm’ the girl. It’s a ‘tradition’ they woefully, wrongly, believe is in her best interests.

Why is it so horrific?

Have you considered that some of these children might not exist at all if there were no anonymous donation? I’m not sure ‘betrayed’ is the right concept if that was the alternative.

This

I know a sports coach whose biological dc and partner's dc play for the same team.

When the game ends the coach's partner's dc leaves with him and goes home with him whereas the biological dc goes home with their other mum.

I always wonder if the biological child wonders why/how they spend less time with their dad than the other child who is unrelated.

That argument isn’t justified.

Otherwise you could justify genetically engineering children to be organ donors or manufactured for other such inhumane purposes and say “You can’t complain, you should be grateful, if we didn’t create you, you wouldn’t exist”.

Wow that has to be the most illogical extreme ever.
Not sharing information about genetic heritage (which you can get for £39 via. DNA test on your own) is in no way a slippery slope to cloning human slaves that we then kill & harvest their organs from.

They absolutely do know it is harmful. Many live in the UK and travel abroad to do it. They are aware of the pain, and physical consequences. Everyone in the Western world at least knows that cutting off someone's genitals with no anaesthetic, purely to control their sexuality is harmful.

Anonymous gamete donation is legal in the uk. Any man can donate his sperm informally.

Well it’s where the “They wouldn’t be alive otherwise” argument leads. Also, no one mentioned clones or slaves. Have you seen the film ‘My Sister’s Keeper’?

But how would the authorities know you are travelling abroad for donor eggs? Just don't tell them!!

What? Not comparable at all. It’s a massive, massive stretch you’re making.

Nobody who’s conceived by donor has been conceived because they’ve been genetically engineered to provide body parts. That’s absurd. People use fertility treatments because they’re desperate for a child.

As others have told you upthread, fertility treatments in the Uk are disproportionately expensive compared to other European countries and there’s a serious lack of donors, precisely because of the lack of anonymity. For many, travelling to Europe and using donor sperm or egg will be the only way they can have a child. If you don’t get that because it’s outside of your experience I would suggest you think yourself lucky.

No that’s not where that argument leads unless you leap to the most illogical extreme.

Putting on my science hat regarding your dystopia- to “genetically engineer children” to be “organ donors” then logically you’d clone the person who needed the organ so you’d have a perfect match yes? You wouldn’t go through all the hassle of genetically engineering children for organ donation and it not be about ensuring they were a perfect match. So you’d be cloning. Obviously. And if you create a child for purpose of harvesting their organs, then they would have to legally be slaves- property with no rights.

This is a complete fabrication. If the mother is an Israeli citizens their children are Israeli too whether or not they are Jewish. 30% of all Israelis are not ethnically Jewish and the majority of Israelis are not halachically jewish (ie jewish according to orthodox jewish law). There is absolutely no requirement at all for children of Israeli citizens to be Jewish to be Israeli. The majority are not.

Further, most rabbis would treat the mother of a child born via egg donation as Jewish if the child was Jewish. So this is an antisemitic fabrication

We are talking arguments here.

I am refuting the ‘If we didn’t take this course of action, this person wouldn’t be alive’ argument.

If you believe it is a valid argument, then the same could be said of creating offspring by rape, or experimenting on embryos to foster certain traits, all sorts of things.

The ‘They wouldn’t be alive if we didn’t do this” is a shit one that morally justifies nothing.

It’s also important to remember that not every child who is donor conceived will react the same way. I know two. One colleague who was conceived with donor sperm due to male factor infertility. Her Dad who has raised her for nearly 20 years is her father as far as she’s concerned and she views the donation as a necessary medical procedure to help get her to her family. The other is a friend of my brothers raised by a single mother by choice. He’s of the opinion that his mum and other relatives are his family and even though he is 21 and was UK conceived and so presumably can trace his donor he has no interest in doing so.

I also know two couples who have adopted, one adopted child is now 17 and has no interest in tracing birth family. The other is only 3 so they may feel differently when older. But not everyone has an automatic pull towards DNA, many people are content with the family they have.

DH and I went as far as we could trying to have our own baby. Donor gametes/surrogacy were out of the question for us,not only because we knew it wasn’t just about us and our wanting a child, but about that potential child too, but because I feel there is a dark exploitative side to egg donation, especially abroad, but also in this country where women are offered cheaper IVF in return for sharing their eggs and they could be in a position where another woman has become pregnant with their eggs and they did not get pregnant themselves, and I wanted no part of it. I agree with you OP.

I gave the example of My Sister’s Keeper. It could be that the embryos selected to be implanted could be filtered with a view to be a kidney or bone marrow donor. Anyway, that’s not the point.

I am refuting the “If I didn’t do this morally dubious thing, this person wouldn’t exist, therefore the morally dubious thing is actually justified by this person’s existence” argument.

There's diversity of human experience. I'm an anonymous donor conceived child and I'm perfectly fine and couldn't give two hoots about spending my time tracing my biological father.
I'm sorry your friend is so devastated, but I think it's wrong to equate one person's anecdotal experience with such sweeping statements about how it is horrifying, especially when there are so many other factors at play here (including her upbringing and how it was dealt with as a KEY factor and one that, if done wrongly, can be far more damaging to a child than not knowing your biological parent, and I'm sorry your friend clearly has trauma from how this was dealt with for her). I don't want to devalue your friend's experience, it's valid, but it is hers and personal, so please don't devalue mine by lumping us all in together. My parents are amazing parents, thank you.

Another issue re: donor conceived is you upload to Ancestry etc to find you have 20 plus half siblings & counting. Apparently now can’t happen. It can potentially.