Alana Stewart, Elizabeth Marquardt, Jennifer Lahl, call your offices! Check out this NPR interview with a representative of the IVF industry and Wendy Kramer, founder of one of the sibling donor registries. Listen to Sean Tipton, director of public affairs for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of reproductive medicine practitioners.
We think everyone is entitled to whatever they want and whatever they agree to, so we think the informed consent process is essential. So everyone needs to understand what the restrictions and rules are or are not, agree to it only if all the parties agree, and don’t have any changes to that agreement unless all the parties agree.
When asked about the fact that children haven’t given their consent to these arrangements, here is his flippant answer:
Well, as far as I know, no one has ever consented to the circumstances of their own conception. I happen to have teenage boys who I suspect currently probably would not consent to me being their father. I don’t know too many teenage boys who would consent to whoever their father is.
Wendy Kramer tries to explain the problem, from the child’s point of view of knowing who they are:
KRAMER: Well, it’s a little bit different depending on which sperm bank you’re talking about. Some sperm banks – you know, you think you’re picking a quote/unquote “open donor,” where what this means is that when your child turns 18 the sperm bank will send a generic letter saying please update your files. Nowhere in the letter is it mentioned that the child wants to have contact with their biological father, so if the donor gets this letter, he tosses it in the garbage, says I don’t have anything to update, and the child thinks, at that point, that the donor has refused contact with his biological daughter. So there are a lot of problems in the system. We have large sperm banks who refuse to give donors their own donor numbers, thereby prohibiting the donor from making contact on our site to exchange important medical and genetic information. So the problem is there is no oversight. Nobody’s making the sperm banking industry keep accurate records, know how many kids are born from any one donor, update medical records and share medical information amongst families. It’s really a mess.
How can you have “consent” if you don’t have accurate information? You can’t. But poor Mr. Industry Representative isn’t having any part of it.
TIPTON: We don’t think the system’s perfect, but we have been looking into how to develop a national donor registry and we have not found a solution to meet the very significant privacy concerns and cost concerns and intrusiveness concerns that such a registry would result in. …I think we can very easily leave people alone to make their own reproductive decisions.
Hiding behind the rhetoric of “leaving people alone to make their own reproductive decisions,” allows him to avoid ever asking the question of whether anything at all is owed to the child, as a matter of justice.
This is where the sexual revolution has led us: children have no rights that adults are bound to respect, at least when it comes to “reproductive choices.”