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It seems to me those of you who don't have a problem with sperm donor and birth parent anonymity have this idea that everyone involved in these transactions has unassailable rights except for the human beings who are being created and brokered. Men who decide they like the idea of mass anonymous insemination have a total right never to know a thing about people they've fathered. Would-be parents have a total right to have a child by any means possible, without having to jump through tedious bureaucratic hoops or worry about their child's eventual desire to know where they've come from. As far as I'm concerned the 'right' to have a child and the 'right' to donate sperm anonymously are dubious at best. The only innate human right I can intuit in this threesome resides with the child--the right to know who you are and where you came from. Look, these are human beings and human lives you are so blithely fucking around with. It is audacious and arrogant in the extreme to make a statement like:
"Why should they have the right to contact a stranger who was simply doing their mother a favour by donating his genetic material?"
In a society that privileges and fetishizes the biological family in the way this one does, it is crazy-making that we then turn around and try to sell this BS about 'some stranger who donated genetic material'to adoptees and sperm donor babies. All of a sudden people are told biological connections, family, and genealogy doesn't mean squat. Like another letter writer noted, this is the height of hypocrisy. Why is an infertile couple's 'right' to parenthood considered so holy and unassailable while an individual's right to their own human biological roots is considered questionable at best, selfish and petty at worst? The commonplace ethics around this issue are completely upside-down if you ask me.
