The moral consequences of this baby hunger

Adopted children are told their history as early as possible. Why can't donor offspring have the same rights?

An interesting and recurring paradox features heavily in this age of reproductive technology. While medical intervention can now certainly help some people who would otherwise not be able to have children, many of the headlines screaming of the moral dilemmas thrown up by the appliance of science, are really about no such thing.

An interesting and recurring paradox features heavily in this age of reproductive technology. While medical intervention can now certainly help some people who would otherwise not be able to have children, many of the headlines screaming of the moral dilemmas thrown up by the appliance of science, are really about no such thing.

Most recently, Sharon Duchesneau and Candy McCullough found themselves in the media spotlight, accused of having the most bizarre sort of "designer baby". The term is a loaded one, redolent as it is of embryos screened in the laboratory, fiddled with in the Petri dish, and coaxed to life for shallow reasons of status, preference or style.

This couple had deliberately opted to have a deaf child, both being deaf themselves. The truth was, though, that their son was not an abomination of unscrupulous scientific anti-design at all. The pair had been to a sperm bank and enquired whether one of them could be artificially inseminated with sperm that would guarantee a deaf baby. Told that this could not be done, they turned to more old-fashioned methods instead. The biological father of their son – who is profoundly deaf in one ear, almost deaf in the other – was a friend of theirs, fifth-generation deaf, and willing to do the necessary. Whatever the moral questions raised by this couple's choice, institutional science had little to do with it.

Less-than-ethically-perfect scientists have been declaiming about their plans to create the first cloned human for years. Happily, these men – and they are always men – tend to be, to borrow a pleasing apt term of disparagement, all mouth and no trousers.

That science cannot deliver all the amazing things we may assume it can, was the basic message of Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Baby Hunger. Warning with some hyberbole of how "career women" deferring starting a family until their thirties were living in a fool's paradise, Hewlett's book is characteristic of the modern way of looking at problems of reproduction. All the emphasis is on the misery of being unable to have a much-wanted child. That misery has not changed for millennia. All that's changed is our belief in the idea that intervention can usually – rather than sometimes – solve the problem.

For what all the spin and exaggeration around reproductive issues suggests is a fast-moving world of assisted-reproductive progress, with science accelerating far too quickly for little things like ethical considerations to have the smallest hope of keeping up.

The truth, instead, is that we have plenty of time to sort out the ethics, because scientific advancement in this field is slow, painstaking, and highly regulated. It is a shame, therefore, that in at least one important respect, we have already botched up the ethics of reproductive technology, and in a horribly clumsy way.

Ms Duchesneau and Ms McCullough may have found no room at the donor insemination inn. But the simplest "test tube baby" – created by using the sperm or the egg of an anonymous but fertile donor – has been with us for decades now. And like Ms Hewlett's book much more recently, the history of this technology has been concerned more with providing the reproductively challenged adult with a baby, than with the status of the child.

In Britain the rights of the person created by these techniques have been cruelly denied in favour of the rights of the "social" parents. Donor children are the only people in Britain who have no right to find out who their biological parents are. Their lack of right has been enshrined in law, under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 1990 and policed since then by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.

Both the Act and the Authority owe their existence to the recommendations of the Warnock committee, which was even at the time ambivalent on the question of door anonymity. As a nod to the idea that attitudes around anonymity may change, records are kept, though they can be referred to only under certain circumstances.

Back at the time of the report, in 1988, a Project Group on Assisted Reproduction (Progar) was set up, and this group has campaigned ever since for the guarantee of anonymity to be lifted. At first the beliefs of those involved with the campaign were largely based on what we know about adoption.

It has become accepted that it is a good idea to tell adopted children of their history at as early an age as possible. What Progar wants is for donor offspring to have the same rights as adopted children. For Baroness Mary Warnock, who chaired the committee, donor anonymity was to protect the supply of donors. However, in countries where the rules have been changed in favour of donor offspring, donors don't seem to have been put off by the possibility of a child one day turning up at their door.

This evidence has prompted Warnock to change her mind about donor anonymity, and the whole issue will be discussed at a conference tomorrow, organised by Progar. Things are looking hopeful, because the Progar case is a strong one. There are all sorts of subtleties to the case for lifting donor anonymity, and other countries have already ruled that it is in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights.

But really, we need look no further than the internet to see that understanding their personal biological history is hugely important to people. Geneaology is the most searched-for category on the web after pornography. When the Public Records Office published the 1901 census, the website collapsed within a days under the pressure of three million hits. And all this to search for relatives of generations ago. Of course people want to know who dobbed up 50 per cent of their genetic make-up.

Over the years, Progar has come to represent the views of donor offspring themselves. Almost by definition, because otherwise they would not know of their origins, those who speak out have been brought up with some knowledge of their unusual start in life.

But a noticeable repetition among many donor offspring is their testimony than even before they knew, they sensed that they were different. Sometimes people find out, or are set thinking, by accident. I was recently told of a science teacher teaching a class about recessive genes, and being stopped in his tracks by a boy who put up his hand and declared: "But my parents both have blue eyes, and mine are brown!" Sometimes people are told when they are older, already having suspected that there was something being hidden from them.

I think two main things are conspiring to maintain this grossly unfair situation. First, we underestimate how much keeping a big secret erodes a family, and therefore how hard it is to keep up the pretence to a donor child anyway. Second, I think we underestimate ourselves. The worry is that people will not donate, and will not help, if this entails a possible encounter with a genetic child in the future.

I don't think life – or people – are so very generally like that. Even in the case of adoption, children and parents often cope with such encounters, even though the difficult issue here is that of abandonment. For people who merely donated, thereby doing a great service to other humans, encounters are surely nothing much to be endured, and even, perhaps, something to be savoured and nurtured.

d.orr@independent.co.uk