Children have a right to know about their genetic heritage
■ Health Minister Simon Harris has confirmed he is introducing legislation to ban anonymous sperm and egg donation in fertility treatments in Ireland.
The balance of rights is delicate – the human right to create a child versus the rights of the children born through donorassisted human reproduction.
The Irish Fertility Society (IFS) has expressed concerns about the legislation proposed. IFS represents healthcare professionals (doctors, nurses, counsellors, etc) working in the majority of fer tilit y clinics in Ireland. It has stated recently that it is “advocating for our patients in ensuring they are not negatively impacted by inappropriate laws”.
IFS patients are the couples who wish to have help to create a family – thus they would prefer the legislation did permit anonymous donor sperm or eggs.
But are the children born to those couples also considered to be IFS patients? Does IFS advocate for them too?
Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
Being born with equal dignity and rights should mean the right to information about your genetic heritage. The right to information (wherever it is stored in our digitised, data-rich world) could become Article 31 of the UDHR.
In my view, anonymous sperm and egg donation pre-determines a child’s right to know their genetic heritage – perhaps the most profound piece of information any of us can ever know.
Stor y telling is at the heart of TV programmes such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are? ’; the right to know our own stor y, as far as is practicable, must not be taken from us.
The relationship between parent and child starts out imbalanced: “parenthood” rather than “brotherhood” or “sisterhood”. The shift from dependence to independence is a slow release, a gradual letting go.
We can only hope our children stay the course and take up their universal right to become f lawed adults, like the rest of us wobbling just beneath the surface.
Alison Hackett Dún Laoghaire, Dublin