Is it morally right for TV shows to use DNA tests to trace lost relatives?

MAIL TV critic Christopher Stevens asks: ‘It’s amazing a DNA test can find a long-lost relative, but is it right?’ He questions the ethics of the Long Lost Family programme using DNA to establish the parentage of a woman who was switched accidentally at birth and has always wondered about her true origins. This search resulted in the other woman who had been unknowingly swapped suddenly being faced with the devastating evidence that she, too, had been brought up in the wrong family. Can you imagine the emotional anguish this caused? I hope the programme makers provided counselling and support for all involved. As a result of cheap DNA testing, thousands of people are having the biological foundations on which their lives have been built suddenly swept away. This includes those who discover their parents used donor

gamete conception and kept this secret. Why do we allow babies to be created with hidden parentage under the umbrella term of infertility treatment and expect them to be happy when they discover they have been duped about who they are?

CHRISTINE WHIPP, Honiton, Devon. IN LONG Lost Family, it was a good thing for Rosemary to find out the truth about what happened when she was switched accidently as a baby. But for Jackie, who had no idea she had been swapped, it was devastating.

How painful to watch this poor woman trying to come to terms with the fact that the people she had adored were not biologically her parents. At any age this would be a shocking discovery, but at 77 it was cruel to burden her with such a revelation.

SUSAN GIBSON, Stow-on-the-Wold, Glos. I HAVE long worried about the ethics of TV programmes about adoption reunions. How many go wrong and cause heartache? As a happily adopted child with three adopted children, I have compared looking for your biological parents to throwing a pebble into a pond. It might satisfy the person who casts the stone, but who knows what trouble the resulting ripples might bring to others on the

edges? Does wanting to find out the truth about your parentage justify possibly upsetting others?

JULIA DESBOROUGH, Hoveton, Norfolk. IT’S long intrigued me that some happily adopted people have a powerful drive to find their biological mothers. I can understand taking a DNA test, but not a TV programme’s assumption of their right to share this information with the other people affected unknowingly. The lady instigating the search should have been glad she’d been right all along. She should then have let the whole thing fade into the background of her life without disrupting anyone else.

MARGARET DAWSON, Braintree, Essex.