Here is a story you can find many places today. Two people meet and get married, not realizing that they are in fact brother and sister. (In this case, twins actually. Though I believe fraternal twins are no more closely related (genetically speaking) than any other brother and sister.) Once they learn this, the marriage is annulled.
The story is in the news now because a member of the House of Lords raised it during a debate in the UK. The legislation at issue there doesn’t actually have anything to do with adoption. It’s about the use of anonymous donors (egg and sperm) by individuals using ART. The proposed law would apparently require that “biological parents” be named on birth certificates.
The point I want to make is really about language. Perhaps medical records should contain information about sources of DNA (although that may be less and less important as we can actually decode our own DNA). But that referring to these people as “parents” isn’t really very helpful. A sperm donor is not a father. An egg donor is not a mother.
We could consider the merits of the proposal a lot more clearly if people didn’t insist on using the language of parenthood. Most lesbian couples using donor sperm to have a child in their relationship will (reasonably) bridle at the insistence that there must be a father. That insistence undermines their ability to define their own families. If instead we discussed what information needed to be included in a child’s medical records, we’d have a whole different conversation, one that might well be more productive.
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I disagree with you. The prevalence of sibling registries is an indication that children do care who their “father” is and wonder about where they came from.
In my view, it is for the adults’ benefit that these alternate de-humanizing terms are used.
I realize I’m being very picky here about language, but I think it is important. I agree (and did not mean to deny) that many–most?–children may care about “where they came from.” We need to think about how to address those questions. Indeed, it might lead one to say anonymous sperm donation is undesirable. (I’m not entirely sure about this for myself.)
Does any of that make the sperm donor a parent or a father? Not in my view. It makes him an interesting person, perhaps an important person in a constellation of relevant adults. It makes him a unique person, too–only one sperm donor per child.
Perhaps I accord too much meaning to the words “parent” and “father.” To me they mean something about commitment and responsibility, something about performance of a critical role in the child’s life. And while a sperm donor could be a parent or a father (by which I mean being a sperm donor doesn’t disqualify him), he very well may not be.
Mostly what I want to do is separate the questions. I think we’re better off thinking about the importance of various genetic linkages without using the language of parenthood.
(a few years late, but I don’t think I was following this blog at the time)
This appears to be an urban legend. The only source is Lord Alton, hardly the most reliable witness, and no-one else seems to know what he’s talking about.
The President of the Family Division of the High Court Sir Mark Potter said the following:
“This is the first I have heard of it. I know of neither any judge who presided over such a case nor of the case itself.”
There are long discussions about the story here:
http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2008/01/lord-altons-tall-story.html
http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2008/01/myth-makers.html
http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2008/01/case-closed.html
Lots of news sources were very keen to report the story, but not to actually investigate it or publish a retraction, and I fear it will reverberate around the internet for years to come.