On The Radio: CBC on Anonymous Sperm Donors

There’s a Canadian Broadcasting Company radio program I’m fond of called “As It Happens.”  The other evening (October 29–you can find the program here) the show featured an interview with a 27 year-old woman.  The problem is that in Canada information about sperm donors is only retained for six years.   That means that for this woman there is no identifying information at all, so she is bringing a lawsuit to change the law.   (By the way, Canadian law on ART generally is quite distinct from most US law.   Any Canadian who’d like to write it about that would be most welcome.)

There are really two things to think about here.   The obvious one is whether there should be some requirement that some information be maintained and, if so, what information and for how long.  In order to answer that you’d have to think about why the information was important and/or desired.  And you’d have to make some judgment about whether the reason the information was important and/or desired was significant enough to incur the costs of maintaining the information.  (Costs, of course, come in both monetary and other varieties.)   Interesting questions here, and if you look under the tag “sperm donor” you’ll find some earlier discussion of some of them.