The first post concerned the treatment of transgender parents. This second post deals with the position of the offspring of gamete donation. This is nothing new. Respect for private and family life requires that everyone should be able to establish details of their identity as individual human beings.
This includes their origins and the opportunity to understand them. But that right is unlikely to be exercised unless someone tells them the truth, or it is obvious because their legal parents are of the same sex. Often they are first alerted by an unplanned disclosure in the context of a family crisis, or as the result of a DNA analysis carried out by a direct-to-consumer service, frequently to the shock and dismay of the subject.
Even if they are told, and obtain the information from the HFEA, it does not form part of their official documentation. By contrast, adopted people and those born by surrogacy can ascertain, from their official documentation and without the intervention of any third party, that they are adopted or surrogate-born. When they are 18 they can find out who their birth parents were.
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Only the donor-conceived are issued with official documentation which is positively misleading. The Gender Recognition Act introduces a further potentially confounding element. The original birth certificate is marked so as to maintain a link with the new records but this marking is unavailable to anyone other than in very limited circumstances. Consequently, the legal right of any descendant whether genetic or by adoption of the trans person to identify their parent, will in practice be frustrated where their parent has obtained a GRC.
The Article 8 right to establish personal identity is fundamental; it does not need to be justified by evidence of harms arising from its denial.
But in the case of the donor-conceived, ignorance of genetic origins does create practical risks. They are thus denied the opportunity to get timely medical advice, in breach of the right to physical and psychological integrity under Art. A person who does not know the identity of a genetic progenitor is at risk of inadvertently engaging in sexual relations with a genetic half-sibling, niece, nephew or first cousin.
This is not as remote a risk as might at first appear: clinics generally serve a limited area and each donor is allowed to contribute to the creation of ten families not children, families , so the likelihood of a significant number of people of similar age in a given area being half-siblings is not negligible. For most people it would be shocking and possibly psychologically damaging to discover that they had unknowingly engaged in sexual relations with a genetic close relative.
Any offspring of such unions face an elevated risk of congenital disability, through the inheritance of recessive genes.
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It is notable that this risk was recognised in the first legislation about donor conception, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act , which permitted a person contemplating marriage or, following amendment in , an intimate physical relationship to check with the HFEA whether their intended partner might be the offspring of the same donor but not to find out who the donor was. Of course it is, again, highly unlikely that anyone who has not been told that they are donor-conceived will think to check. The issues identified here and in connection with trans parents are easy to resolve; reform would also be an opportunity to clarify in legislation when short form and long-form official documentation is required, something which is currently unregulated.
The RPO would be confidential to the subject and their descendants.
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Legislation would provide that the RPO could only be required by a third party in specified circumstances, for example the issue of a passport; for all other purposes the short form certificate would suffice. The short-form certificate would, as now, disclose only the name, date and place of birth of the individual, without details of their legal or genetic parentage.
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