It’s a fair bet that most wives, asked to list the things they feel are jointly owned with their husbands, would tick them off in a trice: the house, the car, the furniture, the wedding gifts, Fido and Puss and that ghastly etching they both hate but it’s worth a few bob. There’s a woman in Surrey, however, who wishes to add a little extra to her list of what she calls her ‘marital assets’: her husband’s sperm. Not just the bit she wants to use for her own procreation, either. All of it. Every last tiny tadpole.
The thrust of her case is roughly this. During a period when — at least according to her — her husband was going through a bonkers patch, he took himself off to a fertility clinic wherein he donated some sperm without telling her. So vexed is she that she has written to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to ask that rules be amended to disallow such a unilateral decision on the part of a married man — and still more vexed is she that the HFEA has not seen fit even to acknowledge her letter.
On the face of it, you can see its point. The manner in which Man spills his copious seed is — surely? — a matter for him. Besides, the quid pro quo could very possibly be that men might seek the right to ‘own’ and control a woman’s reproductive system — and who, this side of sanity, would care to open that can of legislative worms?
The trouble is that, as the law stands today, Mrs Surrey actually has a point. Since 2005, when anonymity for sperm and egg donors was made illegal in Britain, every child born by donor insemination may, upon his or her 18th birthday, demand and be given the name of the donor and his last known address (there’s no getting around this: watertight proof of both is required before donation). So there is a perfectly real risk that in a few years’ time Mr Surrey — or Mrs Surrey, or even their children — could answer the door to an endless stream of knocks and heartfelt cries of ‘Daddee!’ The potential for such emotionally testing intrusion, Mrs Surrey therefore argues, is why the 2005 change in law means that there is now a need for a would-be donor’s wife to be consulted.
Well, maybe. But there is an infinitely smarter way of calming her fears, to far wider benefit and without any tussle over tadpoles: we should revisit the 2005 ruling, which always was law-making at its most donkey-stupid, and return us to the sensible cocoon of anonymity that is still enjoyed by the US and many civilised EU countries.
As the HFEA admits, demand for donor treatment in the UK far outweighs supply; in some parts of the country there are reported waiting times of three to five years. In such circumstances, you would imagine that as much encouragement as possible would be offered to men to lay down their potency for the greater good. Instead, what was once a five-minute jobbie with a dirty mag and a wee cheque for ‘expenses’ — much appreciated, in my youth, by medical students chosen for their peak-fitness age and matching IQ — is now, quite possibly, a lifetime’s commitment to another person.
No wonder there’s a waiting list; no wonder 20-odd clinics have closed down; no wonder some clinicians despair for the future. (I read somewhere that in the whole of Cornwall there is now only one ‘active’ donor, which is not remotely funny but for some bad reason always makes me laugh.) No wonder, too, that there is a known increase in couples going overseas to buy sperm; quite understandable, but desperation can lower concern for safeguards — guarantees, for instance, that the sperm is unsullied by disease or propensity for hereditary medical conditions.
We used to manage that stuff properly. Age, height, colouring, intellect, health; all noted, all matched to recipient. Indeed, from 1991 until 2005, children born of donation were allowed, at 18, to ask about such details — anything they wanted. Except the name. So why the change? Aw, c’mon. You know already, don’t you? In this, as in so much else, common sense fell at the hands of the psychobabblers. Far from appreciating what previous generations would have saluted as miraculous, the donor-conceived started to whine. They felt ‘incomplete’, they said, to the applause of therapists of varying hues. Slews of them confided in a panting press; the pain of me-me-me, not knowing who I-I-I really am. Every ill that had ever befallen them was ascribed to their ‘need’ to know who sired them — and as surely as dawn becomes day, that ‘need’ became a ‘right’.
Personally, I’d have slapped the lot of them for their ingratitude. No thanks for the doctors who had made their very existence possible? No thought for their mothers, so keen for that existence that they willingly carried a stranger’s child? No sympathy for their fathers, cuckolded by a syringe but big enough to love them regardless?
I’d have told them that they have an absolute right to curiosity — but that nobody ever has a human, civil or moral ‘right’ to have curiosity assuaged. I’d have pointed their spoilt faces towards the vast swaths of the world littered with orphaned children who will never know who their parents were — but who would put the ‘right’ to a meal or a roof rather higher than the ‘right’ to find out.
Still, of course, petulance won and the amendment was passed. Yet still, I say, we should revisit and revoke. It’s not too late: we have 11 years before the first of the new-age donor-born becomes entitled to beat upon unwilling doors. And if simple compassion — both for the families behind those doors and for the couples on their five-year waiting lists — is not enough to rectify this mistake, then simple logic should.
First, if it is a ‘right’ for a child born of donation to know the identity of their genetic father, then it follows that it must be a ‘right’ for every one of these donor offspring. Yet that directly contradicts the parents’ right, which they currently and correctly have, not to tell their children how they were conceived. Are we, then, to make it a legal condition of donor insemination that all children be told that Daddy isn’t Daddy — in order that they may exercise their ‘right’?
Second, let’s pursue this to its natural conclusion: if it is a ‘right’ for children to know their biological paternity, how can we discriminate in favour of any child against the child next door? If some children must know, then all children, donor-born or otherwise, must know. Therefore there is only one possible course of scrupulously fair action: every child, at a certain age — go on, you pick … 12? 14? 18? — should be DNA-tested, by law, alongside the man he believes to be his father. Just to be on the safe side, lest he, too, wishes to exercise his ‘right’ to track down the ‘real’ one.
Any takers? No? Thought not.