As the beginning of the article makes clear, this article was a response to an article in The Age called something like "What the Prime Minister needs to hear about gay marriage?" which seemed to ignore the rights of the children. Hence the title, which does seem to single out gays, but this isn't the intention, as you can see if you actually read the article, which states: "no-one, whether gay, straight, single, married, young or old is entitled to someone else's child, especially when that child's own human rights are thoroughly trampled on". So non-gay couples and individuals are included in the critique.

Shadow Minister, you say the above is "so irrational" you suspect ulterior motives, but in the first place, what is irrational about the claim that no-one has the right to a child? It seems to me that claiming the having of a child as a right is to treat children as commodities and possessions that are here to satisfy adult "needs" and "desires" and not as people in their own right and with their own rights, and this seems, not irrational, but distasteful and hard to defend. In the second place, anyone who has followed Maggie's previous writings will know that she was adopted and spent her first twenty years growing up amongst people who, however loving, seemed like aliens to her, and her first forty years not knowing who either of her parents were. So we can infer from that that she has a keen appreciation of and empathy with what it is like to be donor conceived, but not that she is irrational.

So let's put the gay/straight issue to one side and deal with the issue that overarches them all. The rights of the children.

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What Margaret Somerville is saying is that in effect we are treating children as guinea pigs in a huge social experiment, whose outcome we don't know. Given the huge protests at the use of guinea pigs as guinea pigs in science experiments, shouldn't we be equally cognisant of the moral dimensions of using children as guinea pigs.

As more and more donor-conceived children grow up, there is an increasing amount of angst amongst them, but, as Maggie points out, most DC children (roughly 80%) are not told their origins. So we just don't know how most children are affected by the knowledge that they were conceived when their father jerked off into a Petri dish then walked away out of their lives. But more and more are saying they are not happy.

Many of them are saying that, while they don't want to die now they are alive, they believe that it would have better if they had not been conceived if it had to be in this manner.

This is the information you won't see in any fertility clinic or on any "let's start an artificial family" website, but it's important information for any prospective donor-conceiving parents to think about hard and deep.

Knowing this, they may still go ahead and satisfy their desires and create an artificial family. But at least they may have some understanding of what it may be like for the off-spring they create.

Ian Robinson - my question to you is this: how is the nuclear family NOT another social experiment? I hope you realise that this really arose as a construction in response to capitalism and that for the vast majority of time humans have not lived in these circumstances... I'm not sure you can claim that other family arrangements are more or less experimental - surely it's about the relationships between people and not about configurations and lineage, etc. I also don't accept that the unhappiness or dissatisfaction in someone's life can be uniquely traced to the fact that they don't know one or both of their parents as if correcting this would somehow be a magic cure for all psychological ills... I'm finding this a complete fatuous argument...

Ian as you identify yourself as a "Human rights advocate and Atheist*",
you appear to have an anti to any evolvement or change in society.
You consider same sex marriage will negatively redefine marriage, when marriage does not have any religous origin, so why are you bothered, and now in contradiction of your so called being*, you give support to this homophobic essay.

I have read the article, and it supported my previous beliefs about surrogacy and IVF treatment.

A surrogate mother is treated as a human incubator of a foetus, and the mother has no human element.

A male sperm donor is also treated as a human incubator of sperm, and the sperm donor has no human element.

But it also leads to the question of what occurs with about 25% of normal fathers.

Their children are taken from them, and then those children are often raised by another man.

Meanwhile, they themselves might be raising yet another man’s children, while rarely seeing their own children, and normally paying out money for their children to be raised by another man.

Complicated -> very

Sustainable -> totally unlikely

Why choose this title if not to specifically target gay parents?

ALL children should have the right to know of their biological origins.Im absolutely against anonymous donations- children may not want info but should have that right. That goes for ALL parents.

I help people find donors OUTSIDE of clinics so the child CAN know of their origins, and in many cases develop relationships early on. Loving children means offering them what they are likely to need and want including knowing of their origins. Clinics do NOT meet the needs of children- or donors. The donors I work with want to choose people likely to raise the child in a stable and loving environment, and with the similar values. Clinics dont just separate children- they separate whole families.

The quote .. 'unless we can be absolutely certain that children conceived by various medical interventions will approve of what was done to them as infants when they reach adulthood.' is ridiculous.
I have worked with thousands of abused children - raised by their biological parents- who absolutely do not approve of what is being done to them. Decisions affecting children is part of society. Often we dont know what will will do to hurt our children- intentionally or not- until they tell us. That goes for almost every aspect of parenting.

What we can do however is educate ourselves about children, especially issues relating to donnor conception, and make choices that allow our children information. How he is involved after the birth is up to the parties involved - and as the child grows up this should also be something that the child works out for themselves, depending on what they want.

So no, I dont agree with commercial practices- and especially anonymous donations. Many of us are creating a really positive, loving community where children are our priority. A community that understands our basic human desire to have a family and share love, and who understand that this decision should not be undertaken lightly.

This article is one sided, inaccurate poppycock. (And Im straight.)
www.childrendeservetoknow.com
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