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Right to Know the Sperm Donor

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There are couples where one member may be infertile, there are women or men who may want to raise children on their own, and there are homosexual couples who all want to have children. These people can turn to gamete donors in order to pursue their goal of procreating. One half of the genetic material would come from a person who would be raising the child, while the other half would come from some donor. These two individuals might have opinion x about whether the donor identity ought to be anonymous or not and they may have opinion y about whether to even tell the child of their biological origins. What about the child’s opinion. There is no denying that there are at least three key players, and in many cases four, who these types of opinions and decisions affect. That is the genetic and social parent, the non-genetic social parent (in some cases), the gamete donor, and the child. In this essay I intend to argue that it is ethically appropriate to inform children who are conceived by means of an egg or sperm donor of their biological origins and, in the case that they wish to know, the identity of their donor. I think that a child’s social parents, by which I mean the people who raised the child, should disclose to their child that they were created with the help of donor gametes. When it comes to the identity of the donor, I think it should be up to the child to decide whether or not they would like to know. I was discussing the issue of whether or not to tell one’s

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