Can you guarantee it will be only once?

You haven’t articulated a reason why someone would need to know my identity. You’ve made an argument for medical history. I said that I had provided that when I donated.

But what you’re not doing is making an argument for breaching the contract that I made all those years ago, which was meant to not only protect *my* privacy, but protect the privacy of the donee family. Your whole argument rests on the hurt fee-fees of the child. Who isn’t even a child at the point you imagine all this will take place.

So I’m supposed to be happy that some stranger has violated a privacy agreement and tracked me down after 18 years for who knows what reason? I’m supposed to be happy that my privacy is violated because some stranger is curious about me?

To throw your argument back at you, is the sense of self of this hypothetical child so fragile that he or she needs to use the apparatus of the state to abrogate my agreement with the clinic so his or her fee-fees aren’t hurt?

Also — you seem to be under the apprehension that there’s some kind of state protection involved here, but you don’t identify it. What state coercion are you talking about with regard to egg donors? All I did was waive any parental rights I had to my genetic material through a private contract. There wasn’t any representative of the state there.

Egg donations have decreased by 40% since 2005 and the waiting list is now two years for IVF in some areas this is obviously a major problem that is not getting any better.

It also has have some worrying consequences around reproductive rights and access to fertility treatment as it has been suggested that couples who want to recieve a donor egg must donate sperm in order to access (NHS) treatment. Which seems worryingly coercive.

A further negative side effect has been the increase in ‘private’ sperm donations where women buy ‘live’ sperm from donor usually over the internet. This is obviously not screened and regulated, leading to a whole host of potential problems.

Incidently it is illegal to pay more than ‘expenses’ (Max of £250 for lost earning plus travel and childcare) for gamete donation in the UK so everyone who did it either now or previously did do it for altruistic reasons

On the whole I can see the very good reasons behind bothethe donors wish fir annonimity and teh offsprings desire to find out where they came from. However I don’t feel that the system in teh uk is working particularly well at the moment and perhaps a more intermidiatary system could be put in place with an agency holding teh details and acting as a place for correspondence to be sent, with the sending or recipt of any correspondence at the discretion of both parties involved.

So why, then, do you think it is bad to make that SAME DECISION in advance? Why can’t parents decide they don’t want to be identified or known before someone knocks on their door? Why can’t they decide they don’t want to be known before the child even gets born?

Why should you force them to have ANY contact, if they’ve already decided they don’t want to?

Then you could act like an adult and say “I don’t want to talk to you.” Is your sense of self so fragile that you need state protection from looking at their face or hearing their voice even once?

Finally, I’m not adopted or donor-conceived. I have an interest in respecting the rights of adoptees because I’m an adoptive parent. I know who all my own parents are, I’m just capable of having empathy for others who don’t have that knowledge and experience that as a loss.

And yet you lack the merest shred of empathy for the person who donated gametes or made a difficult decision to give a child up for adoption and now just wants to be left the fuck alone.

I’ve donated eggs, twice. Both times anonymously, and both times because I needed the money. And both times, the clinic took a complete medical history from me. The information about me is in my file, in terms of medical issues. What’s not there is my identity, and that’s how I want it.

The way you’d want it, though, I might get a knock on the door in a few years from some stranger who wants to know me because I’m his or her “mother.” Yet I’m not anyone’s “mother” in any sense of the word — the woman who gave birth to and raised this person is.

And you’d like to completely sweep away the terms of the deal I made back then — that I wouldn’t go trying to insert myself into the life of any child conceived with my eggs, and that that child wouldn’t have any way of inserting him- or herself into mine.

And why? To satisfy your curiosity? Well, as Miss Manners says, just because you’re curious about me doesn’t mean that I have to give up my privacy and indulge your whims. And just because I want to maintain my privacy, it doesn’t mean that I have something to hide.

Besides, if you think that not knowing the identity of the person who donated a gamete is hurtful, how hurtful do you think it would be if that person slammed the door in the child’s face? I used to date a guy who had that very experience — he was adopted in the bad old days when girls were sent away, and while he had found his birth mother and established a relationship with her, his birth father didn’t want anything to do with him because the whole thing was too painful. Do you think that set very easily with him?

i’m thrilled with how i feel, after having it done. i feel much better than i ever did on the pill or on depo, and i would do it again in a heartbeat!

Anger makes bleh’s comments not clear. I won’t try and amend the word choice problems above, but I’ll just acknowledge they are stark. Ahem.

is a fine example of some of that dynamic being taked about on the “Tokenism” thread—the non-apology apology, the redirecting, speaking in the third person, defensiveness, not to mention the complete ignoring of any actual critique.