Dr. Joanna Rose:

I thank the committee for the opportunity to speak. I was conceived from donor conception and have fought for the rights of donor-conceived people. In 2002, I won a test case in the High Court of Justice of England and Wales to bring an end to donor anonymity. I am aware that the committee is concerned about providing for adults seeking reproductive interventions. Today, however, I hope to bring to the attention of members the other stakeholders involved, namely, those who donated their sperm or eggs or who were conceived from reproductive interventions. First, I appeal for the acknowledgement that donors who become genetic parents and those produced from them are stakeholders. Second, I note that they must be given equal or even greater representation than the others owing to their special vulnerability to risks yet to be understood. International developments in regard to the legal and social recognition of the rights of these groups have been incremental and have taken decades of hard work and campaigning.

Sadly, the best interests of the child are not properly considered in the general scheme of the Bill, apart from the provisions to end donor anonymity. The child's interests and legal recognition are reduced to the provision of having his or her welfare taken into consideration "as far as is practicable". I would like to reflect on these words and the degradation of legal protection and discrimination accorded to this group. I wonder if it is legal to provide such discriminatory approaches to this particular group of children. The general scheme of the Bill speaks with confidence about providing counselling and informed consent on the implications and consequences of these practices. This is a false reassurance because of the dominance of the other two stakeholder groups, namely, fertility clinics and the adults who acquire their services.

Reproductive technology is a social and medical experiment and the adverse impacts and consequences are unravelling over time around the world. I have submitted to the committee a document which provides details on some of the activities of campaigning donor offspring around the world. It is only they who can inform best practice in this area. For the most part, we pay for our own counselling and genetic tests. We find lost relatives and sometimes live with false birth certificates and absent or misleading medical histories. We have lost ethnicities and ancestors and large numbers of siblings and half siblings. All this confronts us privately in adulthood. There is little understanding of the resulting grief and its disenfranchisement by our families and the community at large. Ending donor anonymity addresses only some of these problems.

We should know from bad adoption practices in Ireland and elsewhere the grief that can be caused by severing natural ties. The difference between adoption and donor conception is that, in the case of the latter, the natural ties are intended to be broken for a child before he or she is even conceived. Unlike best practice in adoption, donor conception is really about child production, not child protection. With adoption, parents have to pass a vetting process, whereas for donor conception, this is not the case. Why is that so? The general scheme of the Bill refers to plans to create scientific and ethical advisory committees to oversee the practice of assisted human reproduction. I suggest that the relevant authorities, including the Committee on Health, should consult adopted persons' groups and professionals who understand the long-term impact of adoption, kinship loss and displacement and speak widely to those already conceived from assisted human reproduction practices. I urge the committee and the Government to listen carefully to the voices of donor-conceived people and try not to let this become the adoption-style scandal of the future.

Ideally, donor conception should not be permitted because it involves the intentional severing of the genetic kin of future generations as a service or treatment. Children lose their knowledge of and relationships with their natural father or mother or both and all associated family. This is a huge loss to preplan for another generation. At a minimum, the impact of deliberately severing these natural ties must be minimised by providing long-term state support to donor-conceived people and the funding to provide them with the help needed to find their natural families in future, most importantly, when they face these issues as adults. I thank the committee for its time.