Earlier this fall, the NEW YORK TIMES ran a story highlighting some unforeseen consequences of the increased use of donated sperm to conceive a child in the United States. To investigate further the ethical issues associated with sperm donation, THE ROVER interviewed David Solomon, Notre Dame philosophy professor and the director of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, who has conducted extensive research in the field of medical ethics.
The TIMES article offered a laundry list of problems introduced by sperm donation. It stressed the disturbing possibility of unintentional incest between half-siblings when one donor fathers a large number of children in a single community. In addition, the article discussed the difficulties facing doctors in diagnosing and treating serious medical conditions with potentially hereditary causes when mothers of donor children do not have access to some or all of the donor’s medical records. Finally, on a deeper level, sperm donation confuses donor mothers’ and children’s sense of family. Donor children often have dozens or even hundreds of half-siblings, both in their own communities, and scattered throughout the country. Often, they go their entire lives without ever knowing that these people with whom they have strong blood relations even exist. What is the fundamental problem underlying all these issues?
There are fundamental issues with the very idea of in-vitro fertilization, the process that makes sperm donation possible. The article just talks about ways that we should regulate IVF and its various uses now that it has become commonplace (the article mentions how countries such as Britain, France, and Sweden limit the number of children that can be born to a single donor), but what about the fact that there may be problems with this very way of bringing children into existence? The Catholic Church condemns this practice as offending the dignity of the person, not only the parents, but also the child. Is there something wrong with bringing a child into existence without a physical act of love? The Catholic Church says yes. In-vitro fertilization brings reproduction under the domination of technology. If you think IVF is okay morally, you can deal with the rest of these problems through regulation.
Do you think these kinds of practices have arisen primarily because of advanced technology or because of philosophical shifts in the way we think about both human life and families?
Both of these factors are in play; there is a dialectical relationship between the two. Two things are going on in our culture. In the first place, we have the view that if technology makes something possible, it makes it legitimate as long as it doesn’t involve killing or harming someone straightforwardly. There have also been huge changes in the area of families in children that are not necessarily related to technology. People believe their marital status or whether or not they will raise the children in a family are up to them.
Can you think of any other unforeseen problems that could result from sperm donation?
We are no longer going to think of ourselves as related to our children through being part of a family. Before reproductive technology, you thought of yourself as a parent through a love relationship with someone else. We begin to think of children as more like toys or consumer items and not as a fundamental building block of community and social life. Children will think about their parents in different ways as well-they will not see themselves as coming into existence through two people merging in a relationship between persons more significant than the physical coming together of sperm and egg. JPII says in Evangelium Vitae that everyone has a right to be the product of a loving act between two parents. We are harmed in a fundamental way by not being able to see ourselves as a product of a loving relationship.
Bottom line: should sperm donation be legal in America? What can we do to help mitigate the long-term consequences of this practice?
It is hard to address legality questions when there is no possibility of building a consensus on making it illegal. We are so committed to public policies dominated by the autonomy and individual choice of citizens in these matters that it is unthinkable to get anybody to outlaw IVF or its other associated practices. It would be foolish to try to work for that right now. It is rather more important for America as a society to recognize that some people do find IVF morally objectionable, and for those who do find it morally objectionable to continue to articulate that position and live in ways that are consistent with these views. The moral objections to IVF are not narrowly theological even though they are articulated almost solely by the Catholic Church. Rather, they are broader-based humanistic questions about how we create new persons.
Elliott Pearce is a junior in the Program of Liberal Studies. He has been working on this article for exactly two months. Contact him at epearce1@nd.edu with questions on genetics.
