American Adoption Congress: Educating, Empowering, Evolving Donate

Assisted Proposition Article


Proposition About Donor Offspring

The House of Lords and House of Commons Joint Committee on the Human Tissue and Embryos (Draft) Bill has recommended (I quote from the Committee's press release) that they "recognize the force of the argument that the fact of donor conception should be registered on the person's birth certificate." However this does not mean that the identity of the donor would be so recorded; this is anomalous when one considers that following the 2004 Regulations, donor offspring will be able to ascertain their donor's identity anyway once they reach the age of 18. It also means that donor offspring would continue not to enjoy parity with other people.

We believe very strongly that our arguments would carry significantly greater weight if they were put by an organization which could legitimately claim to represent a constituency, rather than simply advocating them as individuals. Hence we propose to form IDOA: the International Donor Offspring Alliance. We see IDOA as specifically a lobbying and advocacy (as opposed to mutual support) group. We would like to focus first on reforming the law in the UK. Then, perhaps we can devote energy to supporting movements for reform in other jurisdictions. For the time being we do not intend that IDOA should have any structure or assets or anything of that kind.

This mail is going only to people who have some direct and personal involvement in DI, as opposed to those who have a professional interest; however we would hope to invite sympathetic members in the latter group to join us once we have established IDOA. Please feel free to circulate it to anyone who you think might wish to lend their support.

If you feel able to support the propositions and are willing for your name to be attached to a further submission to Parliament and/or press release, please email back with confirmation.

Kind regards

David Gollancz david.gollancz@btinternet.com