It’s difficult to conceive, but we are creating new generation of orphans

I don’t have enough compassion for infertile couples... I will never quite know how it feels, writes Victoria White

IT’S little and late, but it’s great news that the Cabinet has discussed legislation to give adopted people the right to their birth certificates. This is a basic human right.

It is an outrage that 50,000 adopted people in Ireland have been denied the piece of paper that states the bare facts of their birth: who Mam was, who Dad was, where and when they were born. They couldn’t be asking for less — access to that bit of paper that the rest of us take for granted.

Much credit is due to adopted people themselves, as well as to our President, Michael D Higgins, and to Averil Power, Fidelma Healy-Eames and Gillian van Turnhout, who produced their own similar bill in the Seanad last year. It’s great to see a dawning realisation turn into organisation and then actualisation. When you read Philomena Lee saying she would have been reunited with her son, Anthony, before his premature death, if he had had access to his birth certificate, it brings home the importance of the Government’s proposed legislation.

The legislation goes too far in protecting the privacy of birth parents. It would be humiliating and hurtful, in the extreme, to ask adopted people to sign a declaration saying they will not contact their birth parents. It will not achieve anything, either, because Government sources say there will be no sanction against an adopted person who tries to make contact.

That’s because sanctioning frequently desperate adoptees for contacting the people who gave them life is repugnant. It will be devastating enough for some adopted people to hear that their birth mothers and fathers have not looked for contact.

I would not like to be the birth mother who has never told her husband and grown-up children she had a secret child and who lives in fear of the knock on the door. This possibility must be brought home to adopted people as carefully as possible. But what must be brought home to the wider community is that two wrongs don’t make a right, and the original wrong was done to adopted people.

If they have their birth certificates, there will be nothing stopping them finding their birth family privately. There may be some unfortunate contact, but knowledge is power. Birth parents may die with their secrets, but the next generation should not be left in ignorance. There are thousands of adults, walking around this small country, who have no idea that they have other brothers or sisters and that their children have more cousins. We owe it to the families of the future to bring what we know into the light of day.

So does nobody else see the irony here? The Government that wants to establish adopted people’s right to their identities rammed through the Children and Family Relationships Bill last spring, with barely any debate. The bill legislates for the legal parenthood of children born by donor sperm and donor eggs, or, in other words, by unknown mothers and fathers. True, it aims to outlaw anonymous gamete donation. Once they turn 18, children born by donation will have a right to know the barest details of their donor parents’ identities.

Children born by gamete donation in Ireland will arguably have the same rights that adopted people will have under the new legislation. Except they won’t at all. They won’t have the protection of the adoption process.

They will be sent off into families that are at least 50% biological strangers, without any of the exhaustive and exhausting screening which today’s adoptive parents have to go through. In anthropological terms, this is a recipe for disaster. In human rights terms, it is an abomination.

The most dangerous situation for most baby mammals is being with a male who is unrelated to them. This is sometimes true of humans, too, as we see in rare but tragic cases of children suffering at the hands of their mothers’ unrelated partners. Clearly, the vast majority of parents of children conceived by gamete donation are dedicated and loving, but without either the safeguard of screening or the safeguard of biological connection, something is going to happen sometime to a donor-conceived child, who perhaps, in the context of relationship breakdown, becomes a stranger to a parent. The Government yanked the surrogacy bits out of the bill, to give it less chance of impacting on the same-sex marriage vote. Surrogacy still generated a fair bit of heat during the debate, with Minister Simon Coveney expressing great misgivings about the process and pointing to the many countries in which it is banned outright. I think commercial surrogacy should be banned and I don’t believe there is any surrogacy outside the family that isn’t commercial.

But it is less of an issue for me than gamete donation, if the baby is returned to two biological parents after its sojourn in a stranger’s womb. The sad fact is that it generates more interest than donor conception because it potentially impacts on the rights of surrogate mothers, who are adults. Adults matter. Children still don’t.

Dr Joanna Rose, conceived by sperm donation in the 1970s, spelled out the difference between adoption and gamete donation in an article she wrote for the Irish press, before the Children and Family Relationships Bill was made law: “The loss and grief experienced by donor-conceived children is very similar to that experienced by adoptees, but with a key difference: adoption gives a home to a child that has already lost their natural family. “Sperm donation cuts the link intentionally, in order to provide adults with a child. It’s the difference between child protection and child production.” She argued that we should amend our bill “to ensure that the State does not facilitate the human rights violations that are egg-and-sperm donation.” I think we should ban conception with donor gametes and insist on a screening process for non-biological parents of children conceived by donor gametes abroad. We pushed the Children and Family Relationships Bill into law without any public debate. It’s considered off-colour to mention any misgivings about gamete donation, in case it’s seen as a slur on donor-conceived children or a lack of compassion for infertile couples.

It goes without saying that the donor-conceived are perfect blessings, like all children. It also goes without saying that I don’t have enough compassion for infertile couples, given that I will probably never quite know how it feels.

But we can’t allow compassion to numb us to the fact that as we begin to reverse the human rights violation that was the denial of their birth certificates to adopted people, we have legislated to create new orphans from scratch.