Our Right to Our Biological Heritage

In our last post, we wrote off the cuff about children's need and desire to know both biological parents. As more wacky ideas surface (e.g., creating egg cells from male stem cells so two male partners can "procreate"; two mommies but no daddy identified on birth certificates, etc.), we need to pay attention to the scholarly debate that's opened up on this. From our friend John:

So now [another] scholar writes that people should only be created by combining an egg and a sperm. Do you agree? There is no law against Same-Sex Procreation right now. After the law, a person won't have the right to procreate with someone of their same sex, but they will with someone of the other sex. We need everyone to back these ... proposals.... They are the answer to stopping Same-Sex Marriage.

David Blankenhorn is now saying that "Every child has the right to a natural biological heritage, defined as the union of the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg." [He also says, "Every child has the right, in so far as society can make it possible, to know and be raised by its two natural biological parents." And, "Every child has the right to know his or her biological origins. Individuals and society should typically refrain from creating genetic orphans." And "Children have the right to be heard. Today, the rights claims of adults tend to come through loud and clear. Children's voices are much harder to hear."]

This echoes Margaret Somerville's children's rights column. [Check out her musings in defense of hetero parenting too.]

And it echoes the President's Council on Bioethics, who over a year ago recommended that Congress "prohibit attempts to conceive a child by any means other than the union of egg and

And by way of contrast, let me link you to a LGBT group that insists on unfettered acccess to any and all reproductive technologies that a gay couple might want to use, and insists that they be safe and affordable, to boot.

We can start the fight against this stuff by enacting an egg-and-sperm law, and then work on donor conception and surrogacy. It will be much easier to fight those if we are able to point out that they are adultery, and that only married couples have the right to contribute gametes to create children. (We don't have to ban donor conception or surrogacy if it would create a backlash among hetero marriages that want to use sperm donation. We can just ban non-egg-and-sperm procreation.)

Go to John's blog for more discussion.