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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Monash Bioethics Review
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40592-024-00212-3
Abstract
What is the true signicance of biological kinship? During the last decades, it
seemed to be uncontroversial that abandoned and even adopted people feel the
negative impact of biological parents’ absence throughout life in several ways
(Miller et al. 2000; Keyes, Margaret A., Anu Sharma, Irene J Elkins, and William
G. Iacono, Matt McGue. 2008. The Mental Health of US Adolescents Adopted in
Infancy. Archive Pediatric Adolescense Medicine 162(5): 419–425.). However, in
the case of people conceived via “third-party reproduction”, especially in sperm
donation, the disruption of the kinship network derived from natural bonds tends
to be presented as something irrelevant. This article disputes that assumption, ex-
plores its relationship with a deconstructivist vision that presents kinship as a purely
social construct and defends the personal and existential value of a person’s bio-
logical bonds with her parents. While analysing the anthropological shift inherent
to the way some political discourses present the nuclear family and heterologous
biotechnology, it proposes renewed philosophical attention on the signicance of
liation and human anity. This article argues for the density of genealogical ties
and defends that the consecration of an individual “right to a child”, namely (but
not exclusively) through the normalised access to sperm banks, is incompatible
with the rights of the child, since it deprives people from knowing not only who
but also how is their father.
Keywords Natural bonds · Third-party reproduction · Filiation · Children’s
rights · Family policies · Kinship · Biological family · Father’s love · Human
anity · Personality · Right to a child
Accepted: 15 August 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party
reproduction” and the existential density of biological
anity
Diogo Morais SarmentoMadureira1
Diogo Morais Sarmento Madureira
diogomsxm@gmail.com
1 Institute for Political Studies, Catholic University of Portugal, Lisboa 1300, Portugal
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D. M. S. Madureira
1 Introduction
The presentation of sperm donation as something positive and altruistic, which exists
to alleviate the suering of people who cannot have children due to a disease or
not having a relationship with a man, has strongly inuenced political decisions in
the last few years (J. Laing and Oderberg 2005). In Portugal, for example, this per-
spective motivated the replacement of the previous 2006 law on assisted reproduc-
tive technologies (ART) with the current one, from 2016 (Assembleia da República
2016). Donor anonymity was one of the clauses that ended up being declared uncon-
stitutional in this new law from 2016 whose main dierence to the previous law is
that this one faced access to sperm banks as a remedy for a health problem, while the
new one extends access to every woman, hence converting it from a subsidiary into
an alternative method of reproduction (Tribunal Constitucional 2018)1. By doing so,
the a priori separation between fathers and children, previously admitted only as an
extreme solution for extreme cases, became accepted as the legitimate result of an
individual choice, with no need for any other justication besides the desire to have a
child. Such separation takes place through the legitimation of agreements essentially
consisting of the following: a woman and a man decide to generate a person whom
only the woman intends to raise and take care of (alone or together with another
individual); the man, for his part, only accepts to generate that person precisely on
the condition that he does not have to raise her. In most cases, indeed, the objective is
that the man remains anonymous since most women resorting to sperm insemination
do not want to connect with the donor (Beeson et al. 2011).
As many of the approximately 6.5 million people conceived via third-party repro-
duction (TPR) worldwide (Zillén, Garland, and Slokenberga 2017) started raising
their voices against donor anonymity, both scientic research and political decisions
converge with what is stipulated, for example, in article 8 of the European Conven-
tion on Human Rights: the right to know mother and father is a fundamental human
right. Despite some ambiguous readings on TPR, the European Court of Human
Rights defended the individual’s vital interest in obtaining information about cru-
cial elements of personal identity, such as knowing who are one’s parents (European
Court of Human Rights 2003; 2006; 2011b; 2011a; 2013). Sweden in 1984, Germany
in 1989, and the United Kingdom in 2005, among others (Norway or Switzerland,
for example), have also eradicated donor anonymity (Blyth et al. 2012), thus echoing
voices like Joanna Rose’s, the “donor-conceived” woman responsible for the legal
case that ended UK’s anonymity law (Great Britain. England and Wales. Supreme
Court of Judicature, High Court of Justice 2002).
1 In its rule 225/2018, that declared the inconstitucionality of some clauses of the Portuguese ART law of
2016, namely that of the anonimity of sperm or egg donnors, the Portuguese Constitutional Court endorsed
the position of the Portuguese National Council for Ethics and Life Sciences (CNECV) against “a para-
digm shift on the use of ART”, which “puts the focus of all protection exclusively on the woman, thus
neglecting that group of rights which constitutes the most important value to safeguard, and towards which
the State has a special duty of protection: the rights of the child. If the Constitution protects the right to
form a family, it also protects the right of each person to know her own identity — including the genetical
—, and between both, it is the former that has to yield, not the latter.” (p. 1886).
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
Anonymity is a relevant ethical issue in this discussion, since among other conse-
quences, it leads, for example, to stark discrimination: while adopted children benet
from a broad social and scientic consensus on the need to know their origins, chil-
dren conceived via sperm banks are forbidden to do so in countries where anonymity
is still permitted, such as the US or Spain. However, as Joanna Rose explains in the
exhaustive reection she undertook on the way literature, politics, and social repre-
sentation neglect “the personal and social eects of disrupting the unity of biological
and social relatedness for the ospring” (Rose 2009), there are other ethical problems
to be taken into account. Instead of being considered something to dissuade as a
general rule, disconnecting the biological and social components of kinship tends to
appear as something irrelevant in the context of TPR. An essential dimension of the
right to personhood and identity is therefore neglected.
To understand this situation it is extremely useful to acknowledge the inuence of
two close ideas: one is that “aections are construed; they are not in the blood”; the
other is well resumed in the colloquial sentence “all you need is love”, an attractive
and quasi intuitive aphorism which in the context of this debate shall notwithstand-
ing be understood as if it was indierent or irrelevant to have the biological parents’
love — to put it simply: if you are loved it doesn’t matter who loves you. These ideas
connect, in turn, with two other strongly related convictions. One says that just like
masculine and feminine, fatherhood and motherhood are “performative” categories
that shall be deconstructed, meaning that they constitute social roles that can be rein-
terpreted by other people than biological parents (Levine 2008; Robaldo 2011). The
other departs from the same deconstructivist epistemology to arm that it is law —
not biology or nature — that determines father and mother; hence the donor shall not
be considered father (Anne Cadoret 2003; Bruton 2018).
The perspective just described characterizes what can be denominated as a decon-
structivist vision. This article critically analyzes it, along with its respective premises
and arguments, through complementary and interconnected counterarguments that
could be condensed into two main ideas: (1) biology is biographical; (2) love is not
importable, i.e., it is not alienable, because the responsibility to love cannot be trans-
ferred (Moschella 2017).
To develop these ideas we address scientic evidence and argue that TPR implies
the deliberate alienation of kinship duties and rights by voluntarily breaking the
inherent bonds derived from the connection between the conceived person, their bio-
logical parents and the whole network of familiar anities (grandparents, brothers
and sisters, aunts, cousins). It is true that, regardless of whether such agreements
materialize through sexual intercourse or biotechnology, a demo-liberal State cannot
stop them from occurring, but the question is whether that State, which is fundamen-
tally committed to the protection of the weakest and human dignity, should deter
those agreements or not. Forbidding the practice does not seem to be a solution, but
this article argues that the State must recognize the right of the child to an ongoing
connection with the biological mother or father and ensure that child the possibility
of knowing her biological parents in the proper sense of the word, i.e., not only to
know who they are but — equally important — how they are. Our main argument is
in line with that of James Vellemanm (Velleman 2005, 2008a, b).
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D. M. S. Madureira
It is logical that among healthy women, those interested in sperm donation are
mainly women unrelated to a man (Beeson et al. 2011; VARTA 2022), which means
that converting TPR from a subsidiary into an alternative means of reproduction
results, in practice, in the absence of a father in the life of the person thus gener-
ated (Blyth 1999; Vanfraussen et al. 2002; Kirkman 2003; Cahn and Cahn 2008). By
expanding the access of all women to sperm banks, just as the cited Portuguese law
and similar ones worldwide do, the State accepts as valid the thesis of the irrelevance
not only of the parents’ sex but also of the parents’ kinship, thus authorizing life proj-
ects which have no intention to provide the person to be born the company of even an
adoptive father. Indeed, such laws accept as truth the idea that it is possible to reduce
parents to donors and that they are “third parties” for the children. The impossibil-
ity of cultivating biological ties through an aective relationship with parents also
means the impossibility of feeding any anity with half of a person’s family. This
makes it harder for people generated via TPR “to connect with one’s roots; to com-
plete one’s life (hi-) story; to understand where one’s traits come from; to discover
one’s dening characteristics and capabilities; and to map out one’s ancestral history”
(Ravelingien et al. 2013, p. 257).
2 Biology is biographic
In 2018, within the scope of the Bioethics États Généraux called by the French gov-
ernment to prepare new legislation and which was dominated by the possibility of
coming into force in France a TPR law similar to the Portuguese one, Aude Mirkovic,
spokesman for the French association “Jurists for Childhood”, published a book with
this sharp introductory summary:
The PMA for single women and women’s unions is one of the agship mea-
sures of the revision of the 2011 bioethics law and the public’s attention on the
matter is strong, but when it comes to facing this non-therapeutic PMA, society
must choose: where do we want to go with articial reproduction techniques?
Should PMA be an exceptional measure, designed to compensate for a medi-
cal problem, or become a habitual procreation mode that drags society into a
new anthropology, to use the National Ethical Advisory Council’s terms? The
French who say they are in favour of WFP for single women and women’s
unions would have the same opinion if the question were asked from the child’s
point of view: ‘Do you think that the law should organise the conception of
children deliberately and legally deprived of father’? (Mirkovic 2018).
The erasure of the father, or the normalization of its absence from his biological
children’s lives, is a direct consequence of the deconstructivist dynamic generated
by the convictions “aections are construed; they are not in the blood” and “all you
need is love”. In this rst point, we address two arguments that strongly contribute
to that outcome.
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
First, the argument of the nonconclusive information, according to which existing
empirical research is not clear on the harms of cutting the connection with the bio-
logical father and, concretely, of sperm donation.
Intimately associated with this argument there is a second one, known in bioethics
as the argument of existential debt, that consists of the following reasoning: despite
the harm that the child may experience for lacking a father connection, she will still
be glad to be alive; would she prefer not to be born rather than be born but not know
her biological father?
The underlying conclusion to both arguments is, on the one side, that those who
oppose TPR shall be the ones who must prove its harms. On the other side, even
though they could prove it, the practice would still be equally morally justied,
because the harm of not having one’s biological father would never be so great that
people would prefer not to be born — bringing someone into the world inevitably
causes them to suer and if a parent believes that the goods of life outweigh the
harms, then it is not wrong to procreate not even via condential sperm donation.
Our response to each of these arguments aims to show, among other things, that
they jointly ignore a very important principle in bioethics, especially in the context of
public policies related to reproductive biotechnology, which is recalled by the sound
teaching that not everything technically possible is ethically acceptable: the principle
of prudence or precaution. Aude Mirkovic accurately resumes this point:
The Convention on the Rights of the Child proclaims for all of them the right
to know and be raised by their parents whenever possible. Now, a procreation
technique that deliberately and denitively erases the father is not compatible
with such a right. If we think that 2018 children do not need a father, we need to
start by proving it, because experience invites us to think otherwise; afterwards,
we will need to correct CRC (…) It would perhaps be preferable to accept that,
in a rule of law State, the satisfaction of the desires of some nds its limit in the
respect for the rights of others and includes children. (Mirkovic 2018).
2.1 The argument of non-conclusive information
Several authors have argued that the biographical weight and signicance of the bio-
logical connection includes more than just data on who is one’s father (Callahan
1992; Velleman 2005; Laing 2006; Guichon et al. 2012; Moschella 2014). But is that
position empirically grounded? A good way to introduce the response could be by
citing a 2011 report entitled “Men in Families”, from the UN Economic and Social
Council:
Regardless of the mechanisms and eects that a parent produces, their presence
or involvement is associated with several benets for children, both in the short
term and over time (UN Department of Economic and Social Aairs - Division
for Social Policy and Development 2011, 58).
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D. M. S. Madureira
A 2007 UNICEF report defended similar conclusions (UNICEF Innocenti Research
Centre 2007, p. 23). Another study cited at a UN expert meeting titled “Family Pol-
icies and the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda states that “there is copious
research supporting the notion that involved fatherhood is crucial for the develop-
ment of healthy, well-functioning families” (Behson and Robbins 2016, 1), a con-
clusion corroborated by other authors (Hoerth 2006; Cabrera and Catherine S.
Tamis-LeMonda 2013). The trivialisation of the separation between children and
biological father through TPR is at odds with the conclusion that “the continuity of
biological, emotional and legal paternity and motherhood constitutes an advantage
for the child”, as armed in a European Parliament resolution from 1989 (Parla-
mento Europeu 1989, 46). It also seems to violate the Convention on the Rights of
the Child, which stipulates the children’s fundamental right to know their parents and
to preserve the union between them as a general rule — vide, for example, § 7 to § 9
(ONU 1989). That right shall not be subordinated to “parental rights or interests”,
contrarily to what authors like Sally Haslanger defend (Haslanger 2009) and accord-
ing, for example, to the National Council of Ethics for Life Sciences of Portugal,
which regarding TPR techniques stated that “due to its nature and vulnerability, the
being that will be born is the one who lacks most protection” (Conselho Nacional de
Ética para as Ciências da Vida 2016), an understanding that also prevailed in the UK,
at least until recently (McWhinnie 2001, p. 808).
The scientic knowledge accumulated by research on biological and non-biolog-
ical families over decades in which the issue was not as politically controversial as
it is today, oered empirical support for the described normative heritage (Schechter
1964; Amato 1994; Cherlin et al. 1998; Flinn, Leone, and Quinlan 1999). Indeed,
“Several decades of research linked privacy of the father in childhood to higher risks
of depression and other forms of psychopathology” (Tyrka et al. 2008, 1147), and
rather than sustaining the thesis of the irrelevance of the father’s absence, multidis-
ciplinary scientic evidence corroborates the ideal of growing up with one own’s
mother and father:
It is not simply the presence of two parents but the presence of two biological
parents that seems to support children’s development. (…) [R]esearch demon-
strates that family structure matters for children and the family structure that
helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-
conict marriage. Children in single-parent families, children born to unmar-
ried mothers, and children in stepfamilies or cohabiting relationships face
higher risks of poor outcomes than do children in intact families headed by two
biological parents.” (Moore, Jekielek, and Emig 2002, 1).
Many other studies defend the same conclusion (Phares and Compas 1992; Amato
1998, 2012; Popenoe 1999; Regnerus 2012), therefore converging with Sarah McLa-
nahan’s analysis of the work her teams have conducted over the years:
If we were asked to design a system for making sure that children’s basic needs
were met, we would probably come up with something quite similar to the two-
parent ideal. The fact that both parents have a biological connection to the child
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
would increase the likelihood that the parents would identify with the child and
be willing to sacrice for that child, and it would reduce the likelihood that
either parent would abuse the child (S. McLanahan and G.Sandefur 1994, 38).
McLanahan corroborated this conclusion in 2005 (McLanahan et al. 2005), as well
as Mary Parke (Mary Parke 2003), Wendy Manning and Michael Lamb: “The advan-
tage of marriage appears to exist primarily when the child is the biological ospring
of both parents.” (Manning and Lamb 2003, p. 890). The research institution Child
Trends synthesizes the evidence in the following way:
Among young children, those living with no biological parents or in single-
parent households are less likely than children with two biological parents to
exhibit behavioural self‐control, and more likely to be exposed to high levels
of aggravated parenting, than are children living with two biological parents.
(…) Among children in two‐parent families, those living with both biological
parents in a low‐conict marriage tend to do better on a host of outcomes than
those living in step-parent families. Outcomes for children in stepparent fami-
lies are in many cases similar to those for children growing up in single‐parent
families. (Child Trends 2014, 2).
The disproportionate way in which people raised without one or both biological
parents face diverse kinds of problems2 by comparison to those who benet from
the coexistence with both (Paquette 2004; Amato 2011; Potter 2012; Child Trends
2014) is acknowledged even by authors from contrasting political perspectives who
recognize that, as a rule, the absence of one or both biological parents can consis-
tently be regarded as a strong predictor of emotional, psychological and behavioural
problems during infancy and adolescence (Reimann 1997; Manning and Lamb 2003;
Lamb 2010; Rosenfeld 2010). Therefore, existing evidence comparing the results of
biological and non-biological children in a wide variety of indicators conrms that
“genealogical bewilderment” matters and there are indeed strong reasons for seeing
the biogenetic family as the “gold standard” (Sants 1964; Winkler and Mitford 1986;
McWhinnie 1986). In other words, it supports the argument that despite multiple
cases of people growing up normally without their natural parents’ presence, the sep-
aration between them cannot work as an ideal for public policies, because it cannot be
considered a good option not even when it is the better option, as happens in extreme
circumstances. This is corroborated by scientic research on adopted children (Smit
2002; Juer and van IJzendoorn 2005; Keyes et al. 2008; van den Dries et al. 2009;
Fullerton 2016), as well as by complementary evidence demonstrating the dispropor-
tional disadvantages of “donor-conceived” people when compared with peers raised
by their biological parents (McWhinnie 1998, 2006; Allen 2013; Persaud et al. 2017;
Martin 2017). In addition to all the authors already mentioned, one could also cite
Donald Sullins, who has been carrying out a detailed critical analysis of previous
2 Physical and mental health; emotional well-being; social insertion; cognitive performance; personal
identity; self-condence, etc.
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D. M. S. Madureira
studies and making his assessment of the USA’s national longitudinal data since at
least 2015 (Sullins 2015a, b, 2016, 2021):
An extensive and diverse body of research nds that, compared to children con-
tinuously living with two parents, married parents, or their biological parents,
children in other family arrangements consistently experience lower emotional
well-being, physical health and academic achievement (…) This evidence
[from Sullins’ 2021study] strongly supports the claim that maximum child
development occurs only in the persistent care of both of the child’s biological
parents. (Sullins 2021)
Apparently, all this body of research is unknown even to authors like Daniel Groll
(Groll 2021), who recognizes some relevance to biological ties and is openly against
anonymity in TPR practices, but is especially ignored by authors who deny and
undervalue the biographical signicance of biological connection for people born
from TPR (Witt 2005; Leighton 2012; de Melo-Martín 2014).
2.2 The argument for the existential debt
Within the context of the present discussion, this argument is frequently presented
through a rhetorical question (ex: would “donor-conceived” people prefer to know
their father or not to be born at all? ), or through categorical sentences like that of the
once-president of UK’s Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority, Emily Jack-
son: “existence must always be judged preferable to non-existence” (Rose 2009, p.
250).3
The existential debt argument has a direct link with Derek Part’s non-identity
problem (Part 1986). As he explains through the depletion case, a procreation act
may cause harm to the future person, but that person who exists and suers as an
eect of that act would never have existed without it, so she must be thankful for that
act, which is not wrong. A dierent perspective is developed here and aligns with
that of authors like James Velleman or James Woodward (Woodward 1986; Velleman
2008b). In the particular case of donor insemination, what makes the act under scru-
tiny wrong is the intentional and unjustiable violation of the future person’s right
against being brought into an existence without father.
If a human being has already been generated and exists as a fetus, the ethical
appreciation of the decision to allow him to be born — even knowing that will be
deprived of the father’s company — may be limited by the concrete existence of that
human being. However, if we are not dealing with the concrete existence of anything
(not even a cell or an embryo), then we are not harming anyone by defending that
there is no reason to restrict to only two options the horizon of possibilities opened up
to the agent’s decision: (a) having a child without a father; (b) not having the child.
3 As Joanna Rose points out, it seems incoherent to hold such view for someone who defends abortion, as
it was the case of Emily Jackson. Indeed, if one arms a right to life that applies even to those who don’t
exist at all and are only projects of somebody else’s will, how can then deny the right to life of a being that
already exists as fetus, even if we don’t recognize it as a person?
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
Since, in principle, everybody has a mother and a father, a third possibility has neces-
sarily to be admitted: having a child and giving her her mother and father. Society, in
the person of the legislator, must formulate its ethical judgment by reference to this
third option and not ignore it a priori, because it harms nobody and fully respects the
simultaneously diverse and exclusive nature of the reproductive relationship — the
very same nature that structures the original meaning of the terms “mother” and
“father”.
The existential debt argument often promotes a pernicious tendency to confuse
the critic with the banalization of TPR (thus converted into an alternative means of
procreation) with an attack on the dignity of people born from it. However, there
is nothing wrong nor incoherent in being thankful for those people’s existence and
questioning the way they were conceived, as stated by those people themselves, who
are amongst the most erce critics of TPR and related terminology, such as “donor-
conceived” (Elizabeth Howard 2014). The procreative decision under analysis here
absolutely precedes the existence of a being, for in the moment of that decision the
person to be born is nothing more than an aspiration and does not exist not even as
a cell. Now, as Part also shows through the non-identity problem, no harm can be
done to someone who doesn’t exist at all. Likewise, nobody is harmed if people
refrain from procreating for not being able to give the child to be born the company
of both parents. As James Woodward writes “Considerations having to do with rights
and fairness have a large role to play in population policies, even when the conditions
of the non-identity problem are met” (Woodward 1986, p. 804).
3 Love is not importable
If public discussion about TPR widely neglects the consequences of the underestima-
tion of biological kinship ties, that is due, to a great extent, to the tendential associa-
tion of the deconstructivist approach to the idea that “all you need is love”. Thanks to
this successful case of political rhetoric, the discursive power of an attractive expres-
sion ends up serving the conviction that it is indierent to a person to be loved by her
parents or anybody else; as long as she is loved, it would not matter who loves her
(Cholodenko 2010). In sum, within the idiosyncratic context of the current debate,
arming “all you need is love” is equivalent to assuming that love is something
importable and the love of a person’s parents is irrelevant.
In support of this position, it is frequently invoked the undeniable dysfunctionality
of many biological families, along with the equally undeniable robustness of aec-
tive ties between many non-biological parents and their children (Lansford et al.
2001; Hertz 2008; van den Dries et al. 2009; Biblarz and Stacey 2010). The problem
of such arguing is two-fold.
First, it reects a tendency to ignore the amount of evidence mentioned before
about the disproportionate way in which people raised without one or both biologi-
cal parents face diverse kinds of problems by comparison to those who benet from
the coexistence with both. In other words, to overemphasize the constructed side of
aection means, in the rst place, ignoring the well-grounded conclusion that, as
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D. M. S. Madureira
a rule, the best for a person’s development in her infancy and adolescence is to be
raised by her parents, as even adoptive people acknowledge (Rushbrooke 1998).
Secondly, its disregard for the importance of natural bonds between parents and
children promotes the idea that “beyond insemination, fathering is fundamentally a
social construction” (UN Department of Economic and Social Aairs - Division for
Social Policy and Development 2011, 51). According to such perspective, father-
hood and motherhood are social roles whose connection with biology must be decon-
structed, namely by defending that they can be performed by anybody else than a
man and a woman or even the mother or the father. Transformed into a vehicle for the
deconstructivist vision that there is no mother or father, but merely those who play
the role of mother or father, the friendly statement “all you need is love” consists
in a denial of the unique and unreplaceable place of natural parents in their chil-
dren’s lives, thus emptying the biological connection between them of any existential
meaning.
3.1 “It is only a donor”, or the nominalist attempt to vanish fatherhood
A minimum degree of familiarity with the intellectual production related to “gender
studies” shows that the vision of gender as a purely cultural construction has always
predicted, in a more or less assumed way, profound implications for kinship (Wittig
1992; Butler 1998; Robaldo 2011). If we believe that the connection of femininity
and masculinity to biological sex constrains individuals and is a source of oppression
and discrimination, then, logically, the categories “paternity” and “maternity” are a
primordial goal of deconstruction, given their conceptual link to biological sex. The
mere existence of dierent notions to designate the parents – “father” and “mother”
– would somehow prove the cultural inuence of “biological determinism” and “het-
eronormativity” on social representations of the family, thereby repressing an alterna-
tive kinship paradigm (Anne Cadoret 2003; Levine 2008). Deconstruction can take
place in practice by substituting the words “mother” and “father” for “parent A” and
“parent B” (as well as “motherhood” and “fatherhood” for “parenthood”), for exam-
ple (Radio Canada 2013; Gouvernement du Québec - Ministère de la Justice 2017).
Another option is legitimizing reproductive biotechnology applications which per-
fectly illustrates that the disconnection between gender and biology may not always
be just a one-way road: if it can serve to denounce the idea that women shall be moth-
ers, it can also serve to promote the idea that mothers may not be women.
A crucial feature must be emphasised at this point: the deconstructivist vision not
only arms the indierence of having a father and a mother but also of having the
father and the mother (and their respective love).
Kinship thus becomes a kind of clay, moldable according to the criteria of social
engineering experiences within which biological parents are disposable, and chil-
dren appear as exchangeable goods. Consequently, reasonings such as the following
become normalised: since “aections are construed, ‘they are not in the blood’”, the
newborn that a woman generates in her womb and delivers at birth is not necessar-
ily her son. Since “aections are construed, ‘they are not in the blood’”, it is better
to avoid breastfeeding and even separate the “surrogate” from the baby at birth, to
prevent any kind of aective connection (Deonandan, Green, and Van Beinum 2012;
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
Jennifer Lahl 2016; Allen 2018); since “aections are construed, ‘they are not in
the blood’”, and “males have always been fathering anonymously and irresponsibly;
why not put this otherwise noxious trait to good use?” (Rose 2009, p. 24).
These arguments are coherent derivations of the inspiring deconstructivism that
feeds the disregard for the biogenetic anity and denies beforehand the easily pre-
sumable aspiration of any person to be loved by her mother and father. By enabling
a desire for children that involves the premeditated intention of depriving them in
advance of their mother or father, the State legitimises these people’s discrimina-
tion. An apparently egalitarian vision results, therefore, in the inequality of children,
as well as in other contradictions: “The whole procedure certainly runs contrary to
our tradition that natural parents should ordinarily take moral, social and economic
responsibility for their children” (Fisher, 1989, cit. in Rose 2009, p. 60). If govern-
ments aim to “help to embed a cultural norm that fathers should reach the birth of
their child with an expectation that they have clear responsibility for their child”
(Rose 2009, p. 62), then, how “is encouraging the intentional creation of a genetic
child that one intends to have no responsibility for, a healthy paternal (or maternal)
culture for the government to promote” (Rose 2009, p. 60)? How can the premedi-
tated and collectively organised disruption between biological siring and responsibil-
ity be conciliated with “the normative recognition and expectation that unless there
are circumstances that jeopardise the child’s wellbeing, natural parents should be
supported to take this responsibility seriously” (Rose 2009, p. 60)? Is not that disrup-
tion somehow anachronic in a time full of “appeals to increase fathers’ interaction
and input into child-rearing, indeed to raise the role of the father” (Rose 2009, p. 61)?
Judge John Smoot exposes the same argument by recalling Margaret Mead’s idea that
“the supreme task of any society is to teach its men to be good fathers” (Smoot 2013).
As Joanna Rose concludes, “the absence of one’s father tends only to be painted in a
positive light, or indeed in an irrelevant light if it is pragmatically necessary to do so
as part of the justication for the intentional creation of such absence” (Rose 2009, p.
69). Rupert Rushbrooke, an adopted son himself, resumes the problem:
as new technologies have been introduced [and continue to be introduced] that
are also predicated on the notion that blood relationships are trivial, the number
of people damaged by this industry will be even greater, and the eects may
take the form of social, as much as individual, problems> (cf Rose 2009, p.
211).
3.2 Intimate, unrepeatable, and inexorably personal
Expressions such as “aections are construed; they are not in the blood”, “donor
children” or “all you need is love” reect the process of “mediation of meanings”
that Roger Silverstone and Nomi Sunderland (Silverstone 1999; Sunderland 2004,
2008) describe as a mechanism of language shifting and adjustment. This mechanism
is a good prism to introduce the “seemingly invisible process whereby (…) biotech-
nology is engaging in and aecting the social and biological functions of reproduc-
tion, kinship and identity” (Rose 2009, p. 17). The mediation of meanings “narrows
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D. M. S. Madureira
down” the inclusion of specic analyses and “broadens the exclusion” of others, thus
promoting, in the specic case of sperm donation, an “unbalanced and ill-considered
picture” in which many “donor-conceived” people (and respective problems) “are
made less ‘visible’ and hence (…) not given their proper weighting or consideration
in the usual ethical analysis of this practice” (Rose 2009, p. 18). As defended by
Brenda Almond there is a genetic and cultural heritage whose relational substance
tends to be devalued:
If gametes are regarded as being no more than raw material for the medical
manufacture of children, a whole dimension of human reproduction is lost – in
particular, the network of kinship relations that provides the key to an under-
standing of society’s culture and practices. (Almond 1998, p. 142).
The “alienation of fatherhood”, or the denial of the personal anity of the biogenetic
connection between “donor father” and “donor-conceived” children, exemplies how
the mediation of meanings in the context of sperm donation promotes “a destructive
notion of paternity that is decisional, contractual, alienable, instrumental, fractured,
and even commercial” (Rose 2009, p. 18). The idea that people conceived via sperm
banks have no father, but a “donor” plays a central role in this context. It perfectly
reects the process of mediation of meanings, namely through the assimilation of
the assertion that paternity is a purely social construction that can be eliminated or
transferred by decree, as if the juridical designation of biological fathers as donors
amounted to a sort of magic trick that eectively transforms fathers into donors (and
harms none). The Bioethics Committee of the Council of Europe addressed this issue
in a recent study:
[third party reproduction] has generated considerable concern about the rights
of children to information, not only regarding identity and to know one’s par-
ents, but in part concerning who is legally registered by law as the child’s par-
ents (…) Some of these problems are created not by the technology itself but
by national laws – for example, those that shield donors from registration as
parents or only recognize parents based on marital or adoptive status rather than
biology. (Zillén, Garland, and Slokenberga 2017, 24–25).
As Joanna Rose arms, “The ospring’s kinship and identity are then framed through
an experimental postmodernist notion, presenting them as social rather than innate
constructs” (Rose 2009; ii).
The physical and psychological similarities with one’s parents are perhaps the
most immediate invitation to understand a connection that is inexorably biographical
and not merely genetic. As Vardit Ravitsky defends, when the right to know biologi-
cal origins is denied, the freedom of people conceived via TPR to choose what mean-
ing to attribute to critical components of their identity is automatically violated. By
being forced to consider their origins irrelevant, they are forbidden to see their own
story as an essential dimension of their life and personhood (Ravitsky 2012, 36–37).
Vellemann’s position is similar: knowing biological parents is due to every person
and this means not just having information about one’s relatives but also having
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
acquaintance with them. Only through that acquaintance, we can sense the “intuitive
and unanalyzable resemblances” we have to our biological relatives. That intuitive
and unanalyzable resemblance structures a sort of self-knowledge and a narrative
that gives meaning to our actions (Velleman 2005, p. 368).
Given the similarity of situations regarding the absence of at least one of the par-
ents, it seems reasonable to conclude that people conceived through sperm banks
face identical problems to those of adoptive children throughout their childhood and
youth development, namely problems associated with “genealogical bewilderment”.
This is admitted by researchers who are adopted people themselves (Rushbrooke
2001, 33–34). Indeed, as ironic as it may be, as demonstrated by multiple testimonies
of “donor-conceived” and similar experiences, the concerns that, by introspection or
comparison, aect the experience of orphans, abandoned, or adopted, may become
more unbearable when the parent’s absence is surmountable than when it is insur-
mountable. The biological connection is expressed in daily interaction and social-
ization, namely in the importance that might have for a person’s self-representation
to know parents, siblings, cousins or grandparents, the story about her origins, the
physical and personality traits she inherits, etc. (Callahan 1992; Martin 2017). First-
hand testimonials show that a considerable part of these people struggle with family,
psychological, emotional and aective problems due to the tension over their origin
and identity, experiencing feelings of loss, confusion, sadness, anguish or rejection
due to not being able to live or even know his father and paternal family (Clark 2006;
Luden 2011; Faust 2015). Those feelings operate at a somewhat unfathomable level,
making it dicult to assess the profound impact of losses and disadvantages that
belong mainly in the subconscious domain (Pruett 2001; Comité Consultatif Natio-
nale d’Ethique pour les Sciences de la Vie et de la Santé 2009, p. 15). As stated
in a public policy guideline document from the British Government, “Father-child
relationships, be they positive, negative or lacking, have profound and wide-ranging
impacts on children that last a lifetime” (Rose 2009, p. 62). We talk of relational
losses - or voids - and not only of information.
At this point, it is pertinent to point out a typical feature of the “absorption”
dynamic that Sunderland also frames within the referred process of mediation of
meanings (Sunderland 2004). It consists of many “donor children”’s tendency to sac-
rice their identity concerns for fear of hurting their parents. On the one hand, there
is pressure for resignation: everybody, especially “donor-conceived” individuals, is
pressured to conform to the positive vision of sperm donation that parents, politicians,
or the fertility industry oer. On the other hand, there is also a demand to conform
to the pressure: everyone, especially “donor-conceived” individuals, is pressured to
give thanks for the birth of these people, as if questioning the method of their concep-
tion (and the State’s stance on it) meant questioning the value of their existence. This
dynamic helps to explain why the criterion for dening the child’s best interest shall
not be the assumption that “children are okay”, but rather the principle of precaution,
as Rupert Rushbrooke defends:
I think there is a serious problem with the industry’s terminology…[the term
donations implies that]the processes concerned are just about sperm or eggs,
and are no dierent to donating organs, money or blood. It is implied that the
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D. M. S. Madureira
identity of the natural father or mother is not important. I would rather assume
that they are important unless it is proved otherwise (cf Rose 2009, p. 15)
As Brenda Almond emphasises, what is at stake is not only the lack of the father but
of half the family: “The extended network of kinship made up of grandparents, broth-
ers, cousins, uncles and others — a network of connections that constitutes the social
space within which a person also nds his original identity” (Almond 1998, p. 142).
Alexina McWhinnie, an author with many years of research dedicated to the study of
people adopted and conceived by TPR, addresses the same point while pointing out
the mediatic inuence of studies based either on donors’ and sperm bank users’ “self-
interview questionnaires”, compared to the less inuential studies based on systemic
analyses of children’s social and interpersonal relationships (McWhinnie 1998).
The conversion of TPR from an extreme remedy to medical problems into a normal
alternative method of procreation (available to everybody), is only possible thanks to
the disregard for the biological and social continuity, or nexus, that already Aristotle
considered constitutive of fatherhood (and motherhood), as the very etymology of
the word “liation” suggests — from the Greek “philia”: friendship4. Trivializing
conception through sperm donation distorts kinship by intentionally disregarding
its dual structure. Instead of beneting from both parents’ company and love, most
“donor-conceived” children are only generated as long as their father relinquishes the
responsibility to raise them and remains absent or even anonymous. The conception
of people deliberately deprived of their natural father becomes, in brief, an instituted
and collectively organized practice. Such a situation reveals an immediate contradic-
tion since it validates some people’s desire for biological connection at the expense of
acknowledging the legitimacy of that same desire in others. Instead of being under-
stood as a subject, the child appears more as an object, since her existence results
not from the parents’ convergent will to create and raise her, but precisely because of
their divergent intentions in that regard.
It is undeniable that biological parents’ physical presence is not synonymous with
aective presence, and in extreme situations, it may even be benecial to separate
them from their children. It is also true that people can develop without problems
thanks to other people’s love. However, as Melissa Moschella argues, it would be a
mistake to believe that single mothers, adoptive parents, stepparents, or even other
family members can truly replace one’s mother and father, even when they are
unknown (Moschella 2017). The parent’s right to raise their ospring derives from
their duty to love, a duty associated with the unrepeatable place they occupy in their
children’s lives and which makes their love inexorably personal and non-transferable:
The relationship between children and their biological parents is intimate, per-
manent, and identity-constituting. It denes the biological aspect of the child’s
identity—for if the child had dierent biological parents, he would not be the
same person; indeed, he would not exist at all. Children do not miss being loved
by those with whom they have no intimate relationship; the unique, irreplace-
able intimacy of the parent-child relationship manifests itself in the fact that a
4 Aristotle, Politics, Book II, § 4; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, § 12.
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
child can miss the specic love and care of an absent biological parent, even
when she is well-loved by (say) adoptive parents. (Moschella 2015).
[T]he parent-child biological bond really does matter in itself because there
is at least one unique and important benet that biological parents—and only
biological parents — can provide for their children: their parental love. (…)
Certainly, when biological parents cannot or will not raise their children them-
selves, others can generously take on that task and do an excellent job. (…)
But their love cannot replace the absent love of the child’s biological parents
any more than the love of another man or woman can replace the love of an
absent or deceased spouse. Biological parents, simply by virtue of their biologi-
cal (genetic) connection to their children, have an intimate and personal rela-
tionship with those children that makes their love irreplaceable. The absence
of their love is not like the absence of a stranger’s love, because, even if they
have never actually met, biological parents are not strangers to their children.
(Moschella 2014).
The biogenetic connection makes the relationship between parents and children truly
intimate, thus, the void left by parents in children’s life, even if they never knew
each other, can only seem strange if biological parents are seen as no more than
mere strangers to their children. Elizabeth Marquardt reinforces Melissa Moschella’s
vision and emphasises the insensitivity of the phrase “My daddy’s name is Donor”,
which an association adopted as a slogan in favour of universal access to sperm banks
(Marquardt, Glenn, and Clark 2010). As Marquardt shows, it is paradigmatic of the
disseminated ignorance about the demonstrated harms of the father’s absence.
3.3 Complementary clarications
It must be highlighted that the ethical problem discussed here does not consist in the
decision to have a child despite the impossibility of giving her her father’s company
due to any unexpected and unwanted cause, like death, separation, negligence, or
paternal incompetence, for example. An ongoing connection with biological parents
is so signicant that it is wrong to deprive someone of it without any compelling
reason. The point here is the decision to have a child with the intention of depriving
her of her biological father for no other reason than her parents will. This is exactly
what happens in most cases of access to sperm donation: people undertake to create
a child that the biological father has no intention to raise and, on many occasions,
does not even want to know. Can this be seen as a compelling reason equivalent to
those contingent and unfortunate facts previously mentioned? In our view, it cannot,
independent of whether the mother believes that she can provide everything that the
child needs. The problems related to the father’s absence in critical ages (especially
if he remains anonymous), don’t depend on the intended mother’s goodwill. Notwith-
standing her love and dedication, which may well be unquestionable, her daughter/
son may still lack her father’s love and suer because of it in dierent ways, as cor-
roborated by multidisciplinary scientic research.
This position shall not be confused with the anti-natalist position according to
which all acts of procreation are wrong since bringing somebody into the world
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D. M. S. Madureira
inevitably causes suering. To fully justify this stance, it is important to emphasize
the action’s intentionality, namely the desire to neither know nor be known by one’s
biological son or daughter.
A good way to better illustrate the ethical problems underlying donor insemination
is to compare TPR with adoption. Giving a child to adoption always entails depriv-
ing children of their biological parents, but this alone doesn’t make adoption mor-
ally wrong at all, because adoption aims precisely at compensating already existing
children who, for multiple undesirable reasons, cannot grow up with their biological
parents. It is not grounded on the assumption that natural bonds are irrelevant and
parents should be free to disappear from their children’s lives or to handle them to
others. This is exactly why it is forbidden to establish an adoption contract between
biological and adoptive parents upfront, i.e., before birth. Such a pre-birth agreement
between intended couples of biological and adoptive parents would amount to order-
ing people, i.e., to its objectication. Here lies, indeed, a critical dierence: adop-
tion is a regulated process in which the State intervenes to a protect child’s rights,
in full conformity with the noble and structuring leitmotiv of adoption — giving a
family to a child and not a child to a family —, whereas conception by donation is
a highly deregulated market process where the rights of the child are obliterated in
name of a supposed right to the child. In adoption, intended parents are submitted to
long and demanding selection processes, a feature due to the need to check, among
other things (socio-economical conditions, etc.), whether there are no pre-existing
agreements of “people ordering”. This feature perfectly reects the primacy of the
principle of the child’s best interest in adoption, but it is neglected in the context of
sperm donation (Brewaeys 1996; Kirkman 2003; Morrice 2007).
Both adopted and “donor-conceived” people deal with relational and existential
losses, but if similarities between them already show why the principle of precaution
must be a vital criterion for dening the paramount rule of the child’s best interest,
the dierences demonstrate it in a complementary way. It can even be misleading to
compare both situations because similarities can obscure feelings that might indeed
be more traumatic for “donor-conceived” than for adopted people. In the case of
adoption, child abandonment is often involuntary and painful; in gamete donation,
it is intentional and viewed with indierence (“aections are construed; they are not
in the blood” and “all you need is somebody’s love). In adoption, parents often give
their children away because they cannot raise them; in “donor conception”, children
are delivered to others by their parents because only the mother wants to raise them
and previously agrees with their father (directly or through the mediation of a clinic)
his respective absence or even disappearance. Hence, it shall not be surprising that in
addition to shared feelings of loss, emptiness and lack of sense of identity and nar-
rative, “donor-conceived” people also experience abandonment and rejection, which
are due precisely to the acknowledgement that, far from wanting to raise them, their
biological father had no intention but to relinquish that role, transferring it in some-
one else and, in most cases, to abandon them from the beginning. In sum, adoption
doesn’t owe its well-deserved statute of a good and just institution to the denial of
biological parents’ importance, but precisely to the fact of presupposing it: adoption
is good because it compensates the natural parents’ absence, instead of devaluing and
promoting it.
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
In the face of all the responses already given to possible objections, A main argu-
ment arises in favour of a stronger protection for the existential density of biological
anity within the context of human reproduction in general, and of TPR in particu-
lar: the idea that while some causes of suering are accidental, like poverty, others
are deliberate and controllable, like the premeditate exclusion of a father from his
child’s day-a-day life, an exclusion not due to contingent circumstances, but to the
adults’ will. Poverty is also a good example to invoke in this context, given its status
of an undesirable reality that nobody directly controls even though everybody hopes
to eventually overcome it. In order words, we know that every poor person wants to
escape from poverty and may ultimately do it. On the contrary, in most TPR cases
through sperm banks, there is no intention to correct the very concrete cause of suf-
fering. In fact, the tendency is to ignore it as if it was innocuous or irrelevant. This
deliberate intention to erase the father shall be highlighted once more, for we are not
dealing with accidental contingency or hazardous possibilities here.
In conclusion, it is not exactly the lack of connection with the biological par-
ents that makes it justiable to regulate TPR, namely by ending the normalization
of sperm bank access. It is the decision to generate people who will be denied the
company of their fathers (or mothers) based on the presumption that that company
is irrelevant — irrelevant to the point of being denied simply because of the parents’
will, not by unpleasant (and so often unpredictable) life circumstances that generally
justify the separation between biological parents and children (economic fragility,
carelessness, divorce or harmful couple relationships, death, etc.)
4 Conclusion
The knowledge resulting from comparative research about biological and non-bio-
logical families strongly conrms the disadvantages of paternal and maternal absence
in child and adolescent development. This fact explains why that absence is not
regarded as something to be promoted. On the contrary, what has been recognized as
something in conformity with the paramount principle of the child’s best interest is
a person’s right to be raised and loved by her parents. Logic and empirical evidence
show that women unrelated to a man are the most interested population interested
in TPR through “donor insemination”, hence biological father’s absence tends to
become a consequence of the normalized access to sperm donation, i.e., as if it was
an alternative way of reproduction. This poses an immediate challenge to the child’s
best interest, whether the “third parties” are known for women who use sperm banks
or not because they are never “third parties” to those who will be born.
People share a familial history with their parents whose omission harms the daily
exercise of presentation and representation to oneself and others. They owe them
their existence, their ancestry, some of their personality traits, and physical and
psychological characteristics. To undervalue crucial aspects of the well-being and
personality development of people conceived through donor insemination, such as
knowing and feeding their origins’ (hi)story or their personality traits, is to under-
estimate a heritage that is one of the most primordial inductors of a person’s sense
of belonging. That heritage is crucial for an individual to recognize essential coordi-
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D. M. S. Madureira
nates of personal identity and self-knowledge. To ignore the personal dimension of
the biological anity is to favour impersonality; it is to sabotage both the interactive
and introspective dimension of the subject or, in other words, a person’s ability to
present and represent herself; it is to promote the individual’s atomization, his disin-
tegration and depersonalization, his strangeness before others and before himself. In
a few words, we need to know where we come from to know who we are.
This perspective is framed in an ontology that emphasizes the relational entity that
every human being is in its essence, in its origin, and not only in its exterior or as a
social being who relates with others. Alerting nowadays tendency to neglect personal
and existential dimensions that gravitate around TPR, is in harmony with the scien-
tic and historical path about the importance of biological connection for the con-
struction of individual personality. It also respects a crucial idea: we can properly say
that we know somebody when, besides knowing who she is, we also know how she
is, which necessarily presupposes a minimum of conviviality and coexistence. That
is even more justied if those to be known are the two people directly responsible
for one’s life. This argument is fully reected by the etymological origin of the word
“liation” (“philia”).
It is a profound irony that, in the context of the present discussion, the statement
“all you need is love” is more inuential the more it ignores the importance of a
father’s love and presence in the lives of people conceived via “donor insemina-
tion”, most of whom grow up in fatherless homes. This ignorance explains, to a great
extent, the process through which normalizing the father’s absence ends up being
seen as something compatible with the paramount principle of the child’s best inter-
est. To fully understand this ironic phenomenon it is necessary to consider the syn-
chronic inuence of conceptual and discursive mechanisms that promote the vision
of a person’s biogenetic heritage as something irrelevant and neglect the biographical
meaning of biological anity. It is indeed paradoxical that the statement “all you
need is love” may be now used to demand the normalisation of a practice that consists
of generating fatherless people beforehand. The truth is that the expression’s projec-
tion increases in direct proportion with the contempt for the personal and intransmis-
sible nature of the father’s (or mother’s) love since not even an absent father can ever
be considered a stranger to his child.
As scientic evidence rejects the thesis that TPR is harmless for children, consis-
tent proof shall be demanded from those who want to accelerate such disruptive inter-
ventions, not from those who want to stop it. As argued by Elizabeth Marquardt, her
“and ample other work is showing that indeed the resulting persons [from donor con-
ception] can be harmed by this practice [TPR]”, but in any case, the burden of proof
lies with who defends the institutionalisation of policies and practices that operate a
complete revolution in how society sees kinship, specically by deliberately depriv-
ing children of their father or mother at the very moment of the procreative decision
(Elizabeth Marquardt 2010).
The claim that TRTs are not problematic for children owes a lot to the promoted or
self-imposed silence of adult “donor children” who do not conrm that view. Some
questions arise in this context: what is the limit for parent-child separation once it
is assumed that biological anity is insignicant? If we believe that the biological
connection between a person and her mother or father has no signicance because
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All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
“all you need is love” and they are nothing more than a “surrogate” or a “donor”,
will it be reasonable, or instead somewhat naive, to expect that empirical evidence on
personal problems might ever come to be considered strong enough to slow down or
even question TPR?
Heterologous reproductive biotechnology rehabilitates in a renewed way timeless
teachings on the value of parent-child bonds and the importance for human beings to
be welcomed and loved by their natural mother and father. One of those teachings is
that we cannot know who we are if we do not know where we come from. The exist-
ing scientic evidence corroborates this teaching and invalidates the conviction that
family anity is purely constructed and re-doable without loss or harm. Even though
the parent-child relationship might not be cultivated, their bond is intimate, perma-
nent, and constitutive of identity, thus making a father’s/mother’s love something
irreplaceable. The inalienable and inexorably personal character of that relationship
explains why a person may suer for not having her mother/father’s love even when
she is loved by adoptive parents or grandparents, for example.
It is questionable that the conversion of TPR into an alternative means of repro-
duction can be justied in the name of equality and the ght against discrimination.
Indeed, that step ignores the inequality of people treated at birth as if they never
had a father. This inequality results from contradictions that the following question
resumes: if the relevance of biological ties is acknowledged for the life and person-
ality development of adults who resort to sperm banks, how can it be assumed that
those same ties are irrelevant for the life and the personal development of the chil-
dren? How can this incoherence be sustained, when it means normalizing the genera-
tion of someone who will be voluntarily denied the right to have her father’s presence
and love? Other contradictions follow from what was said: nowadays, public policies
reect an increasing concern in freeing parents to intervene in their children’s lives,
censuring conduct that systematically delegates parental responsibilities to other peo-
ple. If the paternal absence is alarming and censurable when it is frequent, how can it
be irrelevant when it is permanent and lifelong?
The formulation of a supposed right to a child suggests an unconditionality that
would imply the annulment of the right of a child to be loved and raised by her parents.
It would normalize a rupture that the rule of law has decided to compensate (through
adoption, for example) precisely for considering it undesirable and not acceptable in
principle. Hence, the dierence between the right to a child and the right of a child
is not a mere terminological detail. On the contrary, it accurately points out a neces-
sary and fundamental ontological distinction: every person is always a relational fruit
— someone — and never an object or even a project of a purely individual will —
something. How can then the legitimate and understandable desire for reproduction
be met and collectively organized unconditionally, specically when the decision to
generate descendants denies beforehand another person’s right to know the ancestry?
Sylviane Agacinsky and Jacques Testart defend that the trivialisation of sperm
banks is a step towards the objectication of both children and men, in which the lat-
ter become a sort of sperm reservoirs and are allowed to disregard any responsibility
for their ospring (Sylviane Agacinski 2013; Jacques Testart 2017). In this sense, it
could be said that far from being anti-naturalistic progress, that step means an anach-
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D. M. S. Madureira
ronic return to a time when it was more or less usual and culturally accepted for men
to imitate most male mammals’ behaviour regarding ospring (Rohner 1998).
This article shows that biological connection is indeed so important that societies
have the moral duty to respect it and procreative decisions are unjustied whenever
based on a voluntary contempt for the importance of that connection. In the con-
text of that eort, which tries to conciliate in a satisfactory way existing scientic
evidence and philosophical reasoning, we emphasize the ethical importance of the
question of intentionality, i.e., the fact that there is a premeditate intention to relin-
quish the father’s responsibility to raise the children to whom he gave life for no
other reason than an individual desire to procreate (which can hardly be seen as a
proper compelling reason). That intentionality feature distinguishes donor insemina-
tion decisions from those accidental, unpredictable, or undesirable cases where the
absence of biological father is unavoidable or even justied for the child’s best inter-
est (death; unhealthy relationships that harm children’s development and well-being,
extreme poverty, etc.).
In conclusion, procreative acts resulting from decisions that intentionally and
deliberately violate the prospective people’s right to their father’s care are unjusti-
ed in the same exact way that non-consented procreative acts are unjustied even
if they result in a new person. If this person’s dignity is certainly unquestionable,
the argument according to which we must accept the referred acts because if it was
not for them that person wouldn’t exist, is not. None of the referred procreative acts
(and respective violation of basic rights) shall be justied and allowed just because
some (or even many) people owe their lives to those acts and are happy or thankful
for living. To put it in another way, if some couples decided to conceive children
with the intended purpose of handling them to others (thus violating basic rights,
including the right to be loved by their parents), should society accept that decision
on the argument that if it was not for it, those children would never exist? Would the
ethical evaluation of such a decision change if those children assumed to be happy
and thankful for their lives? If we recognize that no one has the right to intentionally
deprive children from their father’s love and care (as scientic evidence also suggests
we shall do), the decision to violate that right remains unjustied even if it brings a
new person into existence. Although the outcome of a wrong act may ultimately be
positive, that doesn’t turn that act into a good act nor justies it.
The contradictions, conceptual inconsistencies and ethical problems described
here are not solved through the assimilation by decree of the conviction that it is irrel-
evant to know and be raised by biological parents, or that some people have donors
instead of fathers or mothers. It is ironic that approaches of this type are considered
realistic and “inclusive”, whereas the defense of the right to be raised by one’s mother
and father is associated with “hate speech” and intolerance. Complementary analyses
of the problem could explore more deeply this and other mediatic fallacies.
Funding Open access funding provided by FCT|FCCN (b-on).
Data availability The author conrms that all data analysed during this study is included in this published
article and can be accessed in the references.
1 3
All you need is [somebody’s] love “third-party reproduction” and the…
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