Entangled in political manoeuvring and number-crunching, the Government probably has little spare mental capacity this week for philosophical musings on the relationship between biology and identity. However, three debates have come together to throw up profound questions. There is the matter of sperm donors’ identification; the pending court cases against the NHS over organ retention; and the ten-minute rule Bill on February 3, which would make everyone an organ donor unless they — or close relatives — opt out.
Whose body? Whose parent? Whose DNA? What unique humanity resides in a sperm or remains in a cadaver? What is the relationship between squishy, basic biology and the dignities and duties of being human? Is it mawkish and absurd to give a second or third funeral to a few fragments of your child on laboratory slides, as some Alder Hey parents did? Must a casual sperm donor who does it for beer money be held responsible for passing on his centuries of heredity to a person unborn? Has his child a right to know of it? If I die on the road today, is the State entitled to take what it wants from my still-warm body and give it to strangers, unless I remembered to do paperwork forbidding it?
These are big philosophical questions which have grown bigger and more emotionally pressing during the decades when Christianity lost its grip on the wider culture and science advanced. It is hard for people reared in an agnostic and materialist culture to give up the physical, fold their hands in resignation and say: “We are all children of God, all brothers” or “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of resurrection.” A society whose belief in a benign Creator and an afterlife has dimmed is inevitably going to return to the superstitions of heathenism: or at least, some of its members will.
Some replace religion with a cold chemical version of scientific understanding. They renounce reverence and mystery and declare that, once dead, they are perfectly happy to be put out with the bin-bags. They have no trouble with euthanasia, abortion, frozen foetuses or transplant without consent: it’s all just flesh, unless animated by fully enjoyable life. Others replace — or supplement — a faith in the Divine with a humane reverence for life itself, and manage simultaneously to respect the dead and heroically assent to medical re-use of beloved remains.
But others, and they are not few, replace the old mystical certainties of religion with a frankly superstitious idea that the human person still resides in the decaying cells of the dead body. Like the families now taking the NHS to the High Court to impoverish us all, they raise hell and demand payoffs over the slightest misappropriated body part. Some, like one epically tasteless American author, take the worship of the flesh further and use weird theories about “cell memory” to write sickening books about how they liked different food and dance steps after being given the heart of a dead teenager.
These things are obvious replacements for religion: we attach mystery to the physical with as much conviction as any exotic tribe which tries to gain an enemy’s virtue by eating his liver. We are encouraged because biological science has advanced into the realms of the unseen: the double- helix and its traceability to one person have created a new sense of individuality. Hollywood stars can copyright their DNA lest some future fan should pillage their underwear and clone them.
But most pressingly, this DNA-awareness brings a practical change: tomorrow’s announcement from the Public Health Minister on sperm donors’ right to anonymity. Almost certainly, future donors will lose that anonymity because the world has truly changed. IVF and DNA science have caused a huge shift of attitude. Fertilisation, once hidden deep in a woman, can now be filmed happening on a saucer. Embryos which once made themselves known in their own good time can be gazed on from their first seconds of existence, fiddled with and “selectively reduced” into the bin if they don’t look good. Women, as well as men, can donate or sell genetic material to strangers. It is this last development, I think, which has tipped attitudes over. When it was just men providing semen in a banal act of release, the eternal significance of the act was rarely discussed. Children born of artificial insemination by donor (AID) were often not even told.
When women, who are tenderer about pregnancy, began donating ova, the world suddenly grasped what a momentous thing it is to give your genes away. As a mother, I do not morally disapprove, but would still be unnerved at the thought of my biological child growing up unknown to me. Now some men are thinking that way too; and if they aren’t, their unseen children are beginning to feel aggrieved. In an interview a couple of years ago, an old-school sperm donor said that he originally started out of “mischievous curiosity . . . a little bit of an adventure”. He would never have done it if future children might be given information about him.
“I’ve given something I can manage without and somebody else can use,” he said. “All that emotional baggage is somebody else’s, it’s not mine.” Something of that attitude was reflected in the line from Kamal Ahuja of the Cromwell Hospital: “I would argue that the rights of a donor outweigh those of offspring that are yet to be born.” Other voices, realists in the stepfamily era, say that “real” fathers are the ones who are there, and that biology means nothing compared with love.
Contrast that with the way AID children, grown old enough to go to court, express “feelings of incompleteness, anger, frustration and hurt”. Contrast it with the anger of individuals writing to websites: “Knowing who your real ancestors are is a basic human need. Nothing good starts with a big lie.” Or “These donors are creating human beings with emotions and a brain . . . It is a basic human right to know one’s parentage.” In an age of individualism, reinforced by a knowledge of the intricate uniqueness of DNA, the need to know your biological inheritance has become a real emotional force. You could argue that such people are lucky to have been born, whether through generosity or “mischievous curiosity”, and should put up with their lot. But to live like that was not their choice; it was their mothers’.
There are obvious practical difficulties. Anonymity cannot be lifted retrospectively without consent: that would be atrocious. Financial responsibility must be ruled out forever. There can be no enforced meetings; it might be enough merely to give the child a detailed statement from the donor, far fuller than the present law allows. It could mean a lot to a young adult to know that he or she came of a military family, or a theatrical one, or a farming or business background, or a particular ethnic root; these things help you to make sense of yourself.
In an increasingly multiracial, multicultural society, a settled sense of identity is harder to come by than it was. “I”m British” is a far vaguer statement than 200 years ago. If we support and value the tracing of ethnic roots such as slave ancestry by immigrant communities, we cannot slam the door on AID babies.
Fertility doctors fear that donors would vanish if they were outed. On the other hand, a new kind might come forward, altruistically willing to pass on not only sperm but also enough goodwill to share a family history proudly with an unseen child. And I suppose that if there were more openness we could abandon the current ruling, a safeguard against accidental incest, that no donor fathers more than ten children. Maybe fewer donors, properly identified and more prolific, would work out fine.
Ministers are said to believe that once a child is 18 it has a fundamental right to know its genetic heritage. I am not sure quite where this leaves parents who never tell. Even if you think, as I do, that they are wrong, it would be unspeakably cruel for the State to notify a young person directly. I doubt that this will be proposed. But I think that ministers and the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority are right, and not only for medical reasons.
There has been a great shift of sensibility in this area, and it should be recognised. Biology and identity are intertwined. That is why we ask permission to use cadavers; it applies all the more to the living, who should at least be allowed to know where their unique and marvellous bodies sprang from.
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