Summary

New discoveries in genetics, when combined with developments in assisted reproduction, have raised some important and highly contentious issues. How should the right to found a family be interpreted and to what extent is reproductive choice a private matter or a matter for public regulation? Should the protections associated with adoption be extended to assisted reproduction using donated gametes? Do individuals have a right to knowledge of their genetic identity or origins if available? Are children losing something valuable, perhaps indeed a basic human right, if those origins necessarily deprive them of a genetic link to their carers or of the experience of the mother–child or father–child relationship? Should legal regulation govern other choices made possible by PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis) such as sex selection, choosing a sibling as a potential bone marrow donor for another, selecting for or against a disability? What are the ethical constraints in these cases? The conclusion drawn here is that deployment of the new technological options involves a responsibility that has not existed before to protect the welfare and rights of people at a vulnerable stage of existence when they are unable to protect themselves.

Right to found a family: private choice or public issue?

Advances in reproductive medicine offer unprecedented control to individuals over their reproductive options. For those who want it, reproduction can now be separated from sex and personal relations. The new technologies have also made it possible, through the transfer of human reproductive material (embryos or gametes, eggs and sperm), for children to be born to people to whom they are not genetically related. These children may thus be cut off in an unprecedented way from the wider network of genetic relations; siblings, half-siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins and others who previously contributed to a person's sense of identity and who made up the wider notion of family.

This raises many questions. The fundamental underlying debate, however, is about how we conceive of ‘family’. On one side of this debate is the idea of the family as fundamentally a biological concept and on the other that of family as a social and legal construct. As far as the first is concerned, it is worth pointing out that ‘family’ in the biological sense of a couple and their offspring is common to many species and so is a natural presumption in the case of human beings.