Surrogacy Awareness Week takes place every year in August to raise awareness, encourage open discussion and promote best practice for surrogacy in the UK. This year, the theme is donor conceived voices. A donor conceived person is conceived via donation of sperm or an egg, or both, from a third party or parties. This is different to natural conception (sexual intercourse) and is carried out via home insemination or artificial insemination in a fertility clinic.
A landmark study in 2023 sought to address the widely held assumption that the absence of a genetic link with one’s parents may impede the development of a positive parent/child relationship and cause adjustment problems. After following 65 families in the UK with children born by assisted reproduction (22 by surrogacy, 17 by egg donation and 26 by sperm donation) from infancy to age 20, and comparing them with 52 unassisted conception families in the UK over the same period, the main findings were:
· There was no difference in psychological wellbeing or quality of family relationships between the children who were being studied.
· Telling children about their biological origins early (before they start school) can be advantageous for family relationships and healthy adjustment.
· 42% of sperm donor parents shared their child’s origin story with them by age 20, compared to 88% of egg donation parents and 100% of surrogate parents.
Currently, a donor conceived child can access non-identifying information about the donor at age 16 and identifying information at age 18, if the donation was via a UK licenced clinic and took place after 1 April 2005 assuming they know that they are donor-conceived and request that information from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). There is no legal requirement for any parent conceiving via donation to tell their children that they are donor-conceived, but the research shows that doing so early in a child’s life is better for the child. Similarly, there is no legal requirement for parents of children born via surrogacy to inform their child of their origin story. However, those parents will need to file statements with the court if they apply for a parental order (an order making them the legal parents of the child in place of the surrogate and any spouse) in which they are expected to explain if and how they envisage telling the child about their origin story.
Research in this area is ongoing and there are calls for law reform to change the age at which donor conceived children can access identifying information, with a proposal being that the information could be accessed by the parents from birth.
For support on the legal aspects of donor conception and surrogacy, advice from a lawyer should be sought. For guidance on the emotional welfare of donor conceived children and steps you can take at any stage of the process, organisations such as the Donor Conception Network can assist.
