Addressing The Harms of Not Knowing One's Heredity: Lessons From Genealogical Bewilderment

Addressing The Harms of Not Knowing One’s Heredity: Lessons From Genealogical Bewilderment By Kimberly Leighton The genetic tie’s value is not determined by biology. Rather, it systematically varies in a way that promotes racist and patriarchal norms. . . . There is nothing either precious or sinister about the genetic tie by itself. The genetic tie’s precise social import depends on the type of relationship to which it becomes relevant and the prevalent social conditions that influence that relationship. —Dorothy Roberts, “The Genetic Tie” One day at table, a fellow who had been drinking deeply, Made bold to say I was not my father’s son. —Sophocles, King Oedipus Introduction In 2002, thirty-one-year-old Joanna Rose, a person who was conceived by her parents with the use of anonymous sperm, brought a claim against the British government. She sought to establish that the policy of secrecy about the identity of sperm donors, in effect at the time of her conception, caused her harm. She states in her lengthy testimony (which was strikingly quoted in full by the deciding judge): “I feel intense grief and loss, for the fact that I do not know my genetic father and his family. . . . I feel that this lack of information is potentially very dangerous. Such dangerous mis-information is re-enforced by birth certificates which do not reflect someone’s true genetic identity. . . . I find the fact that I do not have this missing genealogical picture very distressing” (Rose sect. 7). According to Rose, without access to her “true genetic identity” she was not just ignorant, but incomplete, as it purportedly left her without knowledge of her ethnicity, her racial identity, and her medical, genealogical, and social heritage. Moreover, she claimed that this lack positioned her as unequal to those who “have known both of their natural parents” (Rose sect. 7). In the wake of the Rose case, many people who were conceived through anonymous gamete donation (AGD) and are now adults are reporting experiences of suffering in relation to what they believe they do not know about their conceptions.1 Like Rose, such people Adoption & Culture 3 (2012) 64 additionally claim that they should be able to have access to such information. But these accounts have more than a personal resonance: they are increasingly present in arguments in support of changing regulatory policies on reproductive medicine.2 Aiming to promote the best interests of the donor-conceived, advocates for overturning policies that currently allow donor anonymity are citing the voices of the donorconceived as evidence of how unethical the practice of AGD really is. Harm is prominently conceptualized in current discussions of the ethics of anonymous gamete donation through a comparison to adoption.3 In many arguments supporting the prohibition of AGD, critics contend that, analogous to adoptees who have suffered from policies of closed adoption that deny them access to their original birth certificates, people who were donor-conceived suffer from policies of anonymity that deny them access to information about the identities of the donor(s) involved.4 More specifically, opponents of AGD are borrowing from adoption literature the concept of genealogical bewilderment. The emotional need to know that many people who were donor-conceived (or were adopted) express is considered by critics to be evidence of the need to end anonymous gamete donation. “Genealogical bewilderment” is the means by which such opponents of AGD recognize the desire to know as entailing an important moral interest, the interest in not being harmed in the way that is believed to follow from not having knowledge of one’s genetic heritage. According to Naomi Cahn, a prominent critic of anonymous gamete donation, “[l]ike adoptees, children of donated gametes may feel a sense of ‘genealogical bewilderment,’ a feeling that they are confused about their identity and different from other children” (Test Tube 256). First developed in the 1950s and 1960s to explain what psychologists Erich Wellisch and H. J. Sants considered the maladjustment of their adopted patients, genealogical bewilderment is purportedly a condition people suffer from when they do not know their genetic parents. According to Sants’s much-cited 1964 article, “Genealogical Bewilderment in Children with Substitute Parents,” a “genealogically...