This article by an intellectual property lawyer reviews many of the issues surrounding genetic screening and anonymous sperm donors. If you think these are simple issues, you haven’t thought about them enough. Here is one of my favorite passages:
Anonymity itself comes with a cost. One need only spend a little time on the website created by a donor child searching for her father and half-siblings to understand the pain some of these children feel at be deprived of the knowledge of their biological father’s identity. As the daughter of an anonymous donor put it on another such website, “[m]y mother’s need to have a genetic link to her child was valued, while my need to know, love and understand the father with whom I have a genetic link was not.” More than 25,000 such children, their parents, and donors, have registered at the Donor Sibling Registry, trying to connect donor children with half-siblings and fathers—up from fewer than 10,000 two years ago.
Read it all here.