"Uncommon Ancestry"

"In Canada, a federal law, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, was passed in 2004. But it was largely preoccupied with outlawing payment for sperm, eggs, embryos and wombs—which, incidentally, it has failed to do—with much less emphasis on accountability.

It has largely been forgotten that the original Canadian law did call for the creation of a national personal health information registry. It was supposed to help identify health and safety risks that might arise through assisted reproduction, and keep tabs on ethical and human rights abuses. There was even the explicit promise that if two individuals who were created through assisted reproduction in this country wanted to know if they were genetically related, they could make a request and find out...

Also eliminated in that bill was the government agency that was supposed to administer and enforce the 2004 law. The agency, called Assisted Human Reproduction Canada, had been set up in December 2006, but it never did much of anything, let alone uphold the law. Part of its problem was that it never had any specific regulations to enforce—the government claims to be working on them now, thirteen years in—but another part appeared to be lack of political will...

Olivia Pratten, a donor-conceived woman who grew up in British Columbia, argued a few years back that people like her had the right to know about their origins the way adopted people in her province did. (Adoptees in B.C., and a few other provinces, such as Ontario, have the right to know the identity of their birth parents.) Pratten won that case in court, then lost when it was appealed. She has never found her sperm donor.

Palmer is cynical. “They don’t want people finding out they didn’t use the right donor,” she says. She thinks people created through donation should have the right to know both the fact that they were donor-conceived and who the donor is. “It messes with people’s identity,” she says. On finding out that hers was actually the doctor, she says: “I’m not happy it’s him, but I’m happy I have some sort of answer.”"

https://hazlitt.net/longreads/uncommon-ancestry