Sperm and egg donor registries.

An article in the Chicago Tribune discusses the need for setting up a registry of egg and sperm donors. The argument for such a need seems a bit odd. The danger it seems is that a donor may have a condition that manifests itself later in life, like colon cancer, and they should be able to inform those children who carry the donors genes of the condition.

I don’t see how that is any different from parents who have family histories of ailments going ahead with having children. It is fairly accepted I assume that few of us are without at least some serious deleterious mutations of this sort or that. A registry however would be a good way to track quality donors by lineage, keeping track of the quality of the offspring, and using certain family lines as regular donors.

As the technology advances, and as more and more people get their genes tested, the quality of designer children should increase rapidly. To date, the science is a bit too sloppy still. For instance, “This month, Oprah Winfrey’s magazine is running a feature on several families who used the same sperm donor and whose children have mild autism or developmental disorders. And in December, the Los Angeles Times wrote of a gay California couple whose young daughter, conceived with a donor egg, developed Tay-Sachs, a fatal genetically inherited neurological disease.”

There is no genetic test for autism, but a registry would be beneficial, especially if a child or two could be conceived and allowed to mature a few years, before using the same sperm or egg on others just to make sure there are no surprises. But Tay-Sachs is a Jewish recessive condition, and Jews have a program for testing couples that may both be carrying the condition. Why wasn’t the donor tested for Tay-Sachs disease? Were they unaware that the egg and sperm were probably both Jewish?

Designer babies will increase in quality with time, as these registries track several generations and as genetic testing expands to include additional information about the children. There is at present a great deal of concern about privacy, primarily on the part of donors not wanting to be known as a parent to a lot of disconnected children. But in time, as genetic engineering spreads and becomes quite common, the desire for privacy should wane considerably.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 06:01 PM in Genetics & Human Bio-Diversity
Comments (2) | Tell a friend

Comments:

Posted by Karen on September 05, 2008, 04:55 AM | #

I am the mother of a beautiful little girl thank u to who ever donated sperm you have no idea how much joy she has given us should she ever want to meet her biological dad i hope u realise it wont be for financial gain

Posted by Chickie on January 08, 2009, 06:18 PM | #

I used egg donor and have an autistic son. I get this. I think though, that by the time I found out that this child was autistic, this person would have already donated several more times and probably aged out. It’s kind of useless. Although, I would like to know if there are other egg donor half siblings who also have autism. There is no autism in our family but this 1 child, and quite a few children, so we know where it came from.

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