Last Friday, RTÉ Radio One aired a programme, Pregnant on My Lunchbreak, about a woman, ‘Angela’, who decided to become pregnant using donor sperm from a Danish clinic, Cryos.

In Denmark, sperm donors are allowed anonymity, so Angela’s little boy or little girl will grow up without a father, by design, and without any knowledge of his or her father.

But her own motivation is her deep desire to have a child who is her own “flesh and blood”.

Angela was adopted and she said: “For me it is something that I’ve thought about all my life – to wonder what it was like to look like somebody.”

Angela, in the programme, also admitted that her decision to intentionally deprive her child of its biological father “plays on my mind”.

Angela, in other words, wants to have a child because she self-confessedly wants to have a biological link between her and her child but she is reasonably happy for her child to have no link with one of his or her biological parents.

According to the documentary, the Danish clinic provides a web-based database where would-be mothers can browse through hundreds of donor profiles so that they can “shop online”.

Having had it explained to her that the procedure was similar to “going into your local shop and buying something”, Angela decided: “I think I’ll do that. It’s no big deal”.

She said: “It is a very simple gynaecological procedure. You can relax afterwards. To everyone’s surprise, you can head back to your normal daily routine.

“I was back in the car and I was thinking to myself that nobody had a clue what I had just done. I just felt totally relaxed. I just continued my day and I didn’t really think about it.”

So there we have it: conception reduced to the ultimate in consumer convenience.

The AHR industry both intentionally deprives children yet unborn of one of their biological parents and turns what was once the deeply personal and frankly sacred process of conceiving and bearing children into an online retail experience.

Donor conception has yet to be properly considered or debated in this country. Instead of focusing on adult desires, it is time that RTE examined the experiences of people like Joanna Rose, who was conceived by donor sperm in the 1970s and has spent many of the years since searching for her biological father and fighting for the rights of other donor-conceived adults.