“GP ‘had scores of children illegally adopted’ was the banner front page headline on the Irish Mail on Sunday. 
The report details how a Monaghan GP was involved in illegal adoptions. The report slams the doctor, Dr Irene Creedon, for allowing couples to falsely register children as their own and not record on birth certs the names of the actual biological mothers and fathers.
But how is this different from the present practice of allowing couples who use donor eggs or sperm not to record the actual biological parents of the children on the children’s birth certs?
According to the Irish Mail on Sunday report, because of the actions of Dr Creedon, many of the children now have “no way of discovering who their birth parents really are”.
One of those who was adopted, Margaret Norton, now a mother of two herself, told the Irish Mail on Sunday: “I have absolutely no idea who my birth parents are and there is no way of me finding out without them coming forward or passing me some information. There is simply no trace of my past and every door has been close in my face.”
The children of anonymous egg and sperm donors will know exactly how she feels.
Sperm and egg donors in many parts of the world are anonymous, yet we rarely see media or public outrage about the practice.
And yet the results are the same as those which generated the banner headline in the Irish Mail on Sunday.
Would someone please explain why we get upset about the fact that the birth certs of adopted people were sometimes falsified but we do not get upset to anything like the same extent about the fact that the births certs of the children of egg and sperm donors are also sometimes falsified?
Finally, let us keep in mind that there is a big difference between adopting children and acquiring children through gamete donation. In the former case a child already exists who is in need of a home. The adopting couple are not responsible for the severing of the biological tie.
In the later case, the child does not yet exist and it is intended from before the child is ever conceived that it will never know at least one of its biological parents.
