The Supreme Court of British Columbia is currently deciding whether Olivia Pratten’s inability to access the identity and medical records of her unwitting biological father—a sperm donor 28 years ago—violates her constitutional rights to “life, liberty, and security of person.”  Pratten, a reporter for the Canadian Press, sued to mandate that records be made available to sperm donors’ children when they turn 18. The federal government disagrees, sympathizing with Pratten but contending she has not been treated like a second-class citizen. We agree with the Crown: as current federal legislation mandates, donors’ medical records should be made available to inquiring children, but individual identities should remain concealed.

For various reasons, some more obvious than others, it’s justifiable that a person would want to know the identity of their parents. For one thing, most people just want to know. Many children who are adopted or born from donated sperm have trouble later in life grappling with who they are, where they come from, and what they are doing here. There is a fundamental human need to tell stories, most importantly about ourselves. Not knowing the identity of one or both of one’s own parents can be traumatic. It’s perfectly understandable for people to want to learn the truth.

Another reason is more practical: learning the identity of one’s parents could clear up a lot of questions about medical history, and can therefore help a person take important precautions to ensure they remain healthy. Ignorance of hereditary conditions can lead to serious complications. Knowledge of your family’s medical history can help prevent such tragedies from happening, and should be available to any person who asks.

Despite this, while medical history should be available, there are valid reasons for keeping donors’ identities hidden from their offspring. One issue is that while sperm donations are important for helping many couples conceive, many men who donate sperm do so only for money, and neither expect nor want to be called “Daddy” by anybody. If they knew their identity would eventually be made known to any children their sperm managed to conceive, many of these men would be seriously disincentivized from donating. As sad as Pratten’s situation is, we have to assume it would be even sadder had she never been born.

There is also a serious issue related to retroactivity. It seems dangerously unfair—and potentially a violation of constitutional rights—to assure sperm donors anonymity at the time of donation, and then 15, 20, or even 30 years down the road strip them of that right, in direct violation of the previously-signed agreement. Whatever the psychological issues faced by children ignorant of their parents’ identities, applying this accessibility mandate to donations from the past seems especially indefensible.

One unique complication of the Pratten case is that, according to the Globe and Mail, “The Vancouver doctor who inseminated her mother said he destroyed those records in the 1990s because at the time he wasn’t required to keep such documents for more than six years.” To address precisely this problem, the federal government in 2004 passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which, according to the Globe, “prevents donor records from being destroyed but still allows donors to remain anonymous.” This act does not apply retroactively, as indeed it properly should not.

The case of Olivia Pratten and those in similar situations is confusing and complex. There’s no easy answer, since recognizing the rights of one party seems in the end to violate those of the other. However, it’s unjustifiable to renege on important promises. 

To paraphrase Churchill, the current federal legislation, which allows children to see medical records but not the actual identity of the father, is the worst solution to this complex problem, except for all the others.