McGill Tribune

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.

Last week, I submitted an article to the McGill Daily. (Just broadening my horizons, not switching turfs.) When the editor told me that I had used too many of another’s words and as a result, the article could not be published, I was shocked. Had I really crossed the line to plagiarism?

A 2009 study at the University of British Columbia found that students who plagiarize or cheat have “dark” personality traits, most commonly psychopathy. The study’s author, psychology Professor Delroy Paulhus, recommended that universities should treat plagiarism as a mental disorder.

Me? A psychopath? It doesn’t match my personality traits or my strong ethical values. I still can’t come to terms with the fact that laziness and sloppy work resulted in a close call with plagiarism. I am reluctant to even talk about this incident because, like many other students, I’m hesitant to admit that I came so close to cheating. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.

Apparently, I’m not the first. Researchers at Guelph University and Rutgers University revealed in a 2006 study that over 53 per cent of Canadians admitted to plagiarism and 18 per cent to cheating on tests at post-secondary schools. Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper was accused of plagiarizing his 2010 throne speech from former Australian Prime Minister John Howard. Harper was also accused of plagiarizing a speech he gave as opposition leader, urging Canada to send troops into Iraq. His speechwriter eventually was forced to resign.

The fact that plagiarism is so widespread—among politicians, students, and even professors—makes me wonder why it’s so appealing. Is it laziness, or is it a deeper societal problem?

One issue is that students often don’t realize they are cheating. Letting your parents edit your work (or write it for you) is plagiarism. Working in groups to solve a project, when the professor has forbidden it, is cheating. A survey of 20,000 students compiled by the Canadian Council on Learning found that students of our generation are more likely than those of others to cheat, and less likely to call it cheating.

Another problem is the accessibility of cheating. Internet-based cheating increased by 81 per cent between 2003 and 2006 according to a survey conducted by the CCL. Copying and pasting from an article has never been so easy.

But the biggest problem is our failure to value our own words and work. People cheat not because they are unethical or too busy to come up with their own ideas, but because they don’t value their own opinions. The thoughts of supposedly reputable others seem more important; one’s own original thoughts seem not to measure up in comparison. While discussing ideas for a class paper, my Shakespeare professor didn’t just tell us not to plagiarize. He told us not to disrespect our own intelligence.  “Borrowing” an idea from someone else only means that we don’t believe sufficiently in ourselves.

An organizer of the Rutgers/Guelph study said the best way to deal with plagiarism is to implement an honour code in schools. But students know cheating is wrong. It’s more important to encourage them to develop their own ideas and take them seriously when they vocalize those ideas.

The excuses are endless but at the root of cheating lies an under-appreciation of your own self-worth. Rather than just inserting the section “McGill values academic integrity” onto every syllabus, it would be more effective if professors and students discussed what academic integrity really is: an understanding that my ideas can only be authentic if I work hard to ensure that they’re my own.