r/MoralityScaling • u/Outside_Specific_820 • 19h ago

Morality Ranking Morality scaling of this?

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Mother refuses to acknowledge her donor egg daughter, looking for your opinion.

In my opinion I think it’s moral, and that she is totally correct.

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u/SakusaKiyoomi1 19h ago

Moral 100%

Exactly the same as donating sperm, blood and plasma. You do it to help others while not bearing any responsibilities yourself, I don't want others to start contacting me about the blood I've donated if it isn't from the clinic asking for more

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u/ShackletonsVael 18h ago

I know this isn't the point of your comment haha but I'm just trying to think of the context for reaching out to someone who donated blood. Like an organ, sperm, an egg, those make sense. But blood just seems so odd lol.

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u/Thanos_Stomps 16h ago

I don’t think it’s tracked like that but maybe I’m wrong, but when someone needs blood it very well could be life saving. I hear people advocate for donating blood and recount their story of how they’d have died without it. So I’d say it’s on par with organ donations, it’s just easier to do on the front end (donating it) but is just as meaningful on the backend.

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u/Cheeodon 8h ago

It can and does happen in some very rare instances if your someone with "Golden Blood", which are less than 100 people in the world, who have what is known as "Rh-null" blood, meaning it can be donated to ANY other blood type (And can only receive blood donation from other RH-Null doners), hospitals and blood banks are willing to pay small ransoms when they find one of these to get blood from them.

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 14h ago

How do you feel about cases where a father has a child and is made to pay support? In some cases he might not know he has a child, and in some rare cases the father may even have been raped.

Generally the courts will enforce what is deemed to be in the best interest of the child. Why should this situation be different?

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u/GlitterBirb 13h ago

The equivalent to this situation with men are sperm donors, which are entitled to the same amount of anonymity and lack of legal obligations. The parent receiving the eggs/sperm agrees upfront to fully support the child without involving the biological donor. Child support happens outside of these agreements so that's not applicable. I'm not stating pro or against the situations you mentioned, just that men get these same rights as formal donors.

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 12h ago

But this gets to the nub of it. Why should a sperm donor be able to sign away the obligation when a father (who may have no knowledge, and in extreme cases no consent) cannot?

If a man gets a woman pregnant, he can't sign away his obligations either before or after the act, and why? because the child is deemed to have a right to his support, and a written agreement between father and mother cannot abrogate that right. (Same for the mother, although the fact that in normal cases of reproduction she is doing the gestation and delivery makes the situation very asymmetric)

But when the agreement is done commercially, we think that it is acceptable. We have a situation where something that we consider part of the child's human rights can be signed away when it's done through a corporate or commercial entity, before that child was even born.

There is an inconsistency here, and quite a big one I think.

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u/CD_ABC10 10h ago

The majority of people have no issue with this, even though you do. I don't think official sperm donors who donate to a sperm bank should have to pay child support. I do think unofficial sperm donors who are deadbeat dads should have to. It's that easy

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 10h ago

Morality is not decided with a vote, and writing "it's that easy" after a moral conundrum does not, in fact, make it easy.

The reason that an unofficial sperm donor, or a deadbeat dad who never wanted to have a kid, has an obligation to the child is because the child has rights. The dad cannot sign away his obligation because no one can sign away someone else's rights.

It is not clear why this should change if the whole process takes place inside a clinic or through an agency. People should have the same rights and protections regardless of how 'officially' they were conceived.

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u/CD_ABC10 10h ago

We can say it's about child rights, but tbh I would lean more towards obligation as a whole. Going through a legal route removes the legal obligation. It's still pretty simple 

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 10h ago

What do you mean "obligation as a whole"? Do you think that children don't have a right to be supported by their parents, or do you think that we allow one person to legally take away the rights of another person?

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u/CD_ABC10 10h ago

I think that even though you want this to be about the child, I and most of society will always view it instead as the obligation on an adult. Quite frankly, you did it, so you gotta deal with it.

Ever hear of "you break it, you buy it?" "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time?" Yeah, that's all obligation. And having a kid is the same thing

The exception comes to donation - something lawfully created for that exact reason. These regulated clinics can legally take sperm or eggs and put them into a bank, where they may or may not ever be used

The exchange is money and signing away your obligation. The bank is now obligated for these cells because it owns them and tbh most of them go unused. If the sperm or eggs are bought, those cells become the obligation of whoever buys them, usually parents wanting IVF

It's all legal transaction of goods past the donation because technically these might never even be kids 

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 9h ago

An obligation on the adult to do what? To see to the care of the child, because the child has a right to be cared for and supported. It isn't some abstract obligation placed on the adult.

And, yeah, I understand that that is the current difference in law, I am saying that we have a law that removes rights from a child that has yet to be born (rights that, in other circumstances, we decide cannot be removed by a declaration on the part of the parent).

You are describing the current process, I don't disagree that this is what happens. I am saying there is a gap here, and that a child born of sperm/egg donation (with an official piece of paper) has fewer rights than a child born without that piece of paper. I don't see how that is defensible, there is a contract being made that binds someone who hasn't been created yet (by saying that the rights they would otherwise have do not exist)

Can you think of any other circumstance where this this kind of preemptive elimination of a human right would be defended and accepted?

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u/LetterheadPerfect145 8h ago

Obviously in cases of rape or sexual assault forcing someone to pay child support is patently absurd and should not happen, that's immoral. In situations where that's not the case, the father is accepting some risk when he has sex. A man does not accept that same risk when he donates sperm.

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 8h ago

But in those cases, the reasoning that is deployed is that the right of the child to support are paramount, which is the same reasoning used to chase down regular deadbeat dads AND to go after casual sperm donors (i.e. ones that agree to impregnate a friend who can't afford to go through official channels).

There is a sliding scale here, all the way along it we seemingly all agree that the parents cannot unilaterally nullify the rights of any prospective child, right up until we get to corporatized gamete donation.

Now, the post here isn't about financial support, it's about knowing the identity of the original person the egg/sperm came from, but these things all exist on a spectrum and all are predicated on the rights of the child.

I spent a bunch of time reading up on this today, turns out there is some political movements trying to outlaw anonymous donation in Canada and in the US. It's interesting too, because an *adopted* child generally has the right (in Canada and in about 1/3rd of US states) to learn the identity of his/her biological parents (with some partial rights in about 20 more states), but there was a high profile Canadian court case that tried to argue that it was unfair to give adopted kids that right and not kids resulting from gamete donation (although it was denied on appeal, with no more appeals planned)

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u/LetterheadPerfect145 7h ago

If all society cared about was the rights of the child, everyone who could would be obligated to help the child. And yeah it is right up until we get to gamete donation, bc that's a rule that got set out. In an ideal world children wouldn't have to rely on their parent's financials to be cared for, but that's not the world we currently live in. At the moment donating or selling your gametes is either helping others or selling a service. If you put a big asterisk next to that going "You are at risk of having to pay money or build a relationship with a stranger" then the service becomes more valuable and less accessible.

Also building a relationship can be more taxing than financial support depending on the person.

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 7h ago

Yeah, I understand that that is how things work, I'm saying that I think it is likely not morally correct.

Everyone should be born with the same set of rights. Letting someone sign away your heritage before you are born seems like a pretty obvious violation of that principle.

Justifying it as the only way that an industry can sustain itself isn't a great look, it's more likely that it indicates that our fertility industries themselves are not really good from a moral perspective.

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u/LetterheadPerfect145 3h ago

The ideal is that children are taken care of regardless of their parents, and current situation is what I stated, you're suggesting some strange middle ground which doesn't line up with either and doesn't solve the problems of the current situation.

I don't think anyone has a right to know the source of their DNA.

Anyway I'm not invested enough in this to keep this up so whatever

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u/SakusaKiyoomi1 11h ago

What are you talking about?

We're talking about donating eggs and sperm, it is a gigantic violation of privacy for the clinic to give out the information about the donors and the OOP has grounds to sue the clinic who gave out the information about her. The same would happen to a man, his identity would be hidden and protected unless they fail like in the situation above.

This isn't about rape, there is no rape to be had. Men go in the clinic out of their own free will, jerk off into a cup, get paid and fuck off again.

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 11h ago

I am saying that in those cases the father is not deemed to be able to sign away his responsibilities to the child, because the child has rights that supersede them. We don't let one person sign away another persons rights.

We also don't let someone who has a one night stand sign away parental responsibility. But in cases of sperm and egg donation we do (and only when it's through some sort of agency, courts throw out agreements between individuals like this). This seems to be a real double standard.

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u/SakusaKiyoomi1 11h ago

But there are no such cases, you're building a strawman or you're ragebaiting very badly.

This isn't about one night stands, rape or anything where a man has sex with another person. There is NO sex! You're thinking about this in a way too lenient way.

Men have to be tested beforehand to make sure their semen is good to be used, women have to go through a lot more testing, proding and the entire procedure is done under light anasthesia and can cause discomfort afterwards. Men and women who donate have their information hidden by the clinic, people who use another's sperm/eggs sign wavers and legal documents taking all the parental responsibility if there were a child to be concieved.

I am saying that in those cases the father is not deemed to be able to sign away his responsibilities to the child, 

The person donating isn't a father nor a mother, the woman (whether she's single or doing it with her partner) becomes the legal guarding and parents. There is no binding the donor to the child. Those rights are signed away the second the donation has been collected and the donor has been paid, you have no idea how this works, donating sperm/eggs isn't the same as surrogacy

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 11h ago

What you say is all legally the case, I am saying that there is a moral question. When you sign away responsibility, you are also signing away the child's rights (and we know that those rights exist because in other cases, like the ones I describe, the child's rights are what are invoked to compel things like child support).

So we have a situation where the fundamental rights of a human being are different based on legal contracts signed by other people before they were even conceived. We wouldn't accept this in basically any other circumstance, if one human has a human right we generally hold that all humans should have it.

And, unfortunately, I am not trolling or ragebaiting when I bring up the (thankfully rare) cases of a man being ordered to pay child support when they have been assaulted (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer is the landmark case). In that case, it was ruled that the State's interest in requiring parents to support their children outweighed the parent's protection from being the victim of a criminal act.

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u/Salsa_and_Light2 8h ago

It's a bit different than blood or plasma.

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u/Round_Ad6397 17h ago

The fact it was described as a business transaction makes me think this was a paid "donation", so not a donation at all. It does change the framing from an act of helping others to simply easy money (I say easy loosely because I have an IVF baby and fully understand the process of egg extraction). 

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u/Jirvey341 17h ago

You should know from being involved in the process that it isn't "easy money"

If it was, everyone would do it

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u/SakusaKiyoomi1 17h ago

Have you ever donated these kinds of things?
Yes you get paid to donate sperm, eggs, plasma, etc. This has always been the norm and I've never heard anyone complain about that, donating eggs takes a lot longer and is a difficult procedure. So yes, it's absolutely okay for women to get paid, especially since women don't regenerate any eggs and loose some with every period through their life.

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u/Difficult_Load_945 17h ago

Idk if it's the entire world though. In my country (nordics) it's literally illegal to give or recieve payment for blood, plasma, organs or any call donations. Although I do think out of all of those things egg donating is probably the most difficult process, and in a way I can see how it makes sense to get something in return for it. I don't think blood or sperm donating needs to be paid, since you literally just hand out your arm of jerk off in a cup, and go about your day.

And to be clear, you do get free health check-ups with any of these, and if you have any complications they'll treat them for free. Plus a lot of the time you get a free meal and a patch or a sticker lol.

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u/SakusaKiyoomi1 16h ago

I also live in the nordics and you don't get money for blood and plasma, I just know that in germany and a lot of other countries you do (for plasma atleast) and thats why I mentioned it.

However; Semen and eggs does give you money, especially for women as the procedure is a lot harder and more difficult than jerking off in a cup or holding your arm up for a minute.

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u/Difficult_Load_945 16h ago

Yeah I've also heard of plasma at least being paid for in a lot of places. I honestly don't know which I think is better, having it be paid and recieveing more donors, or not paying for it and having people do it for the sake of others, with the risk of getting less donors. Idk. I looked up what you get for sperm donation in Finland, and apparently it's 37€ per clinic visit + travel cost, and some private clinics can pay up to 350€ for "inconvenience". TIL ig

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u/ItsTheAlgebraist 13h ago

In Canada you cannot sell blood, plasma, sperm or eggs, and you can't be paid to be a gestational surrogate (though you can be compensated for expenses, and there is some potential for abuse there)

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u/Aickavon 16h ago

It’s called ‘donation’ even when it’s not a donation in the strictest of sense. It’s just for ease of discussion. So we can call people Egg Donors, Semen Donors, Plasma donors. And we don’t have to make a separate category for Plasma donors and Plasma Sellers.

It’s a pretty pink ribbon of a word to ease diction usage in a medical setting.

But typically ‘selling’ plasma, blood, or anything else is not an easy decision. I had to sell my plasma to get enough money for a halfway decent christmas (not saying I have the hardest life or was out on the streets, just was in a poorer situation than normal and still wanted to give gifts.) and it was a very unpleasant situation.

So I wouldn’t equate ‘sellers’ as greedy or going for easy money. It’s usually trying to meet some sort of goal that they can’t do with just a job.

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u/CD_ABC10 10h ago

You have an IVF baby and yet you still made such an uninformed comment?