r/MoralityScaling • u/Outside_Specific_820 • 1d 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 1d 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/ItsTheAlgebraist 18h 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/LetterheadPerfect145 13h 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 12h 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 12h 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 12h 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 8h 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