The practice of informed consent in biomedicine is so widely spread that it must be
considered the most important principle within bioethics, and the most universally
appealed to within recent legislation. There seems to be a consensus as to its value
in research on autonomous persons, but also a problem concerning its application
when dealing with people having a serious mental, social or even physical
disability.
Within the field of artificial procreation there are even more problems.
Informed written consent is often demanded from anonymous donors of gametes
in order to ensure their consent to the legal and moral consequences of their
anonymity. The child resulting from the artificial procreation, on the contrary,
cannot consent to, nor be informed before being conceived, of the secrecy laid on
the identity of its genetic parents. Some countries resolve this problem by allowing
the children, when they reach their majority, to obtain some information pertaining
to the health or the identity of their genetic parents.
This presents ethical problems. It can be argued that the anonymity of the
parents chiefly affects the children, so that an agreement on this point among
parents, doctors and others must be regarded as invalid. The paper will argue
that a law ensuring the complete anonymity of the parents is disregarding the
informed consent and the interests of the children resulting from artificial
procreation, and is thus doing more damage to society than good