Scott Lynda: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Scott Lynda: Human Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:620;Page:15933] 
Dr LYNDA SCOTT (National—Kaikoura) 
: 
 Part 3 “Information about donors of donated embryos or donated cells and donor offspring” concerns an area that many people in New Zealand feel very strongly about because they are donor offspring or they have donated. I totally support Dr Paul Hutchison’s amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 270 to have a voluntary register established before the date provided in this bill—that is before clinics started recording names. We have had a lot of emails from people contacting us about how they feel when they cannot get access to information on their genetic inheritance. 
All of us want to know where we came from if at all possible. I remember a constituent who came to me early in my time as an MP. She had just had a little boy who had a genetic defect and she never knew that she had been adopted. Right up to after the birth of the baby she never knew and the trauma she faced when she found out was enormous. It made so much of her past life a lie. 
Through this bill there is encouragement for those people who have a child via donated sperm or embryo to be honest and upfront right from the beginning and to let that child know. Up to the age of 16 the child will have access to information on the donor’s genetic make-up. After the age of 18 the child can get the name and also a great deal more information about the donor. Between the ages of 16 and 18 a court order can be made if there are special circumstances when a child needs to know. 
I remember watching a movie and I think it was based on real life where a US doctor had been the donor for many many children within a town. The reason donors have to be willing to have their names made available to children is to stop something like that happening. If people can think of doing something often it will happen. We need legislation to provide a way to prevent those sorts of very unfortunate circumstances from happening. In this bill there is no retroactive application about being able to know about donors but Dr Hutchison’s voluntary register will certainly go some way to helping those people born prior to the introduction of this bill. 
In the 1990s clinics started recording the names of donors so donors had to be prepared to give their names. Often people may want to be donors because they want to be able to help but often a donor may be known to the family. Donors may be in some way involved in the situation. They know the distress that is being caused by the infertility so they are prepared to be donors. 
In the select committee we heard from one person who was a donor offspring—and some submitters wanted the name changed from “donor offspring” to “donor child”. That person talked about the painful experience of closed adoption in the past when children could not find out anything about the genetic inheritance of either their mother or their father and how that had affected them. It is rather unfortunate today that the option of adoption has reduced so much because many adoptions were extremely successful. It is sad to see that that has become much less of an option. 
Part 3 does give pretty clear directions about the age at which someone can find out about the donor and what information can be given out. We had a lot of debate about the age and about whether people who were not yet 18 years old could find out who the donor was. In the end we decided that although genetic information could be obtained donor offspring had to be of a certain maturity before they could handle information about the actual name of the donor.