[jambutty]

Originally Posted by magily

I have just read the daily mail online and the headlines are that women going though ivf can now name anyone as the father. From what I understand this can include anyone who is willing to be responsible for the child. I am really not sure about this, I do think that for lesbian couples it does give the other parent more rights which can be beneficial for the child involved. I think this is a very controversial issue and am interested to know what your thoughts are.

This event raises so many issues it is difficult to know where to begin.

Women in need of IVF treatment need this service because they cannot conceive naturally. The reason could be that their partner is infertile or he has a low sperm count. If the latter then IVF is the only way. If the former and if she is desperate to conceive she should either dump the partner and find someone else or adopt.

However IVF could be storing up problems for the future. Meaning that if the woman is unable to conceive for genetic reasons then there is a fifty-fifty chance that any female offspring will have the same defect. It is not improbable to consider that at some time in the future there will be more women in need of IVF that those who do not.

Then there is the potential danger of ‘designer’ babies. It has already happened where a couple have had IVF treatment to bring into this world a child whose existence is mainly to become a donor (bone marrow) for a sibling.

In the animal world, if a female animal is unable to conceive her imperfect gene pool dies with her. That is nature’s way and you defy nature at your peril.

If the sperm donor is anonymous then the woman’s partner should adopt the child in the same way that a female divorcee with children can have her new partner adopt her children with the natural father’s consent. How you get consent from an anonymous donor is a riddle for the courts to solve.

Lesbian couples should not be allowed to have IVF treatment – FULL STOP!

In the first instance children learn from their parents and with no male parent they could easily grow up thinking that same sex partnership is the norm, when in fact it is not. In the main a lesbian is a lesbian because of her genes and these would be passed on to any female offspring.

Then what happens when it comes to mixing with other ‘normal’ kids in school? I know that kids are resilient and tend to accept life as it is but they can also be very cruel. Imagine what a child of a lesbian couple is likely to go through once it becomes known that it has two mothers and no dad? There is enough bullying in school for all sorts of other reasons without giving the bullies another arrow to their bullying bow.

I would finish with that the needs of the human gene pool as a whole outweighs the desires on an individual.