American Adoption Congress: Educating, Empowering, Evolving Donate

Assisted Reproduction Statement

Assisted Reproduction Technology Statement

The American Adoption Congress believes that all individuals whose genetic and biological origins are different from those of their legally recognized families have the right to know those origins. This includes people created through the donation or sale of eggs or semen, the transfer of embryos, gestational surrogacies, or any other reproductive technology. Knowledge of one's origins can be vital to the psychological and physical well being of human beings. Denying a person this information can have potentially serious consequences upon that person's family relationships, health and reproductive choices.

AAC is concerned that technological advances and financial incentives rooted in donor/seller secrecy have outweighed legal, ethical and humanitarian considerations in this area. To date, the legal and ethical debate has not sufficiently included the experiences of people conceived through assisted reproductive technologies, and the practices of those who provide assisted reproduction do not reflect the modern rejection of secrecy in adoption practice.

Therefore, AAC opposes any policy or practice in which the identities of donors/sellers and the origins of the individual's genetic material are sealed, kept secret, not permanently recorded and retained, or otherwise withheld from the person conceived through the process of assisted reproductive technology.


Passed by the AAC Legislative Committee and the AAC Board of Directors, October 2001

AAC supports rights of Donor-Conceived Individuals.