Donor conception legislation in Victoria, Australia: the "Time to Tell" campaign, donor-linking and implications for clinical practice

The State of Victoria in Australia was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to introduce legislation regulating donor conception. Under the Infertility (Medical Procedures) Act 1984 (Vic), donor-conceived people, aged 18 years and over, parents of children under 18 years, and donors gained the right to apply for the release of identifying information about each other recorded in a Central Register. As a result, of this and subsequent legislation, services providing donor treatment were obliged to change clinical practice relating to recruitment of donors, counselling of donors and recipients and recordkeeping. Since this legislation was introduced in 1988, over 5,000 donor-conceived children have been born and in 2006 the first 100 of these children reached the age of 18. The Victorian Infertility Treatment Authority (ITA) conducted a public education campaign to provide information and support to people affected by the legislation. This article describes clinical practice changes prompted by legislation, the 'Time to Tell" campaign and the service model developed for linking parties on the donor registers. The Victorian experience demonstrates that laws allowing the parties involved in donor conception access to information about each other must be accompanied by changes to clinical practice, public education about the implications of the laws, and services to meet the needs of those seeking information relating to donor conception and those contacted as a result.     

Accessing donor conception information in Australia: a call for retrospective access

Donor conception practices in Australia have left thousands of donor-conceived people, their families and gamete donors bereft of information. The lack of a nationally timeline-consistent approach to information access has driven these people to seek support and information from self-help groups, online communities and even their own DNA. This article examines the historical perspective of information access and how progress is being made through lobbying and public awareness. To determine the current status of information availability, fertility clinics around Australia were surveyed. It is argued that current practices continue to fail donor-conceived people, their families and gamete donors, and that until all donor offspring are afforded the right to know their genetic family history, they will continue to suffer discrimination, and potentially risk psychological and physical trauma.     

Walls of secrecy and silence

Research Summary Most analysts of the causes of the contemporary credit crunch have concluded that the supervising agencies failed in their duties. The same is true for studies of several major fraud scandals, including the Madoff affair and the Dutch construction fraud. The remedy seems immediately obvious: more and better regulation and supervision. However, this line of reasoning seems somewhat simplistic by ignoring the question of how illegal activities can remain hidden for many years from supervising agencies, victims, and bystanders. This research article argues that the problem also lies in the successful concealment of illegal activities by the perpetrators and in the presence of silence in their social environment. Policy Implications The cases analyzed in this article suggest that financial misconduct also could be controlled by breaking the conspiracies of silence. The strengthening of supervision is unlikely to be effective without simultaneous efforts to encourage people to speak out and to give them incentives to want to know and to tell the truth.     

Wrongful birth,wrongful conception

Nach der dem Behandlungsvertrag zugrundeliegenden Wertung ist sowohl bei wrongful birth als auch bei wrongful conception eine Verrechnung ideeller Vorteile der Elternschaft mit dem Unterhaltsschaden ausgeschlossen. Aufgrund des von § 97 StGB vorgegebenen Schutzzwecks des Vertrags ist bei wrongful birth lediglich der behinderungsbedingte Mehraufwand und nicht auch der Basisunterhalt zu ersetzen. In den F?llen von wrongful conception ist hingegen für den gesamten Unterhaltsschaden zu haften.     

Review essay/the ethics of secrecy

Sissela Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation New York: Pantheon Books, 1982, xviii + 332 pp.     

The genetics of secrecy in adoption, artificial insemination, and in vitro fertilization

In light of the significant role that heredity plays in many disease processes, statutes requiring strict secrecy with regard to medical records in cases of adoption, artificial insemination and in vitro fertilization should be reassessed. In adoption cases, attitudes concerning the adoptee's ancestry have progressed over the century, but adoptees still are unable to access their records. The problem of inaccessibility is also apparent in medical genetics clinics where valuable genetic information, necessary for an accurate diagnosis, is unavailable to the clinic, the adoptive parents, and the birth parents. A uniform law which responds to these interests and problems should be promulgated. This Note discusses the need for better access to and availability of medical records. The Note proposes a Uniform Act and suggests that, at a minimum, it include a scheme for regulating the donation of genetic material, strong record-keeping requirements with respect to family histories and pedigrees, and finally, an open access provision for certain information for both children and parents.     

Behind a veil of secrecy: animal abuse,factory farms,and Ag-Gag legislation

Abstract

For years, animal rights organizations have sought to expose animal cruelty on America’s factory farms. With the meat and dairy industry inaccessible to the public, animal advocates rely on undercover investigators who gain access to farms by becoming employees. Working from the inside, these investigators become whistleblowers when they reveal animal cruelty unrelated to the already inhumane conditions of animal husbandry. An effective strategy that has exposed animal abuse as well as conditions threatening to public health, in recent years the agriculture industry has pressured legislatures to enact laws that criminalize photography at factory farms. Dubbed ‘Ag-Gag’ laws by critics, the emergence of legislation targeting animal rights advocates raises important questions relevant to animal welfare, animal rights activism, and freedom of speech. This paper exposes the failure of government institutions to protect animals on factory farms while simultaneously silencing what is currently the only available mechanism for Americans to learn about abuse on factory farms. It also explores the Constitutional implications of Ag-Gag laws. Not only are Ag-Gag laws presumptively unconstitutional, but with their enactment – animal welfare remains unchanged, the American consumer remains uninformed, and America’s factory farms are free to abuse animals behind a legal veil of secrecy.     

Property and the human body: a proposal for posthumous conception

There is no greater error in law and bioethics than the continuing opposition to applying the concept of property to posthumous conception cases and the human body generally. The aim of this article is to challenge this error and the assumptions underpinning it. The language of property, conceived of as a "web of interests", can be used to capture and identify the social, moral and ethical concerns that arise in cases concerning the human body, a position that finds support from a correct reading of the early High Court of Australia's decision in Doodeward v Spence (1908) 6 CLR 406. However, a key issue on which the language of property is silent is how to quantify the various competing interests in the posthumous conception case: the concept is useful only insofar as it provides the device for capturing the entirety of the posthumous conception problem.     

The search for the Russian Mafia

After the fall of communism in the Soviet Union, newspapers, films, academic researchers and intelligence agencies warned against a new phenomenon in organized crime: the “Russian mafiya.” In fact, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western European countries have noted an increase in the number of criminals from Central and Eastern Europe. In the mid-1990s, the Dutch judicial authorities made the issue a priority and established a special team to investigate crime with links to Eastern Europe. From 1999 to 2005, the KT NON crime team published several studies and reports on serious crime of this nature. In this paper, the authors, who were assigned to the KT NON crime team, discuss the findings of the two most recent publications on the “causes, nature, scale and threat of Central and Eastern European crime” and “mobile banditry,” respectively. They come to the conclusion that among other forms of crime, the phenomenon of mobile banditry seems to be the most serious manifestation of crime from post-communist countries. The Russian mafia was not found.