126 S. Goedeke and K. Daniels
for adoption, many regarded ED as the functional equivalent of adop-
tion. Their sense was that if this measure was introduced then they
would feel that they had met their responsibility towards the future
child. In 2006, the New Zealand government declined a recommenda-
tion by the Law Commission ( 2005 ) to impose mandatory screening
for parents having a child through ED, commenting that it was prema-
ture to do so (Ministry of Justice 2006 ). These recommendations may
need to be revisited.
Second, several donors assumed that adopted children in New Zealand
had greater ability to access information about their birth parents than
donor offspring had to access their genetic information. This may not nec-
essarily be the case, as while open adoption is practised in New Zealand,
adopted children also do not automatically have the fact of the adoption
recorded on their birth certificate. For donors in our study it was impor-
tant that children would be able to access their genetic knowledge. While
identifying information about the donors is recorded in New Zealand,
and donor-conceived offspring can access this information at the age of
18 years or earlier upon application by the parents, there is no obligation
for recipient parents to disclose the nature of conception to their children.
As has been pointed out by several authors (e.g. Hammarberg et al. 2011 ;
Helm 2008 ), disclosure rests on the moral obligation of the recipients.
Donor-conceived offspring can access information only if they have been
informed that they are donor-conceived. While recipients in this study
had told or were planning to tell their children of the donor conception,
and while most of the donors trusted that recipients would follow through
with these intentions, they were aware of their limited rights in ensuring
disclosure and acknowledged that relationships could change over time.
Several donors would welcome the implementation of measures such as
birth certificate annotation as additional measures to ensure that recipients
inform their children of the means of their conception. This has been the
case in Victoria, Australia (Hammarberg et al. 2011 ). In 2005, the New
Zealand Law Commission recommended that birth certificate annota-
tion be considered. However, government response, while acknowledging
the need to give consideration to such issues, was negative (Ministry of
Justice 2006 ). Some commentators have suggested that legislation would
constitute an intrusion into individual choices and privacy, and would not