> People could even potentially steal the DNA of celebrities from, for example, a clipping of their hair to make babies, he says. "One law we definitely need is to make sure people can't become genetic parents without their knowledge or consent," says Greely.
A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not give you money.
Or skip step 2 and threaten to make the baby if they do not give you money.
Or skip step 1 & 2, merely pretend that a baby is related to the rich person, and go straight to step 3.
LoL, why are we threatening to harm the baby? Our current system would require the celebrity pay a huge amount of child support if the dna matches. No laws even look at how conception happened.
It seems fairly probable that if this became feasible and an actual thing people were doing, the laws would carve out an exception. Though I guess it might be kind of difficult to prove, since the surrogate mother could just insist she had an affair with the person.
This just does not happen if the donation was done with the correct contracts and paperwork. Gamete donation has been a multi billion dollar industry for many years would not exist if those donors, anonymous or otherwise, suddenly would be at risk of paying child support for anywhere from 3 to 300 children.
> And court can easily decide that you are no longer "anonymous donor", because you "accepted paternal role", by giving money, by paying for dinner or even by answering messages! There are precedents for that!
The only precedent I’ve found for this is a few homophobic judges that wanted an excuse to pull the sperm-donor father into a child’s life despite having one (single mother by choice) or two women parents that found a donor informally on a Facebook group or something similar.
I am very entrenched in the world of gamete donation being the product of one and I’ve never heard of, run across, or even read someone’s story of this happening to parent(s) who go through a clinic or take legal steps with a “direct to consumer” sperm donation.
Why would I care about such baby being harmed any more than any other random baby being harmed? I'd probably notify authorities that there's some baby likely being harmed and be done with it.
The only reason to care is that the current laws would consider such baby mine. I wouldn't. In such reality, these laws would have to be adjusted.
Or get (1) from a rich, old person with no heirs, do (2), and then once the involuntary parent dies (3) show up and use offspring from (2) to claim the inheritance.
At least here in Norway, children are guaranteed part of the inheritance regardless of the will.
The larger problem is what happens if someone gets a significant piece of DNA from a celebrity and then decides to mass market this to many different people. There's currently a huge scandal such as this one:
going on with the sperm donor industry because some individuals have donated under various aliases. The people who were conceived from those donations are now at risk of potentially getting involved in sexual relationships with their biological siblings without having any knowledge of it.
These ”mega donor” scandals happen near monthly as they are revealed via DTC autosomal DNA tests. It’s a combination of the unchecked power banks have to recruit and collect ad-nauseam sperm that sells very well. Donors may also go to other clinics where they are likely to be approved as well, but are not required to disclose their prior donor status. This results in an unmanageable number of sibling in these group.
Also, ever since the industrial process of sperm and egg freezing, the accidental incest argument isn’t statistically significant anymore. It used to be that donors donated to clinics who then stored and did rounds of AI, IUI, or IVF depending on the needs of the client. Because these clinics were hyper local, donors were often in the same city or at least metro area as the DC offspring. Nowadays, gametes are shipped all over the US and the world so the likelihood of encountering a half sibling goes down significantly even for very large cohorts.
> A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person,
I can imagine a future where this is prosecuted as a copyright violation. I'm not saying I'd be in favor of such a law, just saying I can imagine it.
Something would definitely have to be done, or celebrities would be in big trouble every time they ate in a restaurant (or took a cab or limo, or whatever). I think the odds are pretty high that there are bus boys who would happily hand off Taylor Swift's used drinking glass for a thousand bucks in cash.
Why harm the baby? In many places a claim of a one night stand and evidence of biological fatherhood are enough for a life long of child support payments.
Threatening to release the documentation for the child support case to the media can be a good blackmail opportunity.
A new type of blackmail: (1) get some trace DNA from a rich person, (2) use it to create a baby, and (3) threaten to harm that baby if the rich person does not give you money.
Or skip step 2 and threaten to make the baby if they do not give you money.
Or skip step 1 & 2, merely pretend that a baby is related to the rich person, and go straight to step 3.