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Last week, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics presented its report on ethical aspects of information sharing in donor conception. Although the moral acceptability of third-party reproduction is still debated, this report importantly starts from the position that there is nothing wrong with services helping people to have children with donated gametes.

However, donor conception is much more than just another reproductive option. Challenging issues related to compensation of donors or payment for gametes were addressed in the Nuffield Council's earlier report Human bodies: donation for medicine and research. In this new report the Council looks in depth at another ethically relevant aspect of donor conception: the fact that the use of gametes leads to genetic connections between the future child and the donor. These may or may not be regarded as socially significant by the several parties involved, and that may or may not lead to actual relationships between them and might have medical significance as well.

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