This chapter considers the child’s right to identity. It is for good reason that the Convention on the Rights of the Child requires that core aspects of a child’s legal identity are in place soon after birth. A legal identity secures the child’s place in society, nation and family, providing the foundations for the child’s sense of self and relationships with others. The fact that these crucial aspects of identity are put in place when the child is an infant means that particular care must be taken to ensure that the child’s interests are not lost; not least because adults often have powerful interests in the way in which a child’s identity is determined and recorded. This chapter considers the formation of a child’s legal identity through recognition of parenthood and the challenges posed by changing reproductive technology and social norms such as the growth of international surrogacy arrangements. Further, a child’s knowledge of their genetic origins and the circumstances of their birth may be important to their sense of self and personal identity. The extent to which the right to identity incorporates a right to knowledge of origins is also considered.

Information on genetic relations, gamete donors and donor-related siblings, can now be located within two very different systems: ‘official’ regulatory systems; and emerging digital online systems, including direct-to-consumer genetic testing (DTCGT), ancestry sites and internet groups. The possibilities of finding genetic relatives through these online systems has risen dramatically in recent years, leading to claims that donor anonymity is dead regardless of which jurisdiction you live in. In this chapter, we explore how online systems have impacted on donor conception. We use UK examples to explore the social-cultural contexts, including the activism of donor-conceived people, which have shaped, and continue to shape, both systems. We consider the ethical, legal and social-emotional challenges for donor-conceived people in these new landscapes, especially in relation to their agency, as these different systems collide and interact, creating new spaces of sociality and challenges to existing power structures.

The ethical and religious implications of consumer DNA testing are particularly fraught for deeply orthodox Mormons. Within the Latter-day Saint faith, the obligation to discover and build the relational structure of family across generations forms a core religious duty. Mormons have long fulfilled that duty through genealogical research, creating elaborate family group sheets and detailed pedigree charts. Their genealogical research then provided the foundation upon which for-profit companies like Ancestry.com began and continue to build.The fulfillment of religious duty through the biotechnology of DNA testing revealed a rape my mother suffered decades ago, a secret she considered sin. Across the decades, law failed my mother in so many ways.Although she chose anonymity and silence for 57 years, the relational nature of shared DNA and her granddaughter’s DNA test discounted my mother’s choice. Even if someone chooses anonymity for herself, unless all of her biological relatives do the same, she is always at risk of identification and publicity through shared DNA and genealogical databases like Ancestry.com. If law and ethics recognize an individual’s right to privacy and her claim to anonymity, how should it account for the relational nature of shared DNA that makes complete privacy, complete anonymity impossible?