John Appleby, a lecturer in medical ethics at Lancaster University, in the UK, disagrees with the UK’s regulatory decision to make mitochondrial donation legally anonymous. He argues that children conceived via mitochondrial donation should have the right to find out the donor’s identity, as they do in the UK in the case of sperm and egg donation.

“The psychological evidence to date indicates that some people conceived with donated eggs, sperm or embryos, feel it is important to know identifying information about their donors,” he says. “They tend to express a number of reasons why, ranging from wanting to thank the donor, wanting to find other siblings, or because it matters that they have any genetic tie to their donor and possibly want to meet them.”

In his view, many of those interests would also potentially apply to mitochondrial donation, which, after all, uses part of the eggs from a donor. In particular, there may be reasons that are not just about the genetic connection, and the quantity of genes passed on. “Based on what we know about people’s motivations for wanting to contact their donor, the fact that a mitochondrial donor gave someone a life free of a terrible disease is likely a good reason for the donor-conceived person to want to contact them.”

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Decades of research on new forms of families suggests that children are far more flexible about issues like their biological origins and genetic-relatedness than was previously thought. Open communication with the child about their origins, and being donor-conceived, has also been shown to be very important for their wellbeing.

A longitudinal study by the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research followed up children born through egg donation from infancy to adulthood. It investigated a range of questions about their wellbeing, identity and relationships, such as how they felt when they learned about their biological origins and the quality of their relationship with their mothers (who used donated eggs to have them). Findings from the most recent phase of the study, published in 2023 and based on research done when the young people reached the age of 20 showed that they had good relationships with their parents and high levels of psychological wellbeing. 

Susan Golombok, professor emerita of family research and former director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, who led the study, says she would expect similar findings among children born after mitochondrial donation. 

“As 50% of the children’s genes were from an egg donor, whereas only mitochondrial DNA comes from the egg donor in children born through mitochondrial donation, it is not expected that the children would experience psychological difficulties as a result of their method of conception,” she says.