Wednesday, 9 March 2022

Triple Helix: My Donor-Conceived Story

Mr CARBINES (Ivanhoe—Minister for Child Protection and Family Services, Minister for Disability, Ageing and Carers) (09:47): I was at Readings bookstore in St Kilda last week for the launch of Triple Helix: My Donor-Conceived Story by Lauren Burns, who was interviewed by Ramona Koval. I just want to quote from the dust jacket:

When Lauren Burns learns she is donor conceived she begins a turbulent journey to discover the identity of her biological father. Battling outdated legislation and a medical culture of silence, she enters a political campaign to pass world-first laws overturning decades of donor anonymity. She must also grapple with the radical rewriting of her history and sense of identity when she finally finds her biological father and discovers she’s part of a well-known Australian family.

Lauren’s extraordinary story traverses the many moral and legislative dilemmas of assisted reproductive technology: the rights of the child and the donor, and the strange terrain to be navigated if and when the two parties ever meet.

I was pleased to be invited to the launch and join a former colleague, the member for Prahran as he was then and former chair of the Law Reform Committee, Clem Newton-Brown, and of course former Governor David de Kretser.

There are many donor-conceived people for whom, thanks to changes in the law—retrospective changes by our Parliament flowing from Lauren’s advocacy and the work of this Parliament—there are opportunities for access to medical records, for transparency and for connections to be made between donor-conceived Victorians and their biological families. Everyone has a fundamental human right to know where they came from, their genetic history, and have access to medical records that affect them. It is some of the most significant work that our Parliament has done, and I am very grateful to Lauren for her advocacy and her work to put it in the book. I commend it to the house.