HB412 was defeated in a House Health, Welfare and Institutions subcommittee yesterday by a 6-1 vote. The bill would have prohibited anonymous sperm donors, making Virginia the first state to do so.
The problem with doing away with anonymous donors is that the number of donors would likely decrease. As was pointed out in the comments of this post, it seems fair to provide the medical history of the donor, which can be done without compromising anonymity. To the extent possible, everyone should have the right to know their medical history.
I say “to the extent possible” because there are far too many cases of children being conceived – both in and out of wedlock – in which the father is unknown or someone other than the person listed on the birth certificate. Those children are equally denied medical history, because the mother doesn’t know who the father is, of, if she does, she’s not telling. I would suspect that the number of those births far exceeds the number of births from sperm donation.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I suspect that part of the reason for its defeat is due to who the patron of this bill is and his recent remarks.
As one of our commenters suggested, Mr. Marshall should just submit a bill requiring all Virginians to convert to whatever narrow sect of ultra-conservative Catholicism he belongs to, and be done with it. It sure would cut down on the number of bills.
Your analysis is dead on, Vivian. The medical history piece is legitimate, but there is a tendency in some quarters to conflate that with the magical idea that a person who doesn’t have both of their biological parents in their life has been cheated out of a “right.”
That is pure nonsense for any number of reasons – one of which you have articulated here – but suffice it to say that children who are planned for and wanted are the luckiest children in the world.