College of Nursing and Health Sciences

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https://hdl.handle.net/2328/2977

We are at the heart of advanced learning in health sciences, nursing and midwifery.

The College of Nursing and Health Sciences has strong partnerships to industry, community and the healthcare sector.

In fact, we’re world renowned for multidisciplinary research and improving health care, where our high-quality programs and professional practices continue to expand what we can do to address emerging health issues.

We base our innovation on the very best teaching methods, using the latest equipment and facilities.

But most of all we seek to change and improve practice through our research and through our graduates.

We see it as thinking bravely.

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Browsing College of Nursing and Health Sciences by Author "Adams, Damian Hedley"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Accessing donor conception information in Australia: a call for retrospective access
    (Thomson Reuters, 2012) Adams, Damian Hedley; Lorbach, Caroline
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    Building a family tree: donor-conceived people, DNA tracing and donor 'anonymity'
    (Australian Journal of Adoption, 2013) Adams, Damian Hedley; Allan, Sonia
    Genealogy is the tracing of a line of descent continuously from an ancestor. When conducted by individuals or families, it has been said to be a narrative of how outside forces shape an individual, a journey to build the story of one’s own becoming. It involves the quest to identify the people to whom an individual shares connections, the quest to trace lineage, family, history and kinship. This paper examines the tracing of such lineage, family, history and kinship by donor-conceived people.
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    Conceptualising a child-centric paradigm: do we have freedom of choice in donor conception reproduction?
    (Springer Verlag, 2013-06-19) Adams, Damian Hedley
    Since its inception, donor conception practices have been a reproductive choice for the infertile. Past and current practices have the potential to cause significant and lifelong harm to the offspring through loss of kinship, heritage, identity, and family health history, and possibly through introducing physical problems. Legislation and regulation in Australia that specifies that the welfare of the child born as a consequence of donor conception is paramount may therefore be in conflict with the outcomes. Altering the paradigm to a child-centric model, however, impinges on reproductive choice and rights of adults involved in the process. With some lobby groups pushing for increased reproductive choice while others emphasise offspring rights there is a dichotomy of interests that society and legislators need to address. Concepts pertaining to a shift toward a child-centric paradigm are discussed.
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    Gamete donor medical records: whose information is it?
    (MJA Publishing Group, 2012) Adams, Damian Hedley
    This year, the Law Reform Committee of the Parliament of Victoria released recommendations from an inquiry into various aspects of donor conception, including the ability of donor-conceived people to access identifying and medical information about their donors.1 The Committee recommended that donor-conceived people gain retrospective access to such information, similar to the model already used in adoption. National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines2 and Victorian legislation (Infertility Treatment Act 1995 [Vic], s. 79) stipulate that donor-conceived people have this right, but only prospectively from when the law was implemented. Substantive concerns have been raised about how these proposed changes may negatively affect medical practice and donors. Here, I focus on the issue of retrospective release of donors’ medical information.
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    Is a donor conceived person 'half adopted'?
    (Australian Journal of Adoption, 2013) Adams, Damian Hedley
    Can a donor conceived person be classified as “half adopted"? A knee jerk response may typically be no. Either you are adopted or you aren’t. Either you have been the subject to adoption proceedings with the associated paperwork to show an adoption has occurred or you haven’t. However there are instances whereby people have been adopted without following proper formal procedures. There may also be instances whereby one biological parent has remarried, perhaps due to the death of their partner and the new partner has adopted the child as their own with formal documentation. In this instance it may be possible to view this child as being half adopted as they are only being adopted by one person and not two as one biological parent is still taking care of the child. This situation from a parental perspective is not unlike the use of donated gametes to conceive a child. There will be one biological parent and one non-biological parent who for all intents and purposes raise the child as their own. Many will argue that there are key differences between adoption and donor conception (DC) that make drawing analogies problematic. The purpose here is not to discuss these differences but rather to draw attention to some of the similarities between the two to hopefully give the reader an idea of how they are intertwined. Prefacing these analogies it must be stated just as in adoption, in donor conception too, there can be a whole range of emotions and outcomes for the child conceived this way, in that some are completely happy with what has happened to them and feel no loss whatsoever, and there are those at the other end of the spectrum that can be completely traumatised by it.