Are Fertility Docs Who Use Their Own Sperm Guilty of a Crime?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

I'm Art Caplan at the New York University Division of Medical Ethics at the Grossman School of Medicine. Technology in genetics is creating a whole new world where many people undergo tests to determine whether they're at risk for disease.

There has been a big utilization of informal commercial genetic testing. We all know about 23andMe and other companies that will send you kits and send you back information about your genealogy, trying to determine whether you are Ethiopian or Welsh using DNA markers. Many people are also getting health information.

Putting that aside, what 23andMe is doing unexpectedly is allowing people to trace back paternity. You can put information in from your test results and find out who else might have a biological marker related to you or a genetic profile related to you, whether the people who are related to you know that and whether they want to hear from you.

In a particularly contentious ethical area, many people are finding out that they were created not by their parents they think they have, but by biological donors of sperm, eggs, or embryos that they didn't know about or hadn't been told about.