BIOETHICS means facilitating the denial to children of the identity of their biological parents, according to one “expert.”

A law lecturer at Cardiff University, Leanne Smith, comments: “Ultimately, no institutions, religions, lifestyles or individuals have been harmed … The advent of gay marriage changes virtually nothing – but by validating gay relationships, it will transform lives and spread happiness.”

But something has changed: Elijah and Zachary do not know which of the two men is their father and they do not know who their mother is. The California birth certificates list Sir Elton as the legal father and Furnish as the legal mother. The biological mother and the surrogate mother may or may not be the same person, but they have been excluded from the boys’ lives.

The UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child guarantees both that “a child of tender years shall not, save in exceptional circumstances, be separated from his mother” and that “the best interests of the child shall be the paramount consideration” in all legislation. Same-sex marriage not only violates these rights, but institutionalises the injustice. Children living within these partnerships are cut off from their mother or father, or even from both. Of all the harms flowing from the legalisation of same-sex marriage, this is the first and most inevitable.

There is a movement to give children a legal right to access information about their sperm or egg donor parents. But this will obviously make same-sex parenting more difficult. So it is not surprising to find another academic arguing in one of the world’s most prestigious bioethics journals that laws banning anonymous sperm and egg donation are misguided, unnecessary, socially harmful and “morally problematic”: in short, unethical.