As increasingly more donor-conceived adults share the horrors of realizing they have high numbers of siblings, European Union (EU) ministers are calling for official action to be taken to put the fertility industry in check.
Key Takeaways:
- A coalition of EU ministers is calling for limits to sperm donation, with six countries currently backing the proposal.
- Currently, there are no international regulations on sperm donation.
- Donors have been able to father hundreds, or even thousands, of children as the fertility industry remains unchecked.
The Details:
EU ministers from Sweden and Belgium introduced a resolution calling for limits on the number of children a sperm donor can father, with four other countries thus far — France, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Spain — joining in agreement.
While some countries already have limits in place, loopholes can allow donors to continue fathering children; in the United Kingdom, for example, donors are limited to working with just 10 families. However, that applies only to families within the country, meaning the sperm can be exported to other countries without limit.
Even among countries that do have strict limits, there are no limits across borders, so a sperm donor can travel across numerous countries, fathering children without limits.
Swedish Health Minister Acko Ankarberg Johansson said there are “new concerns about the potential psychosocial impact on donor-conceived children and donors.”
Belgian health minister Frank Vandenbroucke agreed, saying there needs to be an established standard:
We badly need a Europe-wide quota supported by an EU register to ensure proper implementation.
It is unacceptable that children or parents have to discover through genetic testing that they could have 70 or more half-siblings across Europe or even globally.
That is unethical and a risk factor.
Swedish, Danish, Finnish and Norwegian ethical boards also had concerns about serious psychological trauma resulting from the unregulated practices of the fertility industry. “There is a distinction between having half-siblings across six families versus 75, or having 12 versus 100 offspring seeking contact over the course of a donor’s lifetime,” they said in a joint statement.
Currently, putting limits on sperm donation is considered a national issue only. For a law to be implemented across the EU, it must first be proposed by the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU.
Supporters of the cap have said this can be achieved by updating the EU regulation on substances of human origin, but for now, it appears the Director-General for Health and Food Safety, Sandra Gallina, is looking to do nothing more than raise “awareness” of the issue.
Why It Matters:
Horror stories about the unregulated fertility industry have been flooding the media, illustrating the issues that have inevitably come from turning children into products to which people feel entitled if they have enough money to buy them.
There is little-to-no forethought about the actual children being created; instead, the priority is solely on the would-be parents. There are real problems with this:
- Some donors have fathered hundreds, if not thousands, of children — even when they have cancer-causing gene variants which are then passed down to their children. And in many cases, donation is also anonymous, meaning children are intentionally deprived of knowing their background, medical history, and heritage.
- There are no safety checks to ensure those buying children are not doing so for nefarious reasons.
- While people wishing to be parents through adoption must pass background checks and other legal requirements (though this certainly isn’t foolproof), the same is not true of people who become parents through the fertility industry.
YouTuber Shane Dawson was able to become the parent of twins through egg donation and surrogacy, despite having a history of repeatedly sexualizing children, including infants.
In the well-known Baby Gammy controversy, an Australian couple abandoned one of the twins created and born through surrogacy in Thailand — but less attention was paid to the child who wasn’t abandoned. She was taken home to Australia with her purchasers… one of whom was a registered sex offender, who was still able to keep custody of the little girl. There are countless more examples.
The Bottom Line:
The fertility industry needs to stop prioritizing parents over children and their well-being. As one Harvard Medical School study found, 62% of children conceived through donor technologies believe it to be unethical and immoral, and it is long past time for their concerns to be acknowledged and acted upon.
“I am a human being, yet I was conceived with a technique that had its origins in animal husbandry,” one donor-conceived person wrote in a book for Anonymous Us. “Worst of all, farmers kept better records of their cattle’s genealogy than assisted reproductive clinics … how could the doctors, sworn to ‘first do no harm’ create a system where I now face the pain and loss of my own identity and heritage?”
