To think that if you’re prepared to travel to an IVF clinic outside the UK in a country where fertility treatment is not as tightly regulated as here then you need to accept the risks?

I agree with this.

I think there's a huge pressure to say 'oh well, you have a baby, how upset can you be?' and the point is, the whole industry needs to be better regulated. Inevitably there will be some people who are not ok at all. It's not trivial, either. I think people imagine 'oh well, it's all sperm, what's the issue?' but actually, you would be gutted if you found out a hereditary condition had been passed on to your baby, or you'd not got pregnant because the sperm wasn't any good, wouldn't you?

@SarahAndQuack can your DD trace their father?

There's a lot of issues with clinics in Northern Cyprus. The Times ran a long piece last month on egg donation and surrogacy there. The woman found at least 17 clinics in Nicosia including ones that will fly in women from Georgia or Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/1c119d3c-1b53-49ae-8b5a-bd3c4c3bd604?shareToken=17d992934e460fa7512993393e676be2&ver=article

It's a shame but I suspect that part of the mothers' reason for choosing Cyprus is that sperm donors can never get information about their children or contact them - unlike in the UK and some other European countries. So it's hard to see what difference this makes to their family. Their dad is a total stranger anyway.

I think these situations are hard. Im not sure i would have given my pictures

There's been plenty of people that have spoken out about having the wrong embryo transferred or situations for example where the dr himself was using his sperm without telling people

Similar to birth trauma, if you speak out people will tell you that you've got a healthy baby you shouldn't complain etc

But equally how do you highlight some massive areas of poor practise? Some ivf clinics are cowboys and you normally only know that if you've had treatment with them, and I often feel like people don't complain about what they should simply for fear of looking ungrateful

This is now being spoken about, but lots of ivf related stuff gets hushed under the carpet because people aren't open about it

Surely it would be worse if they'd grown up with their parents telling them how carefully they selected a donor, then finding out that donor was totally different?

My DD knows a bit about her donor and I have always told her we chose him because he sounded so nice and wrote such nice things in his statement for her prospective parents.

If she were to turn 18 and find out he was some completely different person - or even (and this isn't impossible) someone who hated the idea of lesbians having children and was disgusted - it could be upsetting.

Love*

I hope the children never read this story. I don’t doubt their parents line them. But it would see the seeds of doubt that they weren’t what parents wanted.

I don't see what's wrong with wanting to choose physical characteristics of the donor - it's natural to want your child to resemble you and your partner. Or to screen out health conditions. Or even to choose someone whose interests are similar. I think lots of children have struggled when they feel that they didn't 'fit' within their families and having similar characteristics to parents/siblings is part of that.

I think the eugenics argument is only valid if we are saying that one 'look' is superior. I don't think that people truly believe that. A brunette, brown eyed couple are unlikely to chose a blonde, blue eyed donor, for example. They will likely choose a donor who is similar to them.
It seems wrong to me to make ivf so much harder than conceiving is for those of us who were fortunate not to have fertility issues. No one tells a woman who can conceive naturally, that she can't select the father of her child based on her own criteria, whatever that is.

Well I just wish them all luck ..The children look gorgeous anyway, and I'm sure they are and will continue to be much loved by their parents.

Hmm not necessarily. The London sperm bank for example carries donors that have donated here and others that have donated in other countries, over half the sperm used here is from other countries.

Any sperm sold here has to be id release. So there will always be that option here.

The uk only allows 10 families from that sperm. (With an unlimited number of children from those families) although there's nothing stopping your donor also being on a dodgy Facebook page, and donating elsewhere

However cyros, or whatever the sperm bank is can continue to sell abroad. Some countries have no limit (us for example allows unlimited and to your home), others have similar limits to us. So they could sell your donor abroad to hundreds of families

Sometimes your uk based donor might also be sold abroad depending on the bank

So nothing legally wrong but personally it doesn't feel like a 10 family limit

Cyros has recently announced its looking at introducing world limits but it will "be priced accordingly" which i imagine will be horrendous considering to get sole use of sperm its about £30,000 for 3 straws alone (recommended for a single treatment so not even multiple attempts or siblings)

Some egg donors are from abroad but its much rarer
People are more likely to out right go abroad from my experience because you can have to wait for an egg donor here and there's much less choice

Cyprus is a member of the eu

Actually, while Northern Cyprus is technically part of the EU, EU laws don't apply there. The island was divided into two halves following the war in 1974, with the southern portion Greek and the northern Turkish. EU rules do not apply in the Turkish north.

And, it is difficult.

Lots of UK clinics are not set up to use known donors (they need facilities for storing frozen sperm for a long stint).

Yeah im not sure that there is a clear line of ethics where British ivf is good and foreign ivf is bad

Each country has its own rules, we do stuff here other countries ban, and other countries do stuff we don't allow

Our clinics in the uk use the same bank, America uses that bank as well with many American donor concieved adults having hundreds in their sibling groups.

The uk isn't the pinnacle of ivf and there's been other similar incidences in the uk of people not being treated with what they thought they are

I’m horrified that clinics here use worldwide sperm banks, so I assume the resultant DC won’t be able to trace their background

All because you can do something doesn’t mean you should

I wish this were just a problem overseas.

My clinic had no familiarity with GDPR. After I did my first round, they sent an email saying we must destroy embryos urgently, and I replied saying I didn't understand and we'd expected to discuss the viability. They got back saying oops, sorry, you've signed now but actually, we thought you were someone else.

I try not to be too upset as I am fairly sure the error didn't actually mean we destroyed viable embryos. But I hate not knowing and I hate the carelessness.

There are so many similar stories. It makes me really angry.

I wouldn’t even go on holiday to Northern Cyprus because of the illegal occupation of the area by Turkey. I'm sorry for this couple, but they should have done their research.

Poor kids!

The other thing i forgot to say was lots of uk clinics use that sperm bank

If i remember rightly something like 50% of donors in the uk are now from foreign banks with the same concerns about levels of world wide donations. So while going abroad and using them is frowned upon, it's also being used over here.

Also somewhat controversially it feels like this is really heavily scrutinised for lesbian couples. I feel like people often talk to me about ethics of sperm donation etc and aren't afraid to give their opinions, it doesn't bother me massively because with a 2 mum family there's a level of transparency built in

However the majority of donor usage is still from hetro parents, the majority of couples using that clinic are hetro. If you know more than 5 ivf concieved babies the chances are one is either egg, sperm or embryo donation.

Often there's lots of discussion about hetro couples going through ivf, celebs posting etc and not much is spoken about the fact that something like 1 in 5 ivf babies in 2020 were donor concieved.

In some ways I find it frustrating that more hetro couples don't speak up about this sort of thing, it feels like its mostly lesbian couples that end up raising flags and ending up with people discussing their choices in the press.

When people think of donor conception they think of our children, when actually in your class there's more likely to be a donor concieved child not from a same sex relationship

This. Horrible attitude.

It's really sad, and your post above did make clear a lot of the decisions and factors involved when it's a lesbian couple seeking IVF/sperm, so thank you.

The whole issue with the 'god complex' a certain type of man has about impregnating as many women as possible - it's horrific, and something that I'd imagine every couple seeking IVF has to grapple with. All the more reason to select a clinic in a country that has very high regulatory standards about IVF, though I'm not sure you'd be able to screen out male donors with this mindset necessarily. (There was a very good R4 podcast a while back, called The Gift, actually about people using DNA kits for genealogical purposes, which highlighted the issue of unregulated sperm donation from men who had a fixation on being the father to as many children as possible. It was horrifying.)

I do hear you WRT needing to know as much as possible about a donor in order to pass that on to your children. I think that's fair enough - practices from a few decades ago were different but no longer viewed as acceptable from the point of view of the children. I think the child's interests need to come first here. I just find it distasteful that people are able to select things like eye colour and skin tone (and that in North Cyprus clinics, sex can also be selected).

I am not against fertility treatment and would have done it myself if I needed to. That doesn't stop it from being an ethical minefield. There is bound to be a shortage of intelligent people from affluent countries, with their lives in order, who are willing to do sperm or egg donation. In reality, a cash strapped Turkish guy may be a much better bet than a Danish guy who likes the idea of fathering hundreds of children. That is the thing with IVF you don't ever really know what you are getting. The background info and health screening gives a false illusion that you have more info than you do in reality, but that is not the case at all. A lot of the health screening will be filled out by the person donating the sperm and presumably once they are at the stage of sitting there and wanting the cash, are they going to declare the family history of schizophrenia? Wherever you get your sperm or egg from it will always be a bit of an unknown.

mix how do happen sometimes. Rare but happen

you do put your trust into clinics. You have to when paying for private

no doubt luckily with mini blondes as she is a mini daddy but must have been a dreadful shock for them to 1) not have the one they chose 2) not even be related so that’s 2 diff sperm , 3 including the one they should have been