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?

Its appalling that have gone public with this including photographs of the children. Fine- report it anonymously to make others aware but they are treating it like they didn’t get the dolls they wanted. Photo included. Children are not commodities.

The sad thing about this article is that the parents want to sue - which is understandable. They paid for a specific service and didn't receive it.
But that's easily years of gathering evidence, court cases and fees. The stress involved must be horrendous and it will have a lasting effect on the whole family, especially the DC.

I've posted above. The choice to go to Cyprus might have been money related, for us it was mostly because they would accept a higher weight limit, lower amh scores etc and actually provided more donor info. The service we've had in the uk has been poor with records being lost, clinics that you're paying tens of thousands in theory to just not responding and needing lots of chasing

We never made it there because travel changed

For us having read a lot from donor conceived people we were clear that we wanted to have some input in order to make sure that whatever choice we made We could do so with confidence. We wanted our children to have as much info as possible from early days, and for their biological father to be someone who felt like a natural fit for our family if they chose to seek him out and invite him into our lives.

The old style of thinking was that it didn't really matter but that's not what dc adults are telling us

As a lesbian couple ttc it's all an ethical and logistical nightmare. All the choices seem bad and I really don't know what the choice is for us.

There's multiple sites for finding a known donor. Quite frankly it's a disgusting place full of sharks. People offering donation then turning up and saying it has to be "NI" which is sex, or asking for "ai" which is assisted. I singed up to have a look and got immediate gross messages.

It didn't seem ethical because lots of the men seemed either to be red pill type bros, and were bragging about hundreds of kids, there is zero regulation of how many kids.

So we scratched that off the list, and sought out banks where there is legislation about number of kids, info etc. The banks only ship to fertility clinics

We aren't entitled on the nhs unless we complete multiple iui rounds (at a cost of about £25,000 for 6 or 50,000 for 12 in our old area) which would entitle us to a single ivf round. So it made sense to go straight to ivf privately

Our experience in the uk has been poor because the clinics are disorganised. They also have very strict weight criteria etc so im debating if my fertility is more in danger from ageing in the time to lose weight or the weight its self

Some of the clinics abroad are obviously cheaper with less weight, amh restrictions. We are massively restricted in where we can go because not everywhere treats same sex couples. We discounted countries with 100% anon donation

We looked into northern Cyprus because the interface with us was much better but also because using cyros etc offers far more donor info than the UK tends to which we would like for our kids. We got no further because of the current travel issues

However this sort of things pop up.

Equally we don't like the idea that while the number of children is capped, they can sell to multiple different countries. Equally the bloke could then join one of the dodgy sites on the side.

Known donor in terms of family is hard. Would anyone truly be happy with their husband giving sperm to someone they know well and where the kids will see each other regularly. Or do you go for a more peripheral friend but take the risk with someone you know less well

@Comtesse I think that poster is talking about risks to the child not the medical risk to the person having the treatment

I'm struggling to muster much sympathy for this couple, TBH. They chose - nobody forced them - to take their money to an under-regulated industry in an illegally occupied part of the world where international laws are not always observed and other nations don't recognise this territory as legal - so your protections are always going to be a bit precarious. The fertility clinics out there sound like the Wild West. Very lax practices, negligent at best but sounds like it could be worse than that.

A decade or two earlier, if you'd sought IVF with, for instance, the NHS, you might not have any say in the donated sperm at all! You certainly wouldn't get to pick and choose from a list of criteria like eye and hair colour, academic capability, interests, athleticism etc. I'm not saying that it's not important to know that the sperm used doesn't carry a high risk of, eg, genetic disease, but to be able to select body type, eye colour etc seems pretty close to eugenics to me. It's really distasteful. I think these women were conned by social mores in general, and the clinics in particular, into thinking that it was perfectly ok and possible to select all these factors in their sperm, and that by doing so, they'd have children with predictable characteristics. I find that morally questionable, as well as unrealistic (it wouldn't, for instance, limit the chances of one of their IVF-conceived children from having a developmental disorder like severe autism, and I can tell you from personal experience that it's a rather more devastating condition to have than eyes that are the wrong colour ).

But those moral scruples aside, isn't it rather obvious that if you pay well below the market price, for ANYTHING, you should expect less than great service? In this instance, either laxity at the clinic led to repeated mistakes, or actual cold-blooded deception, because procuring sperm closer to the clinic would be a hell of a lot cheaper than procuring it from the other side of Europe and having it correctly stored and couriered on dry ice or whatever it is they have to do.

Obviously it's a really sad fact that paying less will get you less, when you're talking about a baby. But then I don't think we ought to be able to select babies for physical appearance. I get that they wanted the babies to be biologically related to one another but they could have opted to use eggs from just one of them. It's the expecting to be able to wrap it up so neatly - each parent's egg gets used, same sperm donor means siblings are still related - that gets me. Life is messy. They have two beautiful children who are currently healthy, and each child is biologically related to one of the mums. I'd take that!

What an extraordinary statement. No medical procedure is risk free, not a good reason to ban it.

I'm not sure I understand the increased risk in all cases and the reason you think it should be banned?

I had IVF for both my children, but we didn't use donors and they are genetically mine and DH's - how is this any more risky for my children than the natural conception route?

It was Northern Cyprus, not Cyprus. Cyprus is a member of the EU. Northern Cyprus is a Turkish territory so isn't in the EU.

There's a reason it was much cheaper there.

At the end of the day, if they had wanted certainty around the father of their children they could have chosen a known donor, such as a male friend or non-biologically-related family member. But that would come with other implications.

I do feel sympathy for them but far more sympathy for the couples who missed their planned fertility treatment during Covid or the link upthread where the couple’s last embryo was implanted into another woman.

@Needlenardlenoo but in this instance the couple hadn’t thought about whether their child might want to know who their dad was. With anonymous donation they will never have that option.

There is a reason sperm/egg donation is not allowed to be anonymous in this country. The child should come first

This couple are upset that there has been a mix up with sperm/eggs but they weren’t bothered in the first place that their DC would never have the option of tracing their dad.

Also there is no regulation on how many times a donor can be used so there could be many people related to them. The recent case where a donor had cancer gene from Denmark clinic and over 100 children could have been impacted, shows just how unethical some countries are

Some people also choose Cyprus because it allows sex selection of embryos (not suggesting that’s the case for this specific couple).

The risks are pretty big of having a child, full stop.

All sorts of things can happen.

At least people doing IVF have actually had to give thought to it all, unlike the just have a shag variety.

Stories like this are a reason to ban IVF completely, not just stick to the UK. The risks to the children created have always been huge but people don’t care about that because either profit or a desire to have a pregnancy is deemed more important.

Many people choose less regulated countries if using sperm donation as it is fully anonymous, so not necessarily a cost issue. I feel uncomfortable with sperm donation in the first instance but to purposely choose somewhere for anonymity is abhorrent.

Yes, they are fortunate to have two seemingly healthy children. But if a clinic can behave like this, can they be trusted to have screened for genetic conditions or illnesses that their dc might be more likely to get? It must be very frightening to have absolutely no knowledge regarding the fathers of your children.

I agree with @BunfightBetty.

We had IVF abroad (not Cyprus) and the clinic well helpful, well organised, empathetic and just all round professional.

It couldn't have been more of a contrast with our experiences in the UK.

We would NEVER have gone abroad if the services had been fit for purpose here.

You would only be reasonable if the NHS offering here were adequate, and private treatment costs were reasonable.

As it is, NHS provision is dire, there’s a complete postcode lottery and many couple don’t get treatment. If they do, the offering is usually a small number of one-size-fits-all production line treatments that aren’t properly tailored to the individual couple, and don’t take advantage of cutting edge treatments or labs.

Private treatment is eye-wateringly expensive, and simply out of reach for many. Not just because of the stringent regulations here, but because of the clinic profits, which are hefty.

Often, clinics abroad are more efficient than the ones here, even private ones. Spanish clinics, for example.

There are obvious reasons why people go abroad. They’re desperate and often this is the only chance they have to become parents.

This is a systemic issue.

This isn't about empathy it is about ethics and risks when creating a child.

The whole situation is a mess and I feel sorry for the children. But there is a tiny whiff of discomfort around this complaint when they do have two beautiful, healthy children.

But @RoseField1 that kind of makes it worse in a way. They didn't go to the arse end of nowhere and paid 2k for some sperm, in which case they could reasonably assume that not everything was above board. They went to what they believed was a decent clinic and they were lied to and deceived, which has very real consequences for their children.

Maybe that 16k was everything they had and they just couldn't afford UK treatment. Or didn't meet the UK criteria.

Tbh, it doesn't matter - money changed hands and these women should have received the treatment they were promised.

£16k to have a baby - they are not poor.

Such a kind, empathetic post 🙄

Poorer people are forced abroad though, since IVF is so expensive. That shouldn't mean having to accept whatever the clinic does, so long as it results in a pregnancy! Mistakes can happen, but this sounds like there was never any intention to use the selected donor sperm. Those children will never know their medical histories or anything about their background on their fathers side.