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?

[KimberleyClark]

Obviously it’s awful that this has happened. But nobody is forced to go abroad.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74v5jd5zkjo

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.

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.

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?

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

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!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

This. Horrible attitude.

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

Poor kids!

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.

Even some IVF doctors themselves can have this God complex. Three separate cases here.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-47907847

https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o895

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/30/victims-of-canadian-ivf-doctor-who-used-own-sperm-win-settlement

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.

It would be if that actually was my attitude.

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

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

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).

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.

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