“We are not anyone’s dream.” Maria Sellés, 32, is violent by the rhetoric of assisted reproduction clinics, which usually use those words: dream come true, illusion, your baby at home or we’ll give you your money back. “Everything is designed so that parents who cannot have children can do it, everything is done from a supposed right to maternity that does not exist. I don’t care if you’re lesbian, gay or straight.”
Her mother decided to have a daughter without a partner in the early nineties and turned to the Cefer sperm bank, one of the pioneer clinics in the sector. “She never hid it from me nor did I have the feeling that she had deceived me, but she explained it to me in a very technical way and I didn’t understand why we couldn’t talk about it with my grandmother and my uncles. It was not problematized, but romanticized, everyone told me that I had been a much desired girl but I lived it badly, I did not understand what was happening, ”says Sellés.
At 29, she realized that the void around her biological father weighed too heavily on her and she channeled her “rage” into activism. He founded AFID (Associació de Fills i Filles de Donants) and began to run an Instagram account (@nda.drets) that brings together other adults born from gamete donations who demand that anonymity be lifted in order to access the information of their biological parents, as is already the case in countries such as France and Portugal, which ended with anonymity in 2018. Their motivations are practical – to have access to medical records that could affect them – but also, and above all, emotional. They want to get the missing piece to finish understanding each other.
Although initially there were only a dozen members in the association, in recent weeks they have received an incessant trickle of calls and messages and new members have joined, people who saw the report Gens anònims that was broadcast on TV3 at the end of February, within of space 30 minutes.
Josep Marquès (not his real name) saw him in a hotel room, by chance. “I never watch TV, but I just got an ad on Facebook. I put it on and ten minutes into the report I burst into tears, an inconsolable cry that I didn’t know where it came from. It was cathartic. My partner didn’t understand anything.”
When the report ended, she told her boyfriend something she had never told him: that he was born, in the first half of the eighties, from an anonymous sperm donor because his father had become sterile as a result of medication. At 21, he sat down with his mother to come out and tell her that he was gay. She took advantage of the conversation to also reveal a secret, that of his origin. But she asked him not to tell her father, who still doesn’t know that her son knows. “I was shocked and out of respect for my mother I began to carry this weight that has never left me until now. I remembered all the jokes that were made around me as a child. “This child is the son of the butanero,” they said, because I don’t look like my family.”
Stories like yours are common among those born in the early years of assisted reproduction. “It is shared that fertility treatments have been used but not that the process has required a third person, some aspects remain in the shadows,” says Anna Molas, a researcher at the Universitat Autònoma who dedicated her doctoral thesis to egg donors. and has been working in this field for years.
“There are no large-scale studies, but we have the perception that this is slowly changing, that things are beginning to be raised that were not raised before, but even so, many people still do not want to say so. There is a feeling that the child will be less accepted in the family, that one’s relationship with the child may suffer. And from the clinics everything is designed so that those who use donations may not say so. The issue of matching [look for donors who share physical characteristics with the parents] is very important and all the discourse they use goes in this direction. They are told: ‘it is a cell’, ‘you will carry that baby’. It is a speech that wants to reaffirm the maternity of the person seeking a pregnancy and minimize the role of the donor.
Gamete donations are becoming more frequent because women who resort to assisted reproduction treatments do so later and later and this leads them to use other women’s eggs. Of the 38,000 in vitro fertilization cycles that were carried out in Spain in 2020, the last year recorded (a weak one, due to the pandemic), more than 10,000 required sperm or oocyte donations. A third of those born thanks to assisted reproductive techniques did so thanks to donated eggs.
For Molas, the question of anonymity is, together with the economic remuneration of donors (about 50 euros for a sperm donation and about 1,000 for an egg donation, which involves hormonal treatment and extraction in the operating room for the donor), the pillar that sustains a highly developed sector in Spain and particularly in Catalonia, that of private assisted reproduction clinics.
Spain is the fourth country in the world that performs the most fertility cycles per year in absolute terms, only behind Japan, China and the United States, according to data from the SEF, the Spanish Fertility Society, and is clearly the leader in Europe. Every year people move from France (those who do it the most), Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany, among other countries, attracted by prestigious clinics, a high rate of effectiveness, and ad hoc legislation. In Germany, for example, the donation of gametes is not even legal.
“The clinics are a powerful lobby due to their economic impact and lifting the anonymity would cause that industry to falter,” projects Molas. “Perhaps some people would donate gametes, but not six times, as sperm donors can do by law, with the possibility that later 20 people could come to present themselves as biological children.”
The president of the SEF, Juanjo Espinós, who carries out assisted reproduction treatments at the Fertty clinic in Barcelona, ??also believes that if anonymity were lifted “the effect would be the same as it has had in other European countries, such as France, Portugal and the United Kingdom, the number of donors would be drastically reduced”. And that would be, in his opinion, tragic for the hopes of hundreds of thousands of couples seeking to conceive with medical help. “Donors have no interest in starting a family and want to preserve their right to privacy,” he defends.
According to Espinós, the demands of groups such as AFID are still very minor and, in his opinion, not entirely justified. “Removing anonymity is making donations comparable with adoptions, when they are different procedures. I understand that whoever is adopted and comes from a place has every right in the world to return to their roots, but donations are made to help a person or a couple. I can’t match those rights,” he asserts. “We have to look for the higher good and we believe that the higher good is the system we already have.” An interesting possibility, he admits, would be to opt for the mixed system, as it exists in Denmark, according to which donors can choose whether they are anonymous or not, and also recipients decide whether they want an anonymous or public donor.
Regarding the purely medical issue, he points out that donors are already screened, their karyotype is obtained and a genetic discard of autosomal recessive (hereditary) diseases. “They are better studied than the patients themselves who come looking for a pregnancy.” In addition, he points out that the law already provides for lifting anonymity if a health issue requires it. For example, if someone might need a bone marrow transplant and it is important to find her biological father or mother.
But not only illnesses are inherited, but also traumas, believes Anna Martín (not her real name), a psychologist who was also conceived with donor sperm and who in her practice usually addresses issues related to roots, genetic grief (the one they go through people who assume that they will not be the biological parents of their children) and generational trauma, which is transmitted from parents to children and from grandparents to grandchildren. “When you are missing a piece of the puzzle, it is difficult for you to heal. If you have that part it is easier to do it”.
In his case, he found out that his parents had turned to a sperm donor when he was eleven years old and the family was immersed in the process of international adoption of what is now his sister. “The psychologists recommended to my parents that they tell me about it. I was very shocked and the first thing I thought was: my God, this man who is not my father has seen me naked many times. As my psychologist says, he scared me that blood didn’t protect me from my father. He told me that he loved me the same and that it was the most important thing to him. We were very close until he passed away six years ago.” Martín was also asked to keep the secret from his family and friends and it was difficult for him to carry that weight until he treated him in therapy.
As a 35-year-old single woman, she sometimes wonders if she would use a donor to get pregnant herself, and concludes that she would not. “For me, having a child is the fruit of love with another person and I would not want to deprive my child of knowing who her biological father is. I understand that my parents did it and I don’t judge them, I also have lesbian friends and at no time do I see it as a bad thing for them to go that way, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable”.
Both she and the other members of the association have taken genetic tests that have been entered into My Heritage, a kind of map or global database of genetic information that connects people who could share ancestors. “Every time I receive the email with the matches [connections] from My Heritage, my heart squeezes,” says Bàrbara Vidal, a 28-year-old sound technician who was born on her mother’s 16th attempt to stay pregnant, and who is also now looking for her biological father. “The most I have found on the web are third cousins, people who share 1% of the genetic information with me.”
Neither she nor her AFID colleagues have dreams of finding a father and starting a close relationship with him. “At most I would look for a contact in the distance, I have never imagined a meeting, it would give me something,” she says. Instead, they would all like to find their biological half-siblings, which it is highly probable that they have. “Sometimes we joke that one of us is siblings, since we are almost all from Barcelona and we all came from the Cefer clinic,” says Anna Martín. At the moment they share activism in a cause that is not always understood from the outside, because it sparks different moral debates, but that will inevitably continue in the air, since every day more babies are born with borrowed gametes.