“We are not anyone’s dream”. To Maria Sellés, 32 years old, the rhetoric of the assisted reproduction clinics, which usually use these words: dream come true, illusion, your baby at home or your money back, is violent. “Everything is designed so that parents who cannot have children can have them, everything is done from a presumed right to mother 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 pioneering clinics in the sector. “She never hid it from me or I had 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 ”, says Sellés.
At the age of 29, he realized that the void surrounding his biological father weighed too much on him and he channeled his “rage” into activism. He founded the Associació de Fils i Filles de Donants (AFID) and started an Instagram account (@nda.drets) that groups other adults born through 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 eliminated anonymity in 2018.
Their motivations are of a practical type – having access to the clinical history 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 of the association, in recent weeks they have received an incessant trickle of calls and messages, people who saw the report “Anonymous People” that was broadcast on TV3 at the end of February, within 30 minutes. Josep Marquès (not his real name) saw him and suffered a seizure. “I put it on and after ten minutes of reporting I burst into tears, a disconsolate cry that I didn’t know where it was coming 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 1980s, from an anonymous sperm donor because his father had become sterile due to a medication At 21, he sat down with his mother to tell her he was gay. She also took advantage of the conversation to reveal a secret to him, that of her origin. But he asked her not to tell the father, who remains unaware that his son knows.
Stories like hers are common among those born during the early years of assisted reproduction. “It is shared that fertility treatments have been resorted to, but not that the process has required a third person, some aspects remain in the shadows”, says Anna Molas, researcher at the Universitat Autònoma (UAB) who dedicated the his doctoral thesis on egg donors and has been working in this field for years. “We have the perception that this is slowly changing, that things are beginning to be considered that were not considered before, but, despite this, many people continue not wanting to say it. You get the feeling that the child will be less accepted in the family, that the relationship with the child may suffer. And from the clinics, everything is thought out so that those who use donations can not tell. The issue of matching [finding donors who share physical characteristics with the parents] is very important and all the discourse that is made goes in this direction. They are told: ‘It’s a cell’, ‘You will carry this baby’. It is a speech that wants to reaffirm the motherhood of the person looking for a pregnancy and minimize the role of the donor”.
For Molas, the issue of anonymity is, together with the financial compensation of donors (about 50 euros for a sperm donation and about 1,000 for an egg donation), the pillar that supports a very developed in Spain and particularly in Catalonia, that of private assisted reproduction clinics.
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 countries “Europe, like France, Portugal and the United Kingdom: the number of donors would be drastically reduced”. And that would, in his opinion, be tragic for the hopes of hundreds of thousands of couples who want to conceive with medical help. “Donors have no interest in forming 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 much in the minority and, he believes, not entirely justified. “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 these rights”, he says. “We must seek the higher good and we believe that the higher good is the system we already have.” An interesting possibility, he admits, would be to go for the mixed system, as in Denmark, according to which donors can choose whether they are anonymous or not, and recipients also decide whether they want an anonymous or public donor.
Espinós points out that donors are already screened, their karyotype is obtained and genetic elimination of autosomal recessive (inherited) diseases. “They are better studied than the same patients who are looking for a pregnancy”.
But not only diseases are inherited, traumas are also inherited, believes Anna Martín (not her real name), a psychologist who was also conceived with donor sperm and who in her consultation usually addresses issues related to rooting, the genetic grief (what happens to people who assume they will not be the biological parents of their children) and generational trauma (what is passed from parents to children and grandparents to grandchildren). “When you’re missing a piece of the puzzle, it’s hard to heal. If you have that part, it’s easier.”
In his case, he learned that his parents had turned to a sperm donor when he was 11 years old and the family was immersed in the process of international adoption of who is now his sister. “The psychologists recommended my parents to explain it to me. It really shocked me and the first thing I thought was: ‘My God, this gentleman who is not my father has seen me naked many times. As my psychologist says, I was scared that the blood did not protect me in front of my father.”
As a 35-year-old single woman, she sometimes wonders whether she herself would turn to a donor to get pregnant, and concludes that she would not. “For me, having a child is the result of love with another person and I would not want to deprive my child of knowing who his biological father is. I understand that my parents did it and I don’t judge them, I also have lesbian friends and at no point do I think it’s wrong for them to choose this option, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable”.
Both she and the other members of the association have had genetic tests that they have entered into My Heritage, a kind of global map or database of genetic information that connects people who might share ancestors. “Every time I receive the mail with the matches [connections] from My Heritage, my heart skips a beat,” explains Bárbara Vidal, a 28-year-old sound technician who was born on her mother’s 16th attempt to get pregnant, and who is now also looking for her biological father. “The most I’ve found on the web are third cousins, people who share 1% of genetic information with me.” Neither she nor her colleagues at AFID dream of finding a father and starting a close relationship with him. Instead, they would like to find their biological half-siblings, which they are highly likely to have.
