The parliament of Queensland, Australia, passed legislation on Tuesday to create a national registry for children conceived using sperm or egg “donors.” The new law also limits the number of families using the same donor.
According to The Guardian, the fertility industry has faced criticism recently for its continued effort to ensure donors remain anonymous, preventing donor-conceived individuals from accessing their family medical histories. The new law seeks to rectify this by requiring all donor-conceived individuals conceived at a fertility clinic to be registered. The registry is scheduled to be created by 2026.
“The Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand has called for a national donor registry. Now we’re going to have, when this bill gets enacted, eight systems of regulation of IVF in a country of 27 million, which is crazy… We’ve got 24 IVF units or IVF clinics in Queensland, all bar two of them have interstate connections… so that means that the clinic has to comply with the law here and the law somewhere else, which is different,” said fertility attorney and director of the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand, Stephen Page. He also used a donor to conceive his child and felt it was time for the government to step in.
Katharine Gelber also felt it was time for the government to set more rules. She has been advocating for changes for 13 years. She had a son in 2006 using a donor and he has been denied contact with that donor — his biological father — despite the fertility clinic originally stating that the donor would not be anonymous.
However, her son wasn’t born in Queensland, so the new law will not affect him. She plans to begin working with the government of New South Wales to create a similar law.
“I promised my son, when I started this, that I would try and get the law changed by the time he was 18, and then he turned 18 this year,” she said.
Donor-conceived individuals often feel “mass produced” and can experience an identity crisis upon learning about how they were conceived. While this new law aims to help them find their biological connections, not everyone will be able to benefit. Some donor-conceived individuals of the state still won’t be able to learn about their medical history because, as The Guardian reported, “it was deliberately or accidentally destroyed, a practice that was not illegal until Tuesday.”
The portion of the law limiting how many times a donor can be used will help limit the number of siblings belonging to different families, unknowing of each other. Adults who were conceived using donor technology are finding new half-siblings at an alarming rate. Alexandra Eccles told The Guardian in April that she finds a new half-sibling nearly every six months. She has a confirmed 32 siblings and guesses she has as many as 100.
A Queensland clinic faced backlash in July, just two months after the legislation was introduced, because it used the wrong sperm to create children and could not guarantee that the mistake would not happen again. It destroyed thousands of sperm samples as a result.
The new law is “historic reform” said Shannon Fentiman, the minister for health. “Too many families have been affected by a lack of regulation when it comes to IVF, and we need to ensure that this does not happen again.”
