Month: July 2018

Sperm Donation

The Overlooked Emotions of Sperm Donation

Intended Parents

Source The Atlantic

Sperm donation offers a tidy solution to an aggravating problem: When a person or a couple wants a baby and needs a different ingredient than what they’ve currently got to make one, a man with viable sperm swoops in to help.

The process can look like a seamless way to create a family, and for many, it is. That’s a big reason why it has gained so much popularity in the past half century, a period when it’s gone from being a niche practice to being responsible for tens of thousands of births. In 2010, the most recent year for which good data is available, some 30,000 to 60,000 babies born in the United States were conceived through sperm donation, out of approximately 4 million American babies born that year.

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Israel, Surrogacy

Israel – SINGLE WOMEN SOON TO GET ACCESS TO SURROGACY, GAY COUPLES DENIED OPTION

Intended Parents

Source The Jerusalem Post

A couple with their twin babies delivered by a surrogate mother. [Illustrative] (photo credit: REUTERS)

Until now, state-supported surrogacy has only been available for married heterosexual couples; the new law will expand the eligibility to single women as well.

Single women will soon be entitled to state support for having children through a surrogate mother, but gay couples will not, under the terms of legislation soon to be passed into law.

The surrogacy bill was approved in the Knesset’s Labor, Welfare and Health Committee on Monday for its second and third readings by an 8-4 vote, in a hearing that became noticeably emotional during comments made by two gay MKs, Amir Ohana of Likud and committee member Itzik Shmuli of the Zionist Union.

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Surrogacy

If your friend asked you to be their surrogate, what would you do?

Intended Parents

Source Evening Standard

Do you have a friend that would carry your baby if you weren’t able to? This is the premise explored in Lauren Sams’ debut novel, She’s Having Her Baby. 

The book centres around Nina, who can’t conceive after years of trying, so asks her best friend Georgie – who, for the record definitely doesn’t want kids – to be her surrogate. 

Alcohol is involved and Georgie eventually agrees, but the process doesn’t come without its complications. 

Surrogacy, especially involving people close to you, is a subject not often explored in fiction, but Sams said the idea came to her after becoming a mother herself. 

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Cambodia, Surrogate Mother

Pregnant Cambodian women charged with surrogacy and human trafficking

Intended Parents

Source The Guardian

Thirty-three pregnant Cambodian women hired to act as surrogate mothers were formally charged with surrogacy and human trafficking offences.

The women, who were arrested last month when police raided the illegal business, were charged on Friday at the Phnom Penh municipal court under a law that specifically targets surrogacy, which was outlawed in 2016 as Cambodia was becoming a popular destination for would-be foreign parents seeking women to give birth to their children.

Acting as an intermediary between an adoptive parent and a pregnant woman carries a penalty of up to six months in prison. The human trafficking offence is punishable by seven

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Anonymous, Ireland, Sperm Donation

Ireland – Anonymous sperm and eggs to be banned by autumn

Intended Parents

Source Irish Times

The Irish Fertility Society, which represents clinics, consultants and scientists working in the sector, has expressed strong opposition to both pieces of legislation.

Anonymous sperm and egg donation in fertility treatment is set to be banned by next autumn on foot of revised legislation due to be introduced shortly, Minister for Health Simon Harris has confirmed.

Provision for a ban and for the creation of a register to allow donor-conceived children obtain personal family information once they turn 18 was contained in 2015 Children and Family Relationships Act. But the minister at the time did not commence enactment of parts two and three of the legislation which would have brought the measures into force immediately.

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Uterine Transplants

Uterine Transplants: Legal Perspectives on Reproductive Technology

Intended Parents

Source The Legal Intelligencer

The use of uterine transplants avoids many of the legal issues and ambiguity associated with surrogacy. This article addresses the legal questions that arise out of surrogacy agreements, the legal benefits to uterine transplants, and the advances in reproductive medicine including the clinical trial currently at Penn Hospital.

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Egg Donor, New Zealand

New Zealand – Egg donor friends share special bond helping couples become parents

Intended Parents

Source NZ Herald

It might be one of the most uniquely beautiful friendships in Australia.
Two women who formed a bond over their love for helping other women become mums, became best friends themselves — and have helped produce 35 babies, news.com.au reported.

If you count Melissa Holman and Sarah Connor’s own children, that number sits at 40 — and then there’s all the potential babies that could come from frozen embryos around the country one day giving parents desperate for a family a child of their own.

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Ireland, LGBTQ Parental Rights, Surrogacy

Ireland – ‘How can I move home when Irish law does not recognise I am my son’s father?’

Intended Parents

Source Irish Times
Parents who have had children by surrogacy are put off returning because of a legal limbo

After tens of thousands of dollars spent on IVF over three years, Jay O’Callaghan and his husband, Aaron O’Bryan, became a family in 2017 when their son, Jake, was born through surrogacy in Toronto, where the couple have lived for seven years.

On Jake’s Canadian birth certificate, both O’Callaghan and O’Bryan are listed as his parents, but under current Irish family law, neither has any legal rights over their son.

In Ireland, the surrogate mother and her husband would be considered Jake’s legal parents, even though she has no biological connection to Jake – a donor egg was used – and relinquished all rights.

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IVF costs

What It Really Cost Me To Have A Baby Through IVF

Intended Parents

Source Romper.com

I know that having kids is expensive. There’s clothes, diapers, toys, education, and countless other things you didn’t even anticipate. But for my husband and I, to even conceive our child was the really mind-blowing expenditure.

I went through six years of infertility treatments and one of the most stressful aspects was financing it all. There were many calls to the insurance company, calls to the billing department and a lot of tears because so much of the process wasn’t going our way. Infertility is being talked about more and more in our society, but so many people still don’t understand just how expensive it can be. And if you are thinking we’re crazy to be spending our savings to have a child, please think for a moment if your children were no longer in existence. That ache you feel in your heart? That’s what people struggling with infertility deal with every day.

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Anonymity, Ireland, Sperm Donation

Ireland – Sperm donors will not be able to remain anonymous

Intended Parents

Source Independent News

People who donate sperm, eggs or an embryo for use by infertile couples will no longer be able to remain anonymous and will have to provide personal information for a register.

The disclosure will be enforced under the Children and Family Relationships Act, and will mean children conceived in this way will know both their parents.

The plan is to set up a register with all the individual donor’s details, according to the Department of Health.
Some fertility clinics here objected to the provision, saying it would lead to a fall-off in donors.

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Egg Donor Selection, UK

UK – Infertile women can use facial recognition software to find lookalike egg donors

Intended Parents

Source The Sun

Selfie service computers use facial recognition software to study 100 points on each face to ensure a close likeness and increase chance of the child looking like the egg-recipient mum.

INFERTILE women can now use facial recognition software to find lookalike egg donors.

The selfie service increases the chance of the child looking like the recipient mum.

Spanish firm Ovobank, which has eggs from more than 4,000 donors, says its computers examine 100 points on each face to ensure a close likeness.

Alberto Lale, from the company, said: “Most people, when they choose egg donation for their treatment, would like their children to resemble them as much as possible.

“It’s better to do it through an objective process, a mathematical algorithm, rather than a human.

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Egg Donor, LGBTQ, Sperm Donor

Canada – Paying Sperm And Egg Donors Will Help LGBTQ Couples Build Families

Intended Parents

Source Huffington Post

The Canadian government is considering amendments to the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (AHRA) that will benefit the LGBTQ community.

On May 29, Member of Parliament Anthony Housefather introduced a private members bill to the House of Commons. He is seeking decriminalization of surrogacy services and consideration of reasonable compensation for egg and sperm donation in Canada.

It’s currently illegal to pay, offer to pay or advertise payment for sperm, eggs, or surrogacy services. Under the Assisted Human Reproduction Act of 2004, any compensation beyond reasonable expenditures is a criminal offence punishable by 10 years in prison and a $500,000 fine. What constitutes a legitimate expense has yet to be clearly defined by the government, leading to criticism of the Act by many doctors and legal experts.

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Surrogacy Law

Iowa surrogacy contracts case appealed to US Supreme Court

Intended Parents

Source AP News

DES MOINES, IOWA

An Iowa woman is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider striking down surrogacy contracts as a violation of the constitutional rights of mothers and their babies.

In an appeal of a February Iowa Supreme Court ruling, a Muscatine woman is asking the nation’s highest court to take the case and hear arguments and then find that a surrogate mother does not waive her constitutional rights and those of her future child when she signs an agreement to have a baby for another couple.

The woman, identified in court documents only as T.B., is challenging a ruling that concluded for the first time in Iowa that gestational surrogacy agreements are enforceable. The Iowa court said banning such arrangements would deprive infertile couples of perhaps the only way to raise their own biological children. The court ruling meant the woman was legally not the parent of the now-23-month-old girl to whom she gave birth.

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India, Surrogacy

India – Once the go-to place for surrogacy, India tightens control over its baby industry

Intended Parents

Source PRI

Outside of a maternity ward, a young man and woman are bent over a phone. A few minutes ago, a nurse beckoned them over and ushered them in through a closed door. They came back out smiling. On the phone is the photo of a newborn baby girl. She’s in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit; these are her parents in the waiting area, and her birth mother, or gestational carrier, is in the ward, getting some much-needed sleep.

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Ireland, IVF

Ireland – Thousands of Irish couples will no longer need to travel to Spain for IVF treatment

Intended Parents

Source xxx xxx

E new programme will mean that many Irish patients choosing to undergo IVF will no longer have to travel for treatment using anonymous donated eggs.

Fertility centre, Institut Marquès, is one of the first to allow people to remotely carry out In Vitro fertilisation with donor eggs.

The programme will mean the embryos will be the ones travelling to potential mothers in countries such as Italy and Ireland.

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Egg Donor, Ireland

Ireland – ‘Remote’ IVF allows use of anonymous donor eggs without travel

Intended Parents

Source Irish Times

Anonymous sperm and egg donation is expected to be banned in Ireland, once the Minister for Health commences enactment of Parts 2 and 3 of the 2015 Children and Family Relationships Act, which allows for parentage through donor-assisted human reproduction. File image: PA

Irish women undergoing fertility treatment can now avail of anonymously donated eggs for use in IVF without having to travel abroad, according to an international clinic which has facilities in Ireland.

The Institut Marquès, which has clinics in Dublin and Clane, Co Kildare, says it has developed a new programme which will allow patients to avoid travelling and to “remotely” carry out IVF with donor eggs.

The institute is to present the initial results of its “distance oocyte donation” (DOD) programme at the 2018 conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Barcelona on Tuesday.

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Egg Freezing

UK – Men are to blame for women freezing their eggs: Inability to find males who will commit to a relationship is the most common reason for procedure, rather than career, finds study

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Singlet women are freezing their eggs due them being unable to find men who will commit to a relationship, rather than to focus on their careers, new research suggests.

Delaying motherhood to focus on work is the least common reason women undergo the procedure, a Yale University study found today.

Most women who freeze their eggs are single, divorced or in broken relationships and wish to keep their options open, the research adds.
Some even freeze their eggs because they would rather be single mothers, the study found.

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Sister egg donor

UK – ‘Having that taken away from me… I just wouldn’t know what to do’: Woman donates her eggs so her sister can be a mother after she went through menopause at just 23

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

A woman who started going through menopause at the age of 23 has explained that without the help of her sister she wouldn’t have had the chance to become a mum.

Amber Spears, from Melbourne, had been trying to fall pregnant in 2014 when her body suddenly – and without warning – went into menopause.
Speaking on Today, Ms Spears said she started having up to 20 hot flushes a day, a situation she described as ‘horrendous’.

‘I went to a doctor and had some tests and it came back I was going through early menopause

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India, Surrogacy

India – Committee to keep watch on surrogacy centres

Intended Parents

Source The Hindu

In an attempt to wipe out unauthorised surrogacy centres, the State government on Monday constituted a committee that will keep a check on all surrogacy centres.

The move follows a complaint by a woman named Shubhangi Bhostekar with the Maharashtra State Commission for Protection of Child Rights in April this year. She said her husband, Prakash, a father of two girls, wanted a son, and so he went to a surrogate centre at a private hospital with his mother, claimed he was single and went ahead with the surrogacy.

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Gay Parenting, Surrogate Mother

Gay couple who used their best friend as a surrogate say they’ve learned to ignore the ‘weird stares’ their family gets – and reveal their daughter, three, feels ‘lucky’ to have two dads

Intended Parents

Source Daily Mail

Robert Young, 31, from Newcastle, spent years anguishing over whether he should become a parent alone using a surrogate but decided that the process would prove too expensive.

However, when his friend, Emma, offered to give birth to a child using a donated egg and his sperm, he decided to go ahead – just months before meeting his partner Samuel Spiers, 28, also from Newcastle, on Tinder.

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