As a team, we are always keen to keep ourselves involved in discussions which revolve around the lives of the families we support – as advocates of their needs and experiences, voices for change and a listening ear to stakeholders involved in different parts of their journey. Natalie and I were delighted to be invited to an event earlier this year organised by The Online Sperm Donation Project (OSDP), a four-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK examining the experiences of those using online sperm donation to donate or conceive their families and were able to share our perspective with a range of others invited to attend. Online sperm donation is an informal and unregulated form of sperm donation which operates outside HFEA regulation and contrasts with going through a licensed fertility clinic in the UK.
The event raised lots of important issues and it was great to be a part of the insightful and wide ranging discussions on how we could regulate and/or improve the sector for donor conceived people, donors, and parents of donor conceived people. We are hopeful that the seeds of change were planted between a group with a shared incentive and considerable passion – watch this space!
Naturally, issues that continue to be important in this arena (and we have seen becoming ever more present in the media) include safety, access to medical history and information, the accuracy of information available to donor conceived people, how legislation applies to an unregulated sector, what is actually happening in practice for those engaging with this means of growing their family, and secure and ethical management of information of and for those involved.
To us as fertility lawyers, the key themes of these issues are safety and security. These have, and will always be, an important element of the legal advice we give to the families we support when creating their families through donor conception. It remains important for anyone seeking to build their family with the help of a third party to understand their legal position before conceiving and ultimately the way their choices will impact on their children’s rights from birth and into the future. We continue to be proud to support our community in finding the best legal security available.
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