Pride Angel

THE state government says it needs another six months to decide whether children of sperm and egg donors promised anonymity before 1988 should be able to know the identity of their biological parents.
A recommendation that the government change the law to allow for the information's release was made by Parliament's cross-party law-reform committee in March, which found the rights of children should prevail over concerns about donor privacy.

The government was due to respond by the end of last month but yesterday released a statement saying it needed further time to consult donors about the proposed change, which raised ''significant legal and practical challenges''.
Noting that the committee's inquiry had heard from only nine donors, the government said it would ask the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority to canvass donor views over the next six months before finalising its response.

The deferral was met with dismay by donor-conceived children yesterday, including Melbourne social worker Narelle Grech, 30, who was diagnosed with late-stage bowel cancer last year. She wants to warn eight half-siblings conceived through the same donor to a possible genetic risk of bowel cancer, and to meet her biological family.

''On Monday I got CT-scan results to suggest that my tumours have grown. My prognosis isn't great and I don't know if I have the time the government is taking. It's eating me up … I'm working so hard to get well and overcome this illness, but having this hanging over my head is really not helping.''

A spokeswoman for support group Tangled Webs, Lauren Burns, said the response failed to give ''even in-principle support'' for the committee's recommendations, or to acknowledge the rights and needs of donor-conceived children.
Australian Medical Association Victoria president Stephen Parnis said he welcomed the government's decision to conduct further consultation on an important, complex and emotionally charged issue.

He said disregarding assurances of anonymity given to donors before 1988 had the potential to seriously undermine the public's trust in the medical profession.
The proposed law change would bring the rights of several thousand children born before 1988 - who are not entitled to identifying information - in line with those born following the introduction of laws to regulate assisted reproduction.

Currently the law varies depending on when the donation was made. Victorians conceived using sperm donated after 1998 have unconditional access to information about their donors. Those conceived between July 1, 1988, and the end of 1997 can access information if their donor consents.

VARTA chief Louise Johnston said the authority would conduct a range of focus groups and individual interviews with donors to ''support the government to make sensitive decisions to meet the needs of all parties involved''.

Article: 12th October 2012 www.theage.com.au

Read more about using known sperm and egg donors at www.prideangel.com

A recruitment drive aimed at gay men has contributed to a significant reduction in the waiting times for Australian women seeking a sperm donor in their bid to have a baby, according to a leading IVF specialist. But women who delay reproduction are more likely than ever to encounter difficulties, experts say. IVF Australia spokesman Professor Michael Chapman said Australian women were waiting up to 18 months for donor sperm about a year ago

The waiting time was now about eight weeks, thanks largely to imrproved supply from overseas clinics and to a local donor drive that targeted gay men. Professor Chapman said improved adherence by US sperm banks to Australia’s strict legal requirements had helped to slash times. Donors must give consent so any child resulting from the donation can make contact once they turn 18. Similarly, a recent advertising campaign by IVF Australia in the gay media had resulted in an increase in inquiries and, subsequently, much-needed donors, he said. However, the demand in Australia for donors has steadily risen as women who put off having children suddenly find themselves emotionally or financially ready, yet unable to fall pregnant as easily as hoped - if at all.

Perils of putting it off
According to a recent study of 1010 women aged 18-44 years, more of them know someone in their circle trying to fall pregnant — and failing — than don’t. More surprisingly, these women of childbearing age remained ambivalent about - or oblivious to - their own decreasing chances of conceiving, the survey by pregnancy test maker Clearblue found. Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirm that women are delaying pregnancy, with the average age at which women fall pregnant for the first time rising from 27.5 years in 1990 to 28.9 years in 2010. Since 2005, more women aged 35-39 years have given birth than have women aged 20-24 years, the ABS figures show. IVF experts concur that both the number and the average age of women seeking help from fertility clinics has increased. Dr David Molloy of the Queensland Fertility Group said while the age of women seeking help getting pregnant at his Brisbane clinic had steadily risen, success rates had struggled to keep pace. "There’s a misconception that infertility clinics can cure you getting older. We can’t," he said. "Pregnancy rates drop quite dramatically once you hit 39-40, and start to reduce from 35. Certainly we can help patients get pregnant in those age groups, but the success rates are lower and there’s no major cure."

New research
Research published over the weekend suggests that babies conceived using commonly available fertility treatments are almost 50 per cent more likely to have a birth defect than those conceived naturally. In the most comprehensive study of its kind in the world, researchers from the University of Adelaide's Robinson Institute compared the risk of major birth defects for each of the reproductive therapies commonly available internationally, including IVF, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and ovulation induction. "The unadjusted risk of any birth defect in pregnancies involving assisted conception was 8.3 per cent, compared with 5.8 per cent for pregnancies not involving assisted conception," said Associate Professor Michael Davies, the lead author of the study published on Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The risk of birth defects for IVF was 7.2 per cent, while the rate for ICSI - a procedure used to overcome male infertility in which a sperm is injected into an egg - was even higher at 9.9 per cent (139 defects).

No substitute for good planning
Dr Molloy said Queensland had led the country in pioneering such recent technology such as oocyte (egg) freezing and AMH (Anti-Mullerian Hormone) testing - "a measure of how many eggs you have left" - but they were no substitute for good planning and prioritisation. "It doesn’t get around the problem of reproductive ageing completely," he said. "What you don’t want to be is 39 with 39-year-old DNA in your eggs and not many eggs left. "And you don’t want to be 31 and thinking you can delay getting pregnant. At 31 you have lovely DNA but if your egg stocks are very poor it’s still going to be harder to get pregnant and you mightn’t be able to fit your two children in. "The DNA ageing that goes on between 35 and 45 still happens, but if you’ve got fewer eggs then you’ve got a double whammy and your back to the wall." Professor Chapman said the average age of the patients seeking help at his New South Wales fertility clinic was "now 37 years of age, so half of them are over 37". He said while the news that more than half of women trying to have a baby were now aged over 30 was alarming enough from a scientific perspective, "more importantly, the percentage of women over 35 trying to have babies has climbed quite dramatically". "More women are putting off faster than science is able to reverse it. The sad part is that we don’t know how to reverse the inexorable decline in egg quality over time. That’s the conundrum," he said. "The truth is, even with multiple attempts, with all the technology that we have, less than 50 per cent of women over 40 will end up having a baby."

It takes time
Professor Chapman said a large number of women failed to realise that falling pregnant often took time, the very thing hindering the chances of a woman over the age of 37 conceiving. "What we haven’t been able to get through to people is that getting pregnant doesn’t happen the day you want to be pregnant," he said. "The human body at its peak in the mid-20s produces a pregnancy rate of only around 15 to 20 per cent a month. To actually have a good chance of getting pregnant, you have to keep going for a number of months - 12 months - before you maximize your chance of falling pregnant naturally. "In women who are older, that natural cycle rate drops. At 35, it’s probably more like 10-12 per cent and by 40, that rate per cycle of falling naturally is probably around 5 per cent. "Cumulatively, a rate of 5 per cent over 12 months gives you a better than 50-50 chance of getting pregnant at 40, but if you’re the 50 per cent that hasn’t gotten pregnant, another year has gone by - another year of decline in the quality of your eggs and the number of eggs has occurred."

Why women struggle with fertility
Professor Chapman said the most common reason he saw for women not getting pregnant after 38 was the quality of their eggs. As a result, he said, more people were using fertility treatment. Despite the repeated warnings from experts, the Clearblue survey found that only 4 per cent of women currently in their best childbearing years saw having a baby as a top priority in their lives. Job security and income was the main concern of 48 per cent of those surveyed, with only 5 per cent admitting to significant stress at the thought of not being able to conceive. Yet nearly half of Australian women have experienced difficulty in falling pregnant — and there are more than twice as many women (450,000) trying to conceive as are pregnant (190,000), according to the study. And seven out of 10 women admit to wanting to have children in their life — when the time is right. Ninety per cent of women could see the benefits in having kids early, however the sentiment was outweighed by the reasons for delaying motherhood.

Of those surveyed:

•74 per cent felt the need to be financially secure;
•50 per cent wanted to be in a loving relationship; and
•51 per cent wanted time to travel and fulfil life experiences free of children.

White-collar women's expectations
Professor Chapman said that an overwhelming majority of women who sought help at his clinic were "white-collar professionals" whose driven nature and high expectations of themselves extended in the realm of reproduction. "When they get to us, they are the desperate ones, and therefore emotion gets in the way of reality. I can tell a woman that she’s got a less-than 1 per cent chance of success with IVF and she says 'I still want to go through with it'," Prof Chapman said. "They don’t want to be in a situation in 10 years' time looking back and saying 'I never tried'. They wouldn’t get to the point of coming to a clinic and then being confronted with some pretty harsh facts and [not] keep on going." He added: "Their expectation will be that they will have a baby." Dr Molloy said that apart from the career women and couples who put off child-bearing, he increasingly treated women who had simply failed to secure a commitment from partners in time. "You see an awful lot of women who invest 10 years in a live-in relationship and they say in their mid-30s 'we need to get moving' and the guy is out the door. All of a sudden they’re trapped," he said. "It takes a while to re-establish a baby-making relationship. That’s a big commitment. The interview process for that could be a couple of years. So these women do get time trapped in these relationships. In a way there’s a shame that there isn’t a higher level of commitment - marriage, home and a commitment to children. "I bet you know people like that."

Sperm donor option
Dr Molloy said sperm donation was one option for women in this situation and in the face of shortages in recent years, Queensland clinics had actively targeted the gay community as a source of sperm donation for several years. "We've had the gay population coming from NSW and particularly Victoria, where the laws are draconian - you have to have a police check before you can go to an IVF clinic and donate sperm," he said. "We were the second unit in the country to import US sperm - started doing it 7 years ago." Queensland Fertility Group had also led the country in "reproductive insurance", namely egg-freezing, he said. "We've had more pregnancies from egg freezing than all the other IVF units in the country combined," he said.

Willing donors
Advertising representative Scott McKeown is among those gay men who would willingly donate sperm to a fertility clinic for use by women - "straight, lesbian or bisexual” – wanting to start a family. While Mr McKeown cannot himself donate for medical reasons, he said gay men were prime and willing candidates for sperm donation, as they were unlikely to be deterred by laws requiring a donor to agree to being contacted by the child once the child turns 18. “The difference between gay guys and straight men in wanting to be a sperm donor is, we are not going to create a complication for ourselves or a future partner and kids, more often than not," he said. “We’re not going to have to deal with a future wife or husband, and those kids, and then someone knocking on the door or making a phone call years later, because it’s less likely that we’re going to have that kind of lifestyle.” He added that for many gay men – just as it was with heterosexual brethren – “it would kind of be nice - as you get older to actually see someone, possibly see yourself in their face and actually say, well the surname may not pass on but maybe my genes will live on”. “It’s the basic human driver for both men and women - why we live, and how we came about anyway. What a nice thing to leave,” he said.

Article: 8th May 2012 www.brisbanetimes.com.au

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BIRTH certificates could be secretly tagged with the identity of sperm or egg donors under a controversial New South Wales Government proposal to help children track down their biological parents later in life.

Notes or "hidden" addendums would be linked to the certificates, telling the child that more information relating to their donor was available when they turned 18.

The move would mean all donor details could be recorded on the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages for the first time.

The current Assisted Reproductive Technology Register, overseen by NSW Health since its introduction in 2010, covers commercial conceptions but excludes non-medical donations or private arrangements.

In a submission to a parliamentary inquiry, Department of Premier and Cabinet deputy director-general Vicki D'Adam suggested that the option of a hidden record would still allow the child to use the birth certificate for public identification purposes without possible embarrassment.

"Options for including donor information on the birth certificate would need to take into account issues of privacy to ensure that donor-conceived children are not stigmatised by being treated differently to other children," she said.

The inquiry was launched last year after the NSW District Court ordered that a NSW sperm donor be removed from his daughter's BDM register. It ruled that the birth mother's former partner had the right to be named on the register, despite the donor maintaining a close relationship and financial support for the child since birth.

The law says only two parent names can be on the BDM register.

Article: 17th February 2012 www.heraldsun.com.au

Read more about finding known donors willing to donate sperm by personal arrangement at www.prideangel.com

VICTORIA Australia is so short of sperm donors that some women are flying interstate for IVF treatment, prompting calls to ease restrictions on importing sperm.

Fertility doctors say demand for sperm has surged since laws giving single women and lesbians access to IVF were brought in last year, with some patients waiting up to nine months.

The removal of anonymity has also made some men reluctant to donate, and restrictions that mean they can only give sperm to 10 families have also increased the need for more donors.

With just 184 registered sperm donors left in Victoria, fertility doctors say some patients are resorting to DIY inseminations using unscreened sperm, which carries the risk of infection.

Importing sperm is prohibited in Victoria unless approved by the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority, which last year granted permission in just three cases. But states without specific reproductive legislation such as Queensland are routinely importing sperm, often from American sperm banks.

Melbourne IVF director John McBain said the regulator was being too strict with the rules.

''The shortage is as bad as it's ever been and when the wait is so long to get access to a donor it just pushes it underground again and people seek their own remedy using uncounselled, unconsented donors and unquarantined sperm,'' he said.

''The worrying risk of that is chronic viral illness infection with either hepatitis B or HIV because a lot of single women tend to source gay men as their donors.

''One of the main things … is that we have minorities here in Australia who would quite like the child to look like its parents but no one has any Indian, Asian or Arabic sperm donors.''

Melbourne mother Lee, who did not want to use her real name, went to the City Fertility Centre but was told there would be a six to nine-month wait for sperm.

The clinic, which has only six donors on its books and has launched a website to attract more, referred the couple to a sister clinic in Brisbane, which uses samples from the US. Lee became pregnant on her first attempt with donor sperm and now has twin two-year-old girls.

''It was so simple. We could look at all their profiles on the internet and see baby pictures of them or in some cases what they look like as adults,'' she said. ''We wanted someone who had blond hair and blue eyes because my husband has Dutch in his background and it was important that the girls look like him.

''We were fortunate we had the finances to fly to Queensland, but it would be great if they could get more donors in Victoria by importing sperm.''

Louise Johnson, chief executive of the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority, which regulates fertility treatment, said decisions on importation were based on complex legal requirements and the welfare of the child.

Federal laws prohibit paying donors for sperm, although reimbursing costs is allowed. Clinics often differ in what they interpret as reasonable costs. State legislation also requires donors to be counselled by a Victorian counsellor before giving sperm.

''It's not just a simple matter of saying there's a shortage of donor sperm let's import a whole batch,'' Ms Johnson said. ''The guiding principles of the act are that the welfare of persons born as a result of treatment is paramount, and they have a right to information about their genetic parents. ''There would be no regulatory body in the US ensuring that their donor's details are kept up to date because there is no central register like there is in Victoria.

''There's a growing body of evidence that young people want to have the choice to obtain information about their donor when they become adults, so it not just the matter of supply.''

Adnan Catakovic, of Brisbane's City Fertility Centre, said his centre's US supplier exceeded Australian standards.

Men interested in donating sperm can visit spermdonorsaustralia.com.au

Article: 19th February 2011 by www.theage.com.au

Read more about donating sperm by personal arrangement at www.prideangel.com

A FRIEND recently revealed he had fathered a baby. No cigars though, just a carefully worded statement. "I have been told there is a pregnancy, but I don't know the mother, or when the baby will be born."

Say again? My friend explained that after 20 years of thinking about it, he had become a sperm donor. Which made the whole thing a bit tricky. Is a pregnancy something a donor also gets to celebrate?

My friend saw my dilemma and said he wasn't going to have children of his own and at least now he would have the satisfaction of knowing he had helped a family achieve its dream.

That is a generosity of spirit I hadn't considered before. We often sing the praises of organ donors, but who gives thanks to the sperm donors?

My friend said the journey wasn't easy and there were the doubts: "Am I up to the job fertility-wise? Will I feel too old if a child seeks contact 20 years later? What would my partner and family think about it?"

He admitted it was a tug on the heartstrings knowing that he would never be more than a donor number and that another man would be the father of any children.

But just the same, he gained a lot of satisfaction from the thought that any parent who went down the track of IVF was "OK in my books".

"Full marks to any man who consents to accept donor sperm as part of his efforts to become a father. And praise to his partner for helping him through such a time," he said.

I was so touched by his motivation and how deeply he had considered all the factors and yet I think most of us take the whole process of sperm donation for something to even snigger about, to our shame. The fact is many IVF clinics desperately need more donors.

You need to be altruistic -- as there is no payment -- and committed, because new laws now require a lot more effort. And, disappointingly, all accessing IVF must now have criminal record checks and counselling sessions.

Donors must also accept that any child born can make contact with them when they turn 18.

Some may struggle with that, but my friend said, if anything, that helped his decision to become a sperm donor. "Everyone has the right to know their genetic heritage," he offered.

In my mind requiring a criminal record consent is an insult and only adds a further layer of stress to couples already doing it tough.

Dr Russell Dalton, director of Ballarat IVF, called for some debate about it. Perhaps the new State Government can look at this. Over to you, Mr Baillieu.

Article: 19th December 2010 www.hearaldsun.com.au

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