"We are not a dream of anyone." Maria Sellés, 32, is violent with the rhetoric of assisted reproduction clinics, which often use these words: dream come true, illusion, your baby at home or we'll give you your money back. “Everything is designed so that parents who cannot have children can do it, everything is done from a supposed right to maternity 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 1990s and turned to the Cefer sperm bank, one of the pioneering clinics in the sector. "She never hid it from me nor did I have 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 29, she realized that the void around her biological father weighed too heavily on her and she channeled her “rage” into activism. He founded Afid (Associació de Fills i Filles de Donants) and began to run an Instagram account (@nda.drets) that brings together other adults born from 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 ended with anonymity in 2018. Their reasons are practical – to have access to medical records 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 in the association, in recent weeks they have received an incessant trickle of calls and messages, people who saw the report Gens anònims that was broadcast on TV3 at the end of February, within the space 30 minuts. 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, an inconsolable cry that I didn't know where he came 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 eighties, from an anonymous sperm donor because his father had become sterile due to medication. At 21, he sat down with his mother to tell her that he was gay. She took advantage of the conversation to also reveal a secret, that of his origin. But she asked him not to tell her father, who still doesn't know that her son knows.
Stories like yours are common among those born in the early years of assisted reproduction. "It is shared that fertility treatments have been used, but not that the process has required a third person, some aspects remain in the shadows," says Anna Molas, a researcher at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) who dedicated her thesis doctoral degree to 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 raised that were not raised before, but even so, many people still do not want to say so. There is a feeling that the child will be less accepted in the family, that one's relationship with the child may suffer. And from the clinics everything is designed so that those who use donations may not say so. The issue of matching [look for donors who share physical characteristics with the parents] is very important, and all the discourse they use goes in this direction. They are told: 'it is a cell', 'you will carry that baby'. It is a speech that wants to reaffirm the maternity of the person seeking a pregnancy and minimize the role of the donor.
For Molas, the issue of anonymity is, along with financial compensation for donors (about 50 euros for a sperm donation and about 1,000 for an egg donation), the pillar that sustains a highly developed sector 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 been in other European countries, such as France, Portugal and the United Kingdom; The number of donors would be drastically reduced.” And that would be, in his opinion, tragic for the hopes of hundreds of thousands of couples seeking to conceive with medical help. "Donors have no interest in starting a family and want to preserve their right to privacy," he defends.
According to Espinós, the demands of groups like AFID are still very minor 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 those rights,” he asserts. "We have to look for the higher good and we believe that the higher good is the system we already have." An interesting possibility, he admits, would be to opt for the mixed system, as it exists in Denmark, according to which the donors can choose whether they are anonymous or not, and the recipients also decide if they want an anonymous or public donor.
Espinós points out that donors are already screened, their karyotype is obtained and a genetic discard of autosomal recessive (hereditary) diseases is obtained. "They are better studied than the patients themselves who come looking for a pregnancy."
But not only illnesses are inherited, but also traumas, believes Anna Martín (not her real name), a psychologist who was also conceived with donor sperm and who in her practice usually addresses issues related to roots, genetic grief (the one they go through people who assume that they will not be the biological parents of their children) and generational trauma (the one that is transmitted from parents to children and from grandparents to grandchildren). “When you are missing a piece of the puzzle, it is difficult for you to heal. If you have that part it is easier to do it”.
In his case, he found out that his parents had turned to a sperm donor when he was eleven years old and the family was immersed in the process of international adoption of what is now his sister. “The psychologists recommended to my parents that they tell me about it. I was very shocked and the first thing I thought was: my God, this man who is not my father has seen me naked many times. As my psychologist says, he scared me that the blood did not protect me in front of my father.
As a 35-year-old single woman, she sometimes wonders if she would use a donor to get pregnant herself, and concludes that she would not. “For me, having a child is the fruit of love with another person and I would not want to deprive my child of knowing who her biological father is. I understand that my parents did it and I don't judge them, I also have lesbian friends and at no time do I see it as a bad thing for them to go that way, but I wouldn't feel comfortable”.
Both she and the other members of the association have taken genetic tests that have been entered into My Heritage, a kind of map or global database of genetic information that connects people who could share ancestors. "Every time I get the e-mail with the matches [connections] from My Heritage, my heart squeezes," says Bàrbara Vidal, a 28-year-old sound technician who was born on her mother's 16th attempt. for becoming pregnant and who is also now looking for her biological father. “The most I have found on the web are third cousins, people who share 1% of the genetic information with me.” Neither she nor her Afid classmates dream of finding a father and starting a close relationship with him. Instead, they would all like to find their biological half-siblings, which it is highly probable that they have.
