A lesbian woman in her 30s who, for medical reasons, may not be able to become pregnant has been permitted by Israel’s health ministry to donate ova to her partner. After an ovum is fertilised with sperm from an anonymous donor the partner will carry the pregnancy.
Such arrangements will automatically become permissible if a bill sponsored by the ministry is passed by the Knesset (parliament). A legal adviser to the ministry, Mira Huebner, said she hoped the bill, which has been five years in the making, will be approved during the Knesset’s upcoming autumn session.
The ministry previously allowed two lesbian women to donate ova to their partners, but these cases were kept secret and involved circumstances that were somewhat different from those of the present case, which was leaked to an Israeli internet news site—to the dismay of the lesbian couple and the ministry.
“They are not doing this for ideological reasons,” said Mrs Huebner, “but of course they would both like to have a connection to the baby. The egg donor will have to adopt it legally, as the woman who gives birth is considered by Israeli law to be the baby’s mother.”
The bill sets down strict rules for the donation of ova by women who are not undergoing fertility treatments. “Some doctors are trying to delay it [the bill] further,” she said. If passed, it will be one of the most comprehensive laws on ova donation in the world.
For decades Israeli law has specified that only women who are undergoing fertility treatment can donate ova, with unpaid donors doing so for altruistic reasons. The restriction was aimed at preventing needless danger to women and the illegal sale of ova in a country where ova are scarce and fertility treatments are in high demand and are offered free to all women below a certain age.
But after the police investigated a senior gynaecologist who allegedly gave his patients high doses of hormones to stimulate their ovaries and sell extra eggs to private patients the ministry decided in 2001 to rethink the issue and expand the pool of potential donors.
A committee of medical, legal, and ethics experts recommended allowing women to give ova even if they were not undergoing fertility treatment and to be compensated financially for their time and discomfort, just as surrogate mothers are paid legally to carry someone else’s fetus to term in arrangements supervised and approved by the ministry.
The identity of donors and recipients would be stored in a secured database, and details of babies resulting from such donations would be kept secret, but the grown children would eventually be permitted to request information to make sure they don’t marry close relatives, which is forbidden by Jewish law.
The database would also be accessible to marriage registrars and would be run by the state adoption officials. The donor would have the right to decide the number of ova that could be used and whether they are used to produce embryos for research.