Turks barred from receiving sperm or egg donations abroad !

Turks barred from receiving sperm or egg donations abroad !

Monday, March 15, 2010
ISTANBUL - Daily News with wires

Women seeking help becoming pregnant have had their options further limited by a new regulation preventing the obtaining of sperm or egg donations abroad. The rule amends an existing law barring such procedures domestically; women who break it could face up to three years in prison.

With domestic egg and sperm donations already banned, Turkish women seeking to become pregnant have now been prohibited from receiving similar fertility treatments abroad by a new regulation seeking to “protect the country’s ancestry.”

According to İrfan Şencan, the director of the Health Ministry’s Health Services Department, the recent amendment to the law was made to “protect the ancestry, to make the newborn’s father and mother known.”

“It has nothing to do with race,” Şencan told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.

But legal experts and sociologists believe it will be hard to implement this ban, published March 6 in the Official Gazette, in a medically sophisticated era.

The amendment to the regulation on assisted-reproductive techniques and centers bans pregnancy resulting from egg or sperm donations (except from a woman’s husband) either in Turkey or abroad.

The change was made in response to the growing number of Turkish people traveling to other countries to have such procedures performed. “It is a way of breaking Turkish law abroad,” Şencan said, adding that women who seek pregnancy through a sperm or egg transplant performed abroad can face one to three years in prison.

Professor Bülent Tıraş, an academic from Gazi University, said many patients are applying to Turkish doctors for help conceiving a child, while many others prefer to go abroad for sperm or egg donations, daily Akşam reported Monday.

“A patient who cannot have a child will do anything to have one,” said Tıraş.

The new regulation has no legal grounds, said Özlem Yenerer Çakmut, a lecturer at Marmara University’s Law Faculty, who spoke to Akşam.

“If these operations [sperm or egg donations and transplants] are not banned in a foreign country, then those who received it in that country cannot receive punishment for doing so,” she said.

“It’s hard to keep anybody from choosing the father of her child by introducing legal restrictions,” Nilüfer Narlı, a sociologist from Bahçeşehir University, told the Daily News.

According to Narlı, the idea of a “pure race” is not a part of a Turkish culture. “Turks have been cosmopolitan in terms of their culture and genetic inheritance. Historically, Turks have been open to mixing with other people,” she said. “The Ottomans had the ‘devşirme’ system [in which they recruited boys from Christian families, raising them as Muslims and training them to take office in significant royal institutions] and sultans’ wives were often foreigners.”

The new regulation says, “Spouses will only be able to receive cells belonging to each other. Using a donor in any [other] way is prohibited.” If a center in Turkey performs an operation using a sperm or egg donation taken from a member of an unmarried couple, or transplants an embryo, the facility will be closed indefinitely and all personnel working there will likewise be barred from working at similar centers.

Since sperm and egg donations and using a surrogate mother are both banned in the country, many Turkish people have been applying to centers abroad to have sperm or egg transplants performed, recent media reports have said. The new regulation bans this practice as well.

In addition, Turkish doctors and medical centers are also prohibited from leading or encouraging couples to have sperm or egg donations performed abroad, or even informing them about the possibility. Centers that recommend a foreign facility or mediate between Turkish couples and doctors abroad will be closed for three months for their first offense. Centers that continue to do so will be closed indefinitely by the governor’s office, according to the new regulation.

The amended law says that complaints about facilities that perform sperm or egg donations or send patients to either foreign or domestic centers for such procedures will be filed with the public prosecutor’s office, along with complaints against the woman and the donor.

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