A fertility clinic operating in Ireland will offer a new service styled as ‘remote’ IVF [1] allowing anonymous eggs from abroad to be inseminated in Spain with sperm from a client in Ireland and the resulting embryo will be flown back to Ireland to be implanted in a woman here. The scheme would allow people to skirt forthcoming laws here that will make anonymous egg donation illegal while also saving women the inconvenience of having to travel abroad for an embryo implantation.
The Institut Marquès, which has clinics in Dublin and Clane, Co Kildare, said “cross border reproductive treatment” could be stressful for patients. With their new programme, “it’s the embryo that travels. This method offers a safe, efficient and comfortable option to carry out treatment in the patient’s country of origin”.
The clinic said the semen sample of the male partner is frozen at the country of origin such as Ireland and sent to a laboratory in Barcelona, where IVF is carried out with the donor’s fresh eggs. Once fertilised, embryos are vitrified (frozen) on their fifth day of development and sent back to Ireland so embryo transfer can be carried out by the patient’s own doctor in her country of origin.
Prof Deirdre Madden, an expert in medical ethics at UCC, said a lot of countries had egg shortages as generating them involved an invasive procedure including use of ovary stimulation drugs, and was not as easy as sperm donation. In relation to Ireland, “it’s less about the law and more about getting eggs. There is nothing preventing having the egg procedure done here”, she said.