a ruleDonor anonymity

Whether a gamete or embryo donor may remain unknown to the person conceived. In the rows below, lawful means anonymous donation is available; unlawful means identity release is compulsory and anonymity is not on offer; lawful-with-conditions means both tracks run, or only non-identifying information is released.

The direction of travel in Europe has been one way for twenty years, and it has moved patients with it.

Britain ended anonymity for donations made from 1 April 2005 by regulations made under the 1990 Act. Sweden had gone first, decades earlier. The Netherlands, Germany, Finland and others followed, each building a register and each fixing an age at which the person conceived may ask. Spain did not: article 5.5 of Ley 14/2006 makes anonymity compulsory and confidentiality of the donor's identity a duty, breakable only in extraordinary circumstances carrying a definite danger to the child's life or health.

Inference — Spain therefore sits in the middle of Europe running the opposite rule to most of its neighbours, and it is also the largest egg-donation destination on the continent. The Spanish registry recorded 27,564 cycles in 2022 for patients resident in other countries — France 39.0%, Italy 20.6%, the United Kingdom 9.0%, Germany 6.4% — and 52.3% of those cycles used donated eggs. The registry did not record why the patient came in 90.8% of them.

That last figure is the one to hold. The correlation between an anonymity rule and an inflow is visible; the causation is not recorded, because the question was not asked of nine patients in ten. Waiting lists, price, age limits and access rules for single women and female couples all point the same direction, and the registry cannot separate them.

The rule that changed the facts on the ground was not a rule at all. Inference — consumer DNA databases have made anonymity a promise a clinic can no longer keep, whatever the statute says, in any country where enough relatives have tested. A register decides what a state will tell you. It does not decide what a cousin's saliva sample will.

What a row does not tell a reader: whether the rule applies to donations already in storage, what happens to gametes exported from a release regime into an anonymous one or the other way, whether a donor recruited abroad is covered by the treating country's rule or their own, and how many families one donor may create — which is capped in most European systems and not in all.

The ESHRE and European IVF-Monitoring Consortium survey covering 43 European countries at 31 December 2022 is the widest comparative reading available. It is a survey of national correspondents, not a reading of statutes, and several of its groupings do not match this project's understanding of the countries concerned — which is why the rows that rest on it say so, and why three rows say no-data instead.

As of 17 September 2026 the rows resting on named national instruments are Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Czechia. The rest rest on the comparative survey or say no-data.