Baby Steps towards a Donor Registry in Canada? Using the Safety of Sperm and Ova Regulations as Building Blocks

This coming Tuesday, February 4, 2020, the new Safety of Sperm and Ova Regulations (the "Safety Regulations") come into force.  For the first time, Canada will not only be regulating the donor sperm imported and used in Canada, but will also be regulating donor ova.  There are many implications to these new regulations, but I want to focus on one in particular that hasn't received a lot of attention and may in fact be unintentional: the Safety Regulations are putting into place requirements that make it possible to trace donor ova and sperm between the donors and the recipients and back.  That, coupled with requirements to keep records about the donor's health and genetic screening or testing, has the potential to provide more medical information to donor conceived people than is currently available to them, at least in some cases.  

There are a number of stakeholders, myself included, who believe that a mandatory donor registry is of critical importance.  My ideal donor registry would most certainly collect, store and distribute more information than the Safety Regulations provide for, including an ability to count the number of cycles a particular donor participates in, the use of the gametes from a specific donor within a specific population, and provide the ability for donor conceived people and their parents to connect with other families who used gametes from the same donor, if they so desire.  Following the Reference re Assisted Human Reproduction Act decision, though, I believe that this infrastructure, must come from the provincial government, and would likely be relevant only to donations which occur under that province's jurisdiction (i.e. provincial donor registries may not include donor gametes imported from other jurisdictions such as the US, which currently make up a very large percentage of the donor gametes used in Canada).    

There are problems with using the Safety Regulations as the foundation for a donor registry, including that the Regulations only require that records be kept for ten years after the donor gametes were last used. Further, it is not clear whether the government has any intention to allow this information to be accessed by parents of donor conceived people or the donor conceived people themselves, as such access is not contemplated by the Safety Regulations.  While these may be baby steps, they are steps in the right direction requiring government to ensure that information that is important to donor conceived people is safeguarded for them in the future.  If this ever was to lead to a donor registry, the provincial governments will have to pick up the mantle and move forward.

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