A French court has effectively reaffirmed the country’s policy of gamete donor anonymity by rejecting a donor-conceived woman’s demand for information on her biological father.
The woman requested that a message be passed on to the man asking whether he would accept to be identified. She was also seeking disclosure of non-identifying information – medical history, reasons for donation, number of children conceived from the sample – in the event of the man’s refusal of her request.
But even though the woman, who has requested anonymity, was not asking for direct identification, the tribunal in Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, still threw out her request on the grounds that information given to clinics by gamete donors is protected as secret under French law.
The woman, herself a lawyer, had invoked Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to private and family life and in some readings confers a right to access information essential to personal identity.
