Registry for Reproductive Material Donors?

According to William Heisel, Registry may track egg, sperm donors, LA Times, Jan. 3, 2008:

Troubled by the health history and backgrounds of some anonymous egg and sperm donors, leaders in the fertility industry have said in recent weeks that they would create a national registry to track donors and birth outcomes. * * *

Egg and sperm donors are for the most part anonymous. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires fertility centers to provide detailed data on pregnancy outcomes: the number of attempts at pregnancy, the type of technology used, whether the treatment resulted in multiple fetuses.

But the CDC, which works closely with the reproductive technology society in gathering fertility data, does not keep track of individual donors’ histories, diseases or other problems, nor does it link their names to outcomes.

A registry would work something like this: Donation agencies and fertility clinics would submit identifying information about donors and surrogates, including Social Security numbers and birth dates. That information would be linked to results of drug tests, sexually transmitted disease tests and genetic screenings. And all of that data would be linked to outcome information supplied by obstetricians.

Clinics would stay in touch with recipient parents to find out if children had developed any genetic abnormalities. All the information potentially would be available to agencies when a person applied to be a donor and to clinics when prospective parents went to them seeking to use a certain donor.

One of the estate planning issues that may arise if such a registry is created is that is would become easier for people to locate their biological parents.  Under the uncertain laws that exist in many states, the children born as a result of donated reproductive materials may be able to make claims to the donor’s estates as heirs, pretermitted children, or as being included in class gifts to children or grandchildren.