Donor anonymity and frozen embryos in France

A few months ago, the French state appeared poised to destroy thousands of cryopreserved embryos that had been created thanks to anonymous gamete donation. After stirring strong opposition from patients and medical professionals, the Ministry of Health clarified on 6 March 2025 – just weeks before the law was set to come into effect – that only the gametes donated anonymously would be destroyed, not the embryos created with them. This controversy highlights the urgent need for in-depth reflection on the legal and ethical framework for frozen embryos, as their numbers in biobanks worldwide keep increasing.

The planned destruction of anonymously donated gametes, as well as the embryos conceived with them, was a side effect of a recent change in provisions about donor anonymity in the bioethics law governing medically assisted reproduction in France. When sperm donation was first regulated in France in 1973, it was modelled on blood donation – both free and anonymous. The first bioethics law, passed in 1994, extended this model to oocyte donation.

However, donor anonymity has long been contested in France, as in many other countries, by people conceived through gamete donation. After many debates, the 2021 revision of the bioethics law, which took effect on 1 September 2022, recognised an individual's 'right to access their origins' and prohibited anonymous gamete donation. Under the new legal framework, donors must disclose their identity and provide information about their age, health, family and professional situation, country of birth, and a personal statement explaining their reasons for donating.

The donor remains anonymous to the recipients. Only the person born from the donation may request access to this information upon turning 18. Individuals conceived from anonymous donations prior to the change in the law may submit a request to a newly formed committee (CAPADD), which seeks to contact donors and obtain their consent to be identified.

One consequence of this legal shift was that previously donated frozen gametes, and embryos created with them, were no longer compliant with the law. A child conceived with them would be denied their legal right to access their origins. The law included a two-and-a-half-year transition period during which gamete banks and fertility clinics were tasked with recontacting donors to seek their consent to waive anonymity. However, they could still use gametes for which donors remained anonymous and embryos made with these gametes. The goal was to allow time to build new donor stocks and prevent an interruption to fertility services, in a context of increased demand when single women and lesbian couples were permitted to access treatment with donor sperm in 2021 (see BioNews 1099).

This transition period was to end on 30 March 2025. Yet, the state provided little clarity about its intentions, leaving the interpretation of the law – whether it applied to existing embryos – unresolved. The looming destruction of thousands of cryopreserved embryos sparked outrage and confusion among both IVF users and providers. They explained the extreme value of these embryos for individuals who had spent years and faced many hurdles to produce them, and underscored that these embryos represented for many the only hope to have a child. Their proposed destruction elicited grief and outcry.

Finally, the state clarified that embryos created with anonymously donated gametes before 31 March 2025 would not be subject to the new law and could still be used by the individuals or couples for whom they were originally created, or to whom they had been donated before that date. They could not be given to a new individual or couple after that date. People opting to transfer one of these embryos must sign a consent form acknowledging that a child born from them may be unable to access information about their donor and, therefore, unable to exercise their right to know their origins.

In the end, the government's decision largely aligned with the arguments made by patient advocacy groups and medical professionals: that cryopreserved embryos, though not yet implanted, were already part of a procreative project and belonged to the intended parent(s) – regardless of whether their own genetic material was involved.

Nonetheless, the state's failure to anticipate the issue betrayed a lack of awareness of the realities of fertility care that are all too familiar to IVF patients and medical professionals. In those extremely long and arduous journeys marked by both hope and loss, the mandated destruction of an embryo would represent a profound loss. And introducing legal unpredictability into experiences already defined by uncertainty only added to the burden faced by those undergoing IVF.

This controversy also underscores the profound ambiguity of IVF embryos as liminal entities, and the ensuing difficulty in making decisions about them. The new French legislation effectively placed embryos and gametes in the same category – as reproductive biomaterials carrying genetic information on biological lineage, and therefore subject to specific regulation. However, the reactions to their potential destruction revealed the clear differences between them.

The planned destruction of 30,000 anonymously donated sperm samples provoked little response beyond concerns over longer waiting times. (No anonymously donated oocytes remained, which raises other ethical issues about the persistent shortage of oocytes.) By contrast, one IVF user, quoted in news coverage, commented that the threatened destruction of her frozen embryos felt akin to killing her newborn child's siblings.

As many social science studies have shown (including my colleagues' and my recent research), IVF users conceptualise and value their embryos in complex ways, that vary among individuals and are often in tension within one single person. While some IVF users consider their frozen embryos as their unborn children, others describe them as clusters of cells that may or may not become more through a potential pregnancy; but even so, they do assign a strong value to these embryos that becomes apparent when they consider what they should do with the embryos that they no longer need for their family.

For some people, acknowledging this value means donating their embryos to research, for others, it is donating them to another couple; for yet others, it means thawing them because they should not be used for purposes other than the one they were intended for. What IVF frozen embryos mean and how they should be treated is an ethically complex and highly situated question.

So, who should make decisions regarding the fate of frozen embryos? Developing clear legal and ethical frameworks is essential for fertility care to proceed in the best way. But, as in this case, the goal is not to pit the interests of IVF users against those of children born from gamete donation. Rather, these discussions should more directly centre on the voices of all those with lived experiences of IVF – as child, intending parent, donor.

This article benefited from a fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France), with the financial support of the French State, programme 'Investissements d'avenir' managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+).