The best aspect of the film, The Secret Society, is how it glimpses the many ripples created through 'third-party' reproduction.
Take six-time egg donor, Katie, whose hormone injections and retrieval we witness on screen. Right after relinquishing 22 eggs, she asked the doctor about the possibility of freezing some for herself. 'She wanted to talk to you about her own fertility,' the nurse said to the doctor as he's leaving the room. 'She was just a little bit worried about if she wanted to have a family, and she got a little bit teary.'
And we don't just meet Katie. During the course of the film, we meet her partner too, who's supportive, but concerned about long-term health implications. We meet her mum and dad. Dad worried at first that she was just in it for the money. We watch her chat online with former recipients and their baby – and in person with current recipients who have just come into possession of embryos made from her eggs that we watched being extracted. We even follow her into her career as an egg broker trying to make a living recruiting other young women into the trade.
Writer and director Rebecca Campbell takes this rippling-out approach with many of the stories she incorporates into the documentary – including her own. A few years back, she decided to donate eggs to a couple she knew, and in the film, we meet the child born from those eggs and the parents who were gifted them. We also meet Campbell's partner (the cameraman), and we watch Campbell's mother interact with her donor grandchild for the first time.
Campbell was afraid she wouldn't be able to have children of her own. 'After the donation,' she tells the recipient, 'my body didn't feel right for a couple of years.' The recipient confessed that she still worried that someday her child will say that she's not the real mum. Strangely, one ripple Campbell neglected to include is that of donor-conceived adults.
The film doesn't shy away from heartbreak and pain. Some of the couples featured aren't successful, and their emotion is pretty raw.
At its heart, this film is about how difficult it is to be an infertile person. Campbell perhaps has too many characters and too little signposting, but she succeeds in conveying just how lonely and exhausting infertility is. But the film clearly has a political objective, too: to advocate against laws that prohibit payment to donors and surrogates. Here I feel it is less successful.
The documentary is centred in Canada, where a federal law makes it illegal to pay a donor or surrogate. Anyone doing so can be jailed for up to ten years, be fined up to $500,000, or both. It's worth noting that since the law came into force in 2004, no parent has been convicted or even charged, despite widespread evidence that many parents do pay. One parent in the film even felt comfortable admitting on camera that she had someone hand her egg donor an envelope of cash in a food court.
Still, it's true that criminalisation has unintentionally made people who use donors and surrogates feel uncomfortable. If they want treatment in their own country, they sometimes find themselves operating in the shadows of the law. If they want to pay but also be legal and above-board about it, they sometimes have to go elsewhere. That said, a perverse aspect of the Canadian law is that it is okay to buy frozen eggs and sperm from foreign donors who were paid elsewhere for their gametes. That's what many people end up doing, including two of the people featured prominently in this film.
Should the law be changed? Should paying for gametes and surrogacy be decriminalised, even permitted? Campbell puts too little effort into examining this question deeply. Instead, it feels like her argument mostly rests on the overwhelming background roar: don't put these lovely people through all this.
Parts of the film even felt a bit misleading. Campbell spends time on a private members' bill to decriminalise payment, for instance. It's made to feel much more significant than it actually was. A few speeches were made, but no vote was ever held and it never made it to committee. It died on the Order Paper, as they say. Also not mentioned was the fact that a campaign by industry members, who stood to gain a good deal from its passing, was carried out in the lead up to the bill.
Other bits needed more examination. Some clips, if you didn't listen carefully, left the impression that fertility treatment itself was under assault. 'If something is complex, what do we do? We ban it,' said one fertility doctor. Another doctor said, 'It's actually an anomaly that Canada doesn't recognise infertility as a disease.'
One comment, however, hit that nerve that always gets activated in this debate. If you believe in capitalism, said Shawn Winsor, an ethicist, then you might have no problem with the idea of paying for gametes. If you believe, however, that some activities should be separated from the market, outside the influence of money, then you might be opposed. 'The challenge with that notion, though, is that physicians are well paid, nurses are well paid, embryologists are well paid. The people who aren't well paid are the donors.'
Alison Motluk is a Toronto freelance journalist who publishes HeyReprotech, a weekly newsletter about what's really happening with assisted reproduction.
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