The Honest Gamete Banking Pledge

Background

Most patients who come to donor conception share a very simple goal: they want a healthy child. Everything else—profiles, traits, quotas—is secondary to that outcome.

From a patient perspective, donors with proven fertility matter. A donor who has already helped create children has demonstrated that their gametes work in real-world conditions, not just in a lab. That alone increases the likelihood of achieving a pregnancy and, ultimately, a child.

Likewise, a donor with many donor-conceived children does not represent an increased medical risk. On the contrary, repeated successful outcomes across different families provide additional reassurance that there are no hidden fertility or health concerns emerging over time. Medically speaking, there is no evidence-based reason to reduce the number of children from an excellent donor simply because previous outcomes have been positive.

Patients also do not experience donors as interchangeable commodities. Some donors are simply more attractive to more people—because of health history, proven fertility, personal characteristics, or a combination of factors. Limiting access to these donors for reasons unrelated to medicine or law reduces patient choice and, in practice, lowers the chances for some families to ever have a child at all.

We believe it is a mistake to remove excellent donors from availability when there is no medical justification to do so. Doing so prioritizes a hypothetical future concern over the very real, present needs of patients who are trying—often urgently—to start a family.

Concerns about the emotional experience of donor-conceived children, including awareness of half-siblings, deserve respect. We address these concerns through transparency and, where possible, through options such as exclusivity. However, for some donors, exclusivity is not feasible. Their value to current and future patients is simply too high to justify withdrawing them from use when families need them most.

Setting arbitrary, pre-decided limits based solely on the number of existing donor children effectively makes a choice on the child’s behalf: that it is better not to exist than to exist with many half-siblings. In the absence of medical risk, we do not believe that decision should be made upstream by a donor bank. It should remain with informed patients, supported by clear data and full transparency.

Our position is pragmatic and patient-centered. We comply fully with legal requirements and donor preferences, and we are transparent about any limits that apply to a given donor. Beyond that, our responsibility is to maximize access to excellent donors for the people who need them now.

As evidence evolves or the balance of supply and demand changes, our stance may evolve with it. But today, with donor scarcity and growing patient need, we believe that prioritizing proven fertility, transparency, and patient choice is the most responsible path forward.

The Honest Gamete Banking Pledge

For patients, this commitment is simple: you should have access to the same information we do when making decisions that affect your chance of having a child.

Under the Honest Gamete Banking Pledge, we commit to full transparency around donor availability and family limits. Patients can see whether a donor currently has a limit, how availability is managed, and how outcomes are tracked—without guesswork and without hidden rules that only banks or clinics can see.

Family quotas are always linked to real patients, not held in the abstract. A quota is only released when a clinic confirms that a treatment did not result in a pregnancy. This protects patients from over-allocation and ensures that family limits reflect real-world outcomes, not assumptions.

In practice, this means patients can make informed choices based on clear, consistent information, knowing that availability, tracking, and limits are handled honestly and responsibly—so the focus stays where it belongs: on giving you the best possible chance of having a healthy child.