El preu de ser mare

The Price of Being a Mother is a journalistic essay that delves into the reality of egg donation. It documents the donation process, the operation of the clinics, the economic and lucrative background, the pressures, suffering and sequelae of the donors, among other aspects of interest. Written by journalist Júlia Bacardit. Human reproduction treatments have grown exponentially in Spain since 2009. This is due to the maternity delay inherent in late capitalism in general and the global economic crisis of 2008 in particular. But the crisis and the implicit ways of life of this capitalism are not the only reason for the rise of assisted reproduction in Spain. Many assisted reproduction treatments require the use of donated sperm and eggs, and unlike what happens in most European Union countries, in Spain the donation is anonymous. Anonymity encourages many more women to donate eggs in exchange for a reward of approximately 1,200 euros, and the surplus causes many recipients from all over Europe and North Africa to travel to Spain to be inseminated. The maximum number of creatures born from each donor's eggs is six, a figure that should be monitored and recorded through a state and European register that was approved many years ago but has never been created. In our house, if she goes to different clinics, a woman can donate as many times as she wants either for altruism, for the financial reward or a little for both. Almost all assisted reproduction clinics are private. The start-up of the registry is not particularly suitable for these clinics, just as some would not like the lifting of the anonymity of donations. Without a guarantee of anonymity, donors would be exposed to children born from their eggs being able to contact them when they reach the age of majority, as is the case in other countries. The right to know one's own origins is enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights and the Spanish Constitution, and in this sense anonymous donations contradict national and international law. Egg donation and assisted reproduction treatments are becoming more common in an increasingly less fertile society that postpones motherhood as much as it can. They are part of the present and the future. Assisted reproduction allows many women who cannot be mothers and who wish to be mothers, but the activity of the sector raises many questions that we should ask ourselves as a society. What do we do with the more than 70,000 frozen embryos that exist in Catalonia alone? Should we keep talking about egg donation or should we talk openly about buying and selling eggs? How do we make sure the donation is fair and not a desperate financial outlet for young, precarious girls selling their fertility? To what extent should we be able to manipulate the genetics of offspring as a result of assisted reproduction? What are the real risks of repeated exposure to the necessary hormones to make any donation cycle possible? Should we rethink the imperative of this motherhood at any cost or, on the contrary, should we give free rein to the advances of assisted reproduction?