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Le don de sperme en Israël, son secret et son anonymat

Sperm donation in Israel: secrecy and anonymity

Résumé

Le secret et l’anonymat du don de sperme sont très forts en Israël. Ce mode est préféré par les couples inféconds et semble faciliter leur adaptation à la parentalité à long terme. Dans les communautés religieuses juives orthodoxes, ce don est, tout au plus, toléré à la condition paradoxale que le donneur soit d’ascendance non juive pour éviter un futur mariage incestueux ou consanguin. Bien que le nombre de couples inféconds n’ait pas diminué, la proportion des couples recevant un don de sperme ne cesse de baisser. Il n’est plus que de 20 à 25 % des receveurs de dons, la grande majorité, 75 à 80 %, étant constituée de femmes seules plutôt âgées. Lorsque l’enfant grandit, ces dernières désirent souvent qu’il puisse connaître son père biologique. La réussite du don de sperme à long terme exige aussi du médecin qu’il sache prendre en considération les sensibilités des personnes qu’il traite. Aussi, de même que l’importation de sperme de donneurs d’ascendance non juive est autorisée, il faudrait permettre le recrutement de donneurs sous un double régime: le régime de l’anonymat surtout pour les couples inféconds et le régime de « l’accessibilité » surtout pour les femmes seules.

Abstract

Secrecy of donation and donor anonymity are extremely tight in Israel. For infertile couples, this appears to be the preferred mode of operation apparently facilitating long-term adaptation to parenthood. In orthodox Jewish communities, donor insemination is at best tolerated, if and only if the donor is of non-Jewish ancestry, so as to prevent a future incestuous or consanguineous marriage. Since the introduction of intracytoplasmic sperm injection, the proportion of infertile couples who require sperm donation keeps dropping, currently comprising a mere 20–25% of the recipient population. The rest of the recipients consists of single women, many of whom would like the child to know his or her biological father when he or she has grown up. The longterm success of donor insemination requires doctors’ awareness of the recipients’ sensitivities. Additionally, just as the importation of “non-Jewish sperm” is authorized, it would be advisable to allow recruitment of donors under two distinct modes: “anonymous” and “visible,” thereby accommodating the diverse preferences that various recipients seem to have.

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Correspondence to Y. Soffer.

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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Soffer, Y., Birenbaum-Carmeli, D. Le don de sperme en Israël, son secret et son anonymat. Basic Clin. Androl. 20, 11–19 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12610-009-0053-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12610-009-0053-8

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