The average waiting time for fertility treatments in the National Health Service is three and a half years, according to the National Council for Medically Assisted Procreation (CNPMA), which also warns of the lack of donors.
“A hetero sexual couple, a couple of women or a woman without a male partner necessarily needs gametes to undergo treatment and there are also many heterosexual couples who need gametes, whether male [sperm] or female [eggs], to undergo their treatments,” the president of CNPMA, Carla Rodrigues, told the Lusa news agency today.
Stressing that “these people are subject to a waiting list of three and a half years”, she warned of the case of women who reach the age limit while waiting to have medically assisted procreation (PMA) treatment on the SNS.
She gave the example of a woman who registers within the age limit, but who has been on the waiting list for two years: “She just hasn’t been treated because there are no gametes available and when she reaches 40 she is immediately excluded (…) for reasons that are attributable to the National Health Service itself, which has not been able to respond,” she said.
For Carla Rodrigues, this situation “is not acceptable”, because “these are fundamental rights that are being denied to people”, and she therefore argues that the Ministry of Health should provide for an extension of the age limit for these cases.
“The law says that these people have the right to medically assisted procreation treatment, they sign up for PMA treatment, but then they don’t have access to that treatment” on the SNS, leaving them with the option of going private, which for many people “is prohibitively expensive”.
Taking stock of the five years since the law that ends anonymity in donations for PMA treatments came into force, marked on August 1st, Carla Rodrigues said that at the time “the paradigm shift from anonymity [to non-anonymity] had some negative impact on male donations”.
Currently, there are “few donations” in the SNS, especially from men, but Carla Rodrigues said she doesn’t believe that the main reason is the end of donor confidentiality.
“The private sector has these donations because it does its job of selecting donors, recruiting donors and collecting them. The biggest problem is in the public sector,” she said.
The president of the regulatory body noted that in the case of male donations, the compensation paid to donors in the SNS “is frankly low”.
In her opinion, the compensation should be rethought and revised, because it may not be enough to cover the expenses that the donor has to incur in travel and the loss of income due to possibly having to miss work to donate.
In the past, donors had to travel to Porto, where the Public Gamete Bank is located, to make their donation, which “greatly limited” access, but now they can do so at the Alfredo da Costa Maternity Hospital in Lisbon and at the Coimbra University Hospital Center.
“The problem is that there is no demand from donors or donors for donations in the National Health Service,” she lamented.
Faced with this reality, Carla Rodrigues defended the need for an information and clarification campaign among the population, especially young people, and also argued that the Directorate-General for Health should analyze what is happening and take some measures.
She added that the CNPMA has already requested an audience with the Ministry of Health to ask various questions and seek solutions.
