First step for women to decide when to destroy their frozen eggs

MadridWhy can a man freely decide when to destroy frozen sperm and a woman cannot do so with her eggs? This anomaly, established in current law, was debated this Tuesday afternoon in Congress, which will take a first step to eliminate this "discrimination". An initiative by the PSOE that the plenary will take into consideration and which proposes to equate the regulation on the cryopreservation of oocytes to that of semen in such a way that women are not forced to preserve them throughout their fertile lives. Today, the only way to destroy them is by obtaining the opinion of two experts stating that the woman can no longer become pregnant. On the other hand, a man can decide at any time and without any oversight if he wants to dispose of his semen deposited in biobanks. Vox is the only party that has positioned itself against the proposal.

"It is not a simple technical adjustment, it is a very clear political decision: whether we continue to maintain a logic of guardianship for women or advance in the logic of rights," stated socialist deputy Margarita Martín. Even the PP, through its deputy Elvira Velasco, argued that current legislation calls into question women's "autonomy" and that "the elimination of these reports [required for oocytes and not for semen] is a reasonable, proportionate measure aligned with international practice". This is a modification that has the backing of experts and scientific associations dedicated to fertility, who also warn of the large accumulation of eggs in biobanks. Not being able to destroy them when the woman is clear that she will no longer want to use them also incurs a maintenance cost, given that most of the centers dedicated to this are private.

The ERC deputy Etna Estrems has denounced that the framework of the current legislation, from 2006, is that of an "absolute guardianship of the conscious decision not to be mothers" in a society that still today "judges all those who one day decided that we did not want children". Estrems has argued that it is "unacceptable" that if a woman who decided to freeze eggs just in case changes her mind at 35, she has to wait until 50 to destroy them. "It is a matter of power, of whether women with gestational capacity have the last word without anyone deciding about our bodies," added Noemí Santana, from Podemos. Almost all the groups in favor of the modification have reproached that the proposal does not extend the change also to cryopreserved pre-embryos, which also cannot be freely destroyed.