Spain is one of the Countries worlwide at the forefront for its advanced legislation on as-sisted reproduction treatments. For this reason it is one of the main destination for couples and women wishing to have a child with medical help. A demand that increased after the new Law on 2006, that explicitly acknowledged the application of this procedure for lesbian couples and the fact that both partners appear as the parents in the family book if they are married. This change promoted an increase of our Country as recipient of same –sex couples proceeding from Countries such as Italy, where this option is not legal, or United Kingdom and Sweden, where the number of sperm donors has decreased after the decision of revealing donor’s identity.   

The new Valencian Government’s measure of giving back the access to public health to Assisted Reproduction treatments for female without male partner’s collective, has been very well welcomed by private assisted reproduction centres of Valencian Community such as CREA (Assisted Reproduction Medical Centre in Valencia). “We approve that treatment is offered again by public health. We consider that it’s not only a right but also a need for the very low birth rate of our Country and that, for this reason, women who want to get pregnant should be given the maximum opportunities”, pointed out Dr. Carmen Calatayud, CREA’S co-director.   

Likewise, she stressed as Spain is one of the Countries with lower rate of children per woman in fertile age. According to the last report of OCDE only Portuguese and Polish women have less children in average, “being realistic our Country needs to increase its birth rate and the exclusion of this collective from public health system draws even more attention to this need”. 

Indeed, in the past few years the collective of women with female partner coming to CREA for assisted reproduction treatment became higher and higher. In the last five years it has been recorded an increasing of 25% of female couples coming to the Clinic.  

As regards treatments Dr. Calatayud points out how CREA is specifically prepared to at-tend this collective, from easier treatments such as Artificial Insemination, to most sophis-ticated ones such as ROPA (Reception of Oocytes from Partner), that “are regularly car-ried out in our Centre”. 

In this sense, she stresses as Artificial Insemination with donor sperm is a low complexity treatment, which efficiency and safety, both if it’s through insemination or through assisted fertilization, is directly linked to the quality of the donor sperm programme chosen. “Here at CREA we count on our own Sperm Bank, quality’s point of reference on a national scale, certified with ISO-9001 since 2004, and the first in Spain to be certified by new UNE 179007 regulation, specific for assisted human reproduction Laboratories”. 

ROPA, on the other hand, is a new and more sophisticated treatment, increasingly re-quested by women regardless of their age, where one woman gives her oocytes and the other woman gives her uterus. It consists of performing an In-Vitro Fertilization with two women and the sperm of an anonymous donor. One of the women will be giving her oo-cyte that will be inseminated with the donor sperm so that the resulting embryo is transfer-rred into the uterus of the other woman, who will be carrying the pregnancy. “By this way, both women have same rights and obligations on the baby with no need for one of them to adopt him, as it happened before”, the Doctor explains. 

However, the age at which they come to perform assisted reproduction treatments is low-er, between 30 and 33, in female couples, than for those women who have decided to cope with maternity on solitary, generally separated women or women who decided to postpone maternity waiting for the ideal partner, who generally come between the age of 38 and 40. As concerns female couples, the younger woman is the one who, in case of ROPA, offers her oocytes, where the older woman is the one who generally wants to carry the pregnancy, as the age affects possibilities. 

As concerns the possible damage for private centers of giving public coverage in assisted reproduction treatments to single women, Dr. Calatayud states that “the request is so high that many of these women will continue to recur to private centers and also, the fact that these treatments become widespread will make an higher number of women without male partner decide to take this step”.