What Caught My Eye from ESHRE 2026

Rundown of research presented at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology

Every July, the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology (ESHRE) holds its annual meeting, one of the largest gatherings of fertility researchers, clinicians, and industry in the world! I culled through the program to see what folks are studying about donor conception. Keep in mind that none of these are peer-reviewed journal articles yet. Conference abstracts are short, preliminary, and sometimes precede a fuller paper by a year or more.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Gamete Screening Keeps Expanding

An industry-authored study, using data from California Cryo Bank, examined how carrier-positive rates shift as genetic screening panels expand. Reviewing screening results for 2,073 sperm donor applicants across five carrier panels (up to 611 genes) from two labs between 2017 and 2026, the authors found that carrier positivity increased steadily with panel size: from around 55% on the smallest panels to nearly 77% on the largest. The authors argue that because being a carrier is now the norm rather than the exception, excluding carrier-positive donors isn't practical, and the real fix is genetic counseling. However, expanded carrier panels don’t test for the same genes; even two 600-plus-gene panels from different labs overlapped only about 65%. This makes it harder to tell whether a donor and intended parent were screened for the same conditions.

X-linked screening panels have focused on identifying female carriers (since a woman with one affected X copy usually shows no symptoms but can pass the condition to a son). Standard genetic carrier screening for men didn’t include X-linked variants because it was assumed that a man with an X-linked variant would already show symptoms of the disease. A study of 1,170 sperm donor applicants from California Cryo Bank found that expanded genetic screening for X-linked conditions turned up findings in about 1 in 20 applicants. Five of the 64 applicants were excluded from the donor program due to increased personal and reproductive risks for serious conditions and disorders; none of them had a family history that would have predicted it.

An independent UK genetics counseling practice audited how sperm and egg donor recipients respond after being told their chosen donor tested positive as a genetic carrier. Reviewing genetic counseling referrals from 2020–2025 (647 sperm donor and 31 egg donor referrals), the authors found that once recipients understood the risk was generally low, 74% of sperm recipients and about 47% of egg recipients skipped reciprocal screening after counseling.

A team in Barcelona reviewed psychological screening records for 2,521 gamete donor candidates (2017-2024) to examine how their Brief Symptom Checklist-50 (LSB-50) scores compare with those of the general population and what predicts variation among candidates. Donor candidates scored notably healthier than population norms on most measures (e.g., lower distress, somatic symptoms, and depression scores). Within the candidate pool, younger age, female sex, and student/unemployed status were linked to higher distress. The researchers then explored how much a structured clinical interview adds beyond the standardized symptom questionnaire (LSB-50). Only 2.3% of candidates screened as “clinical” on the questionnaire alone, but the interview reshuffled things substantially in both directions: nearly half (30 of 59) of those flagged as clinical were still accepted once a psychologist judged their symptoms as transient rather than lasting, while about 9% of candidates who screened as psychologically “normal” were turned away after the interview surfaced concerns like family psychiatric history or weak motivation to donate.

A Deeper Look at Fertility Fraud

Two qualitative studies on insemination fraud push the field to look beyond the doctor-patient consent violation that it's usually treated as. Zeghiche and colleagues combined a scoping review of the academic literature with interviews from 21 donor-conceived adults and found the literature frames insemination fraud almost entirely as physician misconduct, while DCP described it as a rupture to identity and kinship that involved their parents' violated consent and learning they were donor-conceived and defrauded in the same moment. Indekeu and colleagues interviewed 18 people (13 donor-conceived adults, 5 parents, from 13 families) in Belgium and the Netherlands affected by several distinct types of fraud (e.g., the treating doctor used their sperm, donor sperm was used without parent consent, someone other than the selected donor was used). Participants consistently said peer support felt more useful than professional counseling, largely because most professionals don't yet understand what insemination fraud entails psychosocially.

What Egg Donors Actually Experience

A Danish study asked 12 first-time oocyte donors at a public fertility clinic why they donated and how they decided. Motivations centered on wanting to give something meaningful, though many described feeling personally “rewarded” alongside the altruism. Positive interactions with hospital staff turned out to be a driver of whether someone donated again.

One UK study surveyed egg donors up to five years post-donation about their mental health and satisfaction with post-donation support, using validated wellbeing scales. Of 1,824 donors invited, 124 responded (about 7%), and that group reported strong self-esteem, low distress, and high satisfaction with having donated. The authors frame this as evidence against concerns about donor “vulnerability” raised in a 2025 UK Parliamentary inquiry, but that’s a big claim for a self-selected, low-response-rate sample. One finding worth flagging: most donors wanted to be automatically told how many children resulted from their donation, rather than having to apply for that information as current UK policy requires.

Another UK study interviewed 20 people (11 egg-sharing donors, 9 recipients) about their experience with egg-sharing, where a donor gives eggs in exchange for free or subsidized IVF. Both groups broadly viewed the arrangement as ethical and meaningful. Recipients often described donor eggs as a "lifeline" after reproductive loss, and donors blended altruism with the practical draw of otherwise-unaffordable treatment. Of note: Donors reported distress when the recipient's cycle succeeded and their own didn't, even though egg-sharing doesn't reduce a donor's own odds of success.

Supporting Donor-Conceived People

A Portuguese research team presented several studies related to DCP wellbeing. First, they surveyed 97 donor-conceived people aged 21 to 81 from across the world to examine how contact with a sperm donor and/or donor siblings relates to identity development. Participants most commonly learned about the method used for their conception from parents (n=59) and DNA ancestry testing (n=29). Regarding sperm donor contact, 47 participants had established direct contact, 25 had attempted contact without response, and 16 had not initiated contact. Almost all participants had some form of contact with donor siblings. The headline: Participants who'd made contact with their donor scored higher on "commitment making" (a settled sense of identity commitments) and lower on "ruminative exploration" (anxious, unresolved identity searching) than those who hadn't.

The same researchers also ran seven international focus groups (16 donor-conceived people, 11 parents, 12 donors, 7 healthcare professionals) to co-design a formal care pathway for donor-conceived people’s emotional and informational support. Participants converged on two key moments of vulnerability: the point of disclosure/discovery and the point of initiating contact with a donor or donor siblings. Participants wanted specialized, donor-conception-literate counseling paired with peer resources, ideally coordinated through national fertility regulators rather than left to patient-led organizations of varying quality.

A Danish research team conducted a systematic review that pooled 17 studies (1,786 donor-conceived people across six countries) to synthesize what’s known about how donor-conceived people experience having, or potentially having, donor half-siblings. The picture that emerged was mixed: half-sibling relationships were described as a source of identity and connection, but also came with real emotional labor (e.g., curiosity, hope, disappointment) and the challenge of navigating closeness with people who are genetically related but have no shared history, especially when there are many half-siblings to manage relationships with at once. The authors flag that most included studies recruited through donor-linking registries, meaning the evidence base likely overrepresents people who actively sought contact and underrepresents those who didn’t.

Navigating Donor Conception

An Australian research team interviewed Australian egg donors (n=29) and sperm donors (n=20), and Australian recipients of cross-border egg donation, some of whom used an online platform to try and find donors. They found that moderators (often donors themselves) can actively shape relational norms and expectations between donors, recipients and DCP, privileging donor agency and early contact. Parents sometimes reported they had little room to negotiate or push back against moderator-set norms.

A Canadian research team interviewed 28 parents of donors (egg=12, sperm=6, embryo donors (n=4), and surrogates (n=6). The central finding is that these folks feel they are left to negotiate an unrecognized role largely on their own. Some described feeling like "disposable" or provisional family members, wanting a grandparent relationship with the resulting child but lacking any socially recognized space to claim it, dependent entirely on their own child and the intended parents to define (or deny) their place.

The team at Paths to Parenthub presented two abstracts based on data from their 1,103-respondent survey of recipient parents. King and colleagues found that donor sibling concerns are nearly universal among respondents (96% held at least one), led by worry about emotional impact on their child (51.5%) and simply not knowing how many donor siblings exist (44.7%). Kearns and colleagues found nearly 80% of respondents said their most valuable psychosocial support came from peer networks and specialist organizations rather than clinics, with only 2% naming their clinic as most helpful and mandatory pre-treatment counseling frequently described as a “tick-box exercise.”

Did you make it to ESHRE this year? What stood out to you?