Egg donation in Spain is at a turning point. Demand for treatments using donated gametes keeps growing, while the profile of donors increasingly reflects the country’s demographic shift. In this context, maintaining a strict search for the traditional European Caucasian phenotype creates unnecessary delays and, in many cases, a practice less aligned with the law than it might seem.
The shortage of Caucasian donors is a real problem
Spain is Europe’s leading egg provider: around 12,000 donations a year, which represents more than half of all oocyte donations across Europe. But the balance between supply and demand has narrowed. According to the SEF’s 2023 National Activity Registry, 168,372 IVF cycles were performed in Spain, and babies born through assisted reproduction now account for 10% of all births in the country.
At the same time, the makeup of the resident population has changed: 20.3% of those living in Spain were born outside the country, and the Hispanic-American group is the largest. The traditional source of Caucasian donors of European origin carries relatively less weight every year.
Hispanic-American donation is already a structural reality
7.61% of the population residing in Spain was born in South America. The Venezuelan group alone exceeds 690,000 people, and in 2024 Madrid surpassed one million residents of Latin American origin. We are talking about a predominantly young population, of reproductive age, with a strong female presence between the ages of 20 and 35 and largely of Spanish descent
These women come to clinics with the same motivation as any other candidate, pass the same medical, psychological, and genetic screenings, and today make up a growing percentage of potential egg donors.
What exactly does the law say?
Article 6.5 of Law 14/2006 on assisted human reproduction techniques states that the medical team must “strive to guarantee the greatest possible phenotypic and immunological similarity between the available samples and the recipient woman”. The key lies in “available samples”: the law requires the greatest possible similarity within what is realistic, not absolute phenotypic identity, which after all would be extremely difficult to achieve.
The legal report prepared in July 2025 by Fernando Abellán, director of Derecho Sanitario Asesores and legal advisor to the SEF, supports this interpretive criterion: when there is an objectively established lack of compatible gametes within the same phenotype and delaying treatment is not clinically advisable, it falls to the biomedical team to select the most suitable available alternative. The document further notes that postponing treatment without justified medical cause could compromise the reproductive freedom recognized in Article 3 of Organic Law 2/2010. Conversely, it would indeed be improper to make an assignment based exclusively on the patients’ aesthetic preferences.
The Hispanic-American phenotype is more diverse than assumed
Treating “Hispanic-American phenotype” as a homogeneous category is a conceptual bias. Latin America has enormous genetic and phenotypic variability: women with recent European ancestry, Mediterranean phenotypes indistinguishable from the native population of southern Europe, and intermediate combinations with extremely high phenotypic compatibility with European Caucasian recipients.
Clinical compatibility does not depend on geographic origin, but on objective criteria: skin tone, eye color, facial biometrics, bone structure, and immunological parameters.
Facial biometric analysis: objective and traceable matching
At Gametia Biobank we apply a facial biometric analysis system based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) trained on millions of images using a triplet loss methodology. The system builds a “facial map” of each patient and compares it with potential donors to identify the greatest similarities, maximizing matches and minimizing differences.
The result: a matching that is objective, traceable, and respectful of the anonymity of the donor, one that does not depend on the administrative category of “Caucasian” or “Latina” but on real similarity. This objectification is also especially useful in the scenario described in the legal opinion, where the clinical decision must be “duly objectified”.
Less waiting time, a better clinical experience
Expanding the eligible pool with Hispanic-American donors of high biometric compatibility has a direct operational impact:
- Faster assignments and shorter waiting lists.
- Treatment within the best clinical window for the recipient.
- Less dropout and greater patient satisfaction.
- Better planning of laboratory work and schedules.
Conclusion
Law 14/2006 does not require phenotypic identity: it requires the greatest possible similarity within what is available. The legal opinion and the SEF’s recommendations confirm this. Spain’s demographic reality has already integrated Hispanic-American donors as a structural part of biobanks. And facial biometric analysis turns similarity into an objective variable.
For clinics, this means less waiting and more patients treated at their best clinical moment. For patients, a medical answer when they need it.
Bibliography
- Law 14/2006, of 26 May, on assisted human reproduction techniques. Art. 6.5.
- Organic Law 2/2010, of 3 March, on sexual and reproductive health and the voluntary termination of pregnancy. Art. 3.
- Abellán, F. Legal opinion “Selection of a donor of a different phenotype”. Derecho Sanitario Asesores. Madrid, 1 July 2025.
- Spanish Fertility Society (SEF) and Ministry of Health. 2023 National Activity Registry.
- National Statistics Institute (INE). Statistics on resident population by country of birth. Data as of 1 January 2025.
- Schroff, F., Kalenichenko, D., Philbin, J. FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering. CVPR, 2015.
