'National health to cover donor fertility treatments' - min

(ANSA) - Rome, July 29 - A bill making donor fertility treatments part of national health care will be submitted before parliament's summer recess begins early next month, Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin told the Lower House social affairs committee Tuesday.
    Funding must be allocated to make the treatment available in public clinics as soon as possible, the minister said.
    Lorenzin also said parliament must decide whether children born of anonymous donors have a right to find out who their biological parent(s) are.
    "This issue cannot be left up to a single minister to decide," Lorenzin told MPs.
    Her committee hearing comes a day after a government-appointed panel of scientific experts said Monday that nothing now stands in the way of activating anonymous sperm banks in Italy.
    From now on, public health facilities must "guarantee all citizens the possibility of assisted reproduction via donor gametes (eggs or sperm), without economic or territorial discrimination," the panel said.
    Italian couples unable to conceive on their own were forbidden to use donor sperm or eggs until the supreme Constitutional Court overturned the ban in June.
    The justices struck it down because it unfairly penalized low-income couples who could not travel abroad to seek treatment.
    Lorenzin convened the panel to make recommendations as to how to implement the court's decision.
    The public health care system must allocate money to open "public sperm and egg banks," the experts said.
    Donors should remain anonymous, and their DNA and other data should be cross-referenced to avoid the risk of inbreeding, the panel said.
    For the same reason, the panel recommended limiting the number of live births per donor to a maximum of 25, while also allowing couples to conceive more than one child with the help of gametes (sperm or eggs) from the same donor.