Why So Many Women Travel to Denmark for Fertility Treatments
Holly Ryan knows the biological father of her children has two sisters, is a Coldplay fan, and doesn’t like eating chicken in pasta dishes. She knows his mother is a nurse and his father is a policeman, and that his aunt has green eyes and curly hair. She even has a photo of him as a child, and an audio recording of his voice.
But Ryan, 41, doesn’t know his name and has never met him. More than six years ago, she decided she wanted to start a family. “Once you commit to trying to get pregnant, it becomes a kind of obsession,” says Ryan, the director of a talent agency for TV directors, producers and editors. “As a single, gay woman, I knew in order to get from A to B, I had to be strategic about the quickest and least murky route, which I concluded was online shopping for a sperm donor.”
Like thousands of women in Europe each year, Ryan turned to Denmark. Today, the Nordic country of 5.7 million people has the greatest proportion of babies born through assisted reproductive technolog..