The mother of a seven-year-old girl who was born with a rare fertility disorder has donated eggs for her daughter to use to start a family later in life.
If the girl and her future partner choose to use the eggs, the woman will become the first in the world to give birth to her own biological half-sister or brother, The Guardian reported today.
According to the report, Flavie Boivin was born with a genetic disorder called Turner syndrome which affects one in 2,500 female births. Women with the condition have very few eggs from birth and reach the menopause extremely early, so are often infertile by the time they may want to have children.
Her mother, Melanie Boivin, a 35-year-old lawyer from Montreal, decided to donate some of her own eggs to her daughter because of lengthy waiting lists for donor eggs which she believed would only be worse when Flavie is older.
The Guardian said Mrs Boivin, who has two other children, an 11-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, approached fertility doctors at McGill University in Montreal to ask if they would consider storing her eggs.
"For a complete year I was thinking about it and did some research on the internet and was discussing it with my partner because we were concerned about the ethical questions. Would I look at the child as my grandchild or as my own? We were also concerned about the financial impact, the physical impact on me and the emotional impact on the family. After a year I was convinced there were more advantages than disadvantages," Mrs Boivin told The Guardian.
"What made us sure was the fact that I was there to help my daughter. The role of a mother is essentially to help her children and if I could do anything in my power to help her I had to do it and because of my age I had to do it now. I told myself if she had needed another organ like a kidney I would volunteer without any hesitation and it is the same kind of thought process for this," she added.
Fertility specialists at the university referred the case to an ethics committee, which approved the procedure.
If Flavie wishes to use the eggs, she will need to seek approval from another ethics committee before her treatment can go ahead. Because Turner syndrome is a genetic condition which can be passed from parent to child, it is likely that any embryos produced from her mother's eggs would be tested for the condition using a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, said The Guardian.
