#485 Erkenningsnummer P708816
june 21, 2017 \ newsweekly - € 0,75 \ read more at www.flanderstoday.eu current affairs \ p2
politics \ p4
Save our friet
The European Commission’s draft law on limiting the consumption of the chemical acrylamide could put local fry shack traditions at risk \6
BUSiNESS \ p6
Consequences of cancer
innovation \ p7
education \ p9
art & living \ p10
Climbing to the top
A cancer diagnosis can mean being sick and the loss of a job, which is why a group of volunteers opened a shop of free products just for cancer patients
A Brussels initiative is training refugees for jobs high in the sky, such as window washer and wind farm maintenance
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All change M Museum in Leuven has reopened after five months of renovation. “With this ambitious makeover, we’ve really killed two birds with one stone,” says general manager Peter Bary. “We will be able to use the potential of our vast collection, while at the same time implementing our innovative and visitor-friendly philosophy about what a museum should be these days.”
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© Rudi Van Beek
Meet the donor detectives
Donor-conceived woman from Antwerp helps others in same position learn their origins Andy Furniere More articles by Andy \ flanderstoday.eu
Driven by the secrets of her own past, Steph Raeymaekers from Antwerp is part of a team that helps people track down their biological parents.
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veryone has the basic right to know where they come from. That’s the principle behind the new Donor Detectives Foundation, in which the children of Flemish and Dutch sperm donors are working together to help people in the same situation find their biological fathers. The team consists of four Dutch and two Flemish women, all of whom were conceived via donation. One of them is Steph Raeymaekers, from Antwerp, who’s also the founder of the non-profit Donorkinderen (Donor-Conceived Children), which facilitates the exchange of experiences between donor-conceived children and fights for their right to know their fathers. When she was 25, Raeymaekers, now 38, overheard that she and her triplet siblings had been conceived via donation. After her father was diagnosed with infertility –
wrongly, as it later turned out – her mother decided to undergo treatment with donor sperm at a private clinic. “Lots of things suddenly made sense to me,” says Raeymaekers. “Most importantly, the fact that I never had a close relationship with my social father,” she says, referring to the man who raised her. This summer, she also found out that her sister doesn’t have the same biological father. The doctor who helped their mother conceive, it turned out, mixed two samples of sperm, believing this would make the treatment more effective. Neither Raeymaekers nor the rest of her family know who the biological fathers are. Until 2007, Belgium had no legislation concerning donors’ privacy, but fertility clinics, as a rule, guaranteed their anonymity. Since 2007, in addition to anonymous donors, fertility centres can also accept sperm from people who are known to the prospective parents, such as close friends or family members. “My parents were told that it was better not to talk about it with us at all, that this would avoid problems,” says Raey-
maekers. “But the long-held secret only undermined our family and had a huge emotional impact.” According to Raeymaekers, anonymity of sperm donors should be outlawed, just like it is in the Netherlands, which banned it in 2004. “Your genetic descent is an important part of your identity, your parents are like a biological mirror,” she says. “The right to know your parents, which is also included in the UN convention on the rights of the child, is fundamental, and so many donor-conceived children are discriminated against.” Fertility centres, in general, favour anonymity because they fear that it would otherwise deter many possible donors and cause a shortage of sperm at a time when demand for fertility treatments is increasing, as more single people and gay couples explore this option. “Donor anonymity works to the advantage of fertility centres because they don’t have to be transparent about their practices,” says Raeymaekers. “Under the current system, however, many donors are people doing it for the money, like students who are looking for extra income, continued on page 5