Useful data on assisted reproduction in Europe
A 2018 survey by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embriology (ESHRE) provides the most comprehensive overview on access to assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Europe. The data can freely be browsed, even though they don’t come in a directly downloadable form: they are available either as PDF tables or as an interactive map . ESHRE data covers 43 European countries and it refers to 31 December 2018.
For EDJNet’s large investigation on access to ART in Europe, Civio checked one by one the data for the main countries covered by ESHRE, refining and updating them. In particular, data for Belgium, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom were checked in fall 2021. These checks relied on a variety of institutional, legal or scientific sources at the national level, such as the Directorate of Health or Lovdata for Norway, the ART National Council for Portugal, the French government , the Fertility Network for the UK, the National Health- and Invalidity Insurance Institute for Belgium, the General Health Insurance Company for Czechia, and so on.
ESHRE publishes additional data on an annual basis , but ESHRE itself warns that this information is “incomplete” and “not reliable enough to draw conclusions”. To the best of our knowledge, no other comprehensive overview on access to ART in Europe exists.
Eurostat doesn’t specifically provide data on ART, even if it provides some useful data on births , on the average age of mothers at the birth of the first child , and on the number of children born out of wedlock in Europe. The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) does not disclose information on health-related travel.
In order to integrate or complement data from ESHRE, Civio reviewed the scientific literature in databases such as PubMed and Google Scholar. They contacted the press offices of the ministries of health or social affairs of all the countries of the European Union, as well as the press office of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) in the UK. Civio also contacted the Public Gamete Bank of Portugal, the Repromeda and Unica clinics in Czechia, the European Sperm Bank in Denmark, the IVI-Valencian Infertility Institute in Spain.
You can access the datasets produced for EDJNet’s investigation on assisted reproduction here:
