Greece has introduced stricter regulations on egg donation, bringing its laws in line with international bioethical norms.
The National Authority for Medically Assisted Reproduction announced that under the new framework, each donor may undergo ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval no more than six times in her lifetime, with a mandatory four-month interval between procedures.
The measures, approved in July and set to be published in the Government Gazette, are based on the country’s existing reproductive law (Law 3305/2005) and the Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine. Officials stressed that the new rules will not place any financial burden on the state budget.
According to the authority, the move aligns Greece with practices already in place in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Sweden, where restrictions are designed to safeguard donors’ health and reduce the risk of genetic overlap in the population.
In the United States, for example, professional guidelines recommend a maximum of six donation cycles per donor, while the UK limits the creation of families from a single donor’s eggs to ten. Spain enforces a strict anonymity policy and a cap of six births per donor, and France limits donations to eggs that could result in up to six families, allowing children to access a donor’s identity once they reach adulthood.
Elsewhere in Europe, Belgium allows eggs from one donor to create up to six families, while Sweden generally permits donations to six couples. Nordic countries such as Norway set numerical caps on the number of children born from one donor, whereas Canada uses population-based guidelines without imposing a nationwide legal limit. In Asia, India’s 2020 Assisted Reproductive Technology Bill permits a woman to donate eggs only once in her life, with a limit of seven eggs per donation. Russia, by contrast, has no strict national caps but requires donors to meet certain age and health criteria.
