2023-09-02 05:45:00
Everything is there: the light parquet floor, the comfortable armchairs that are impossible to leave, the plants that you haven’t forgotten to water, the light, the undulating screen and the soft footsteps. It’s Scandinavian, warm and enveloping. A couple of women and their two children follow a nurse in a white coat. Marie (the witnesses all wished to remain anonymous) did not wait long before taking her turn in the corridors with walls covered with photographs of children and drawings of storks.
” It will be alright “, repeats one of the caregivers, leading her into another room. This time, there is a medical chair, machines, a screen. The act lasts only a few minutes and it’s over. “We love you very much but we hope not to see you again”, said the nurse, hugging her. Once in the street, Marie feels slightly euphoric. The mild temperature makes him want to go for a walk. She has time, she doesn’t take the plane back to Paris until the next day.
It was nine months ago, a little before Christmas. That day, other women, like this 37-year-old Frenchwoman, crossed the threshold of the StorkKlinik (TFP Stork Fertility) in Copenhagen. Since then, some have had a baby or, like Marie, are about to give birth, others have not. The StorkKlinik is a fertility clinic, a pioneer in the care of lesbian and single women.
Since its creation in 1999, the establishment has been responsible for more than 8,600 births, or almost one baby a day. The patients come from all over Europe: Norwegians, Swedes, Germans, Austrians, British and, without interruption, French women, despite Medical Assistance for Procreation for All, adopted by the Assembly in 2021 ( in the law, the term AMP replaces that of PMA, medically assisted procreation).
Read also: PMA for all: what does the bioethics law change in the procedure?
The courage of a midwife
It is thanks to the stubbornness and malice of Nina Stork, a midwife with a predestined name (stork means “stork” in Danish), now 60 years old, that these thousands of children were born. The story begins in 1996, when Danish parliamentarians decided to ban doctors from performing artificial insemination on their single or lesbian patients. Nina Stork is herself in a relationship with a woman. She and her partner are trying to have a baby. The public debate of this year 1996 proves it. Tired, sad and angry, she closes her home birth practice. But her job obsesses her, and Nina Stork can’t bring herself to abandon these women to their fate.
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