Quebec's Donor-Conceived Register Is Now Fully Operational

What happened

Quebec's donor-conceived rights law isn't new — Bill 12 passed unanimously in the National Assembly in May 2023, and the provisions giving donor-conceived people a right to their origin information took effect on 6 June 2025. What's new is quieter but just as important: 6 June 2026 was the deadline for every assisted-reproduction centre, courthouse registry and other record-holder in the province to finish handing over their existing donor and surrogacy records to the register. Before that date, the register legally existed but was still being built. Now it's actually populated.

That distinction matters for anyone who was donor-conceived through a Quebec clinic years before this law existed — the records that determine whether the register can answer their request had to physically move from old clinic files into the new government system, and that process only just finished.

What's actually in the register, and who can see it

The register — formally the Registre sur la connaissance des origines en matière de procréation impliquant un tiers — holds the donor's name and contact information, a profile (age, ethnicity, education, profession, physical traits, personality details), and, for surrogacy arrangements, copies of the agreement and any filiation judgment.

A donor-conceived person can request their information starting at age 14, on their own; younger than that, a parent or tutor's consent is required.

For gamete donations or surrogacy arrangements from 6 June 2025 onward, the donor's identity is not something the donor can hide — it's disclosed on request. What the donor can still control is contact: they can refuse it, or set conditions on it (email only, for instance), and ignoring a stated refusal can create real legal liability. In other words, Quebec separated "knowing who someone is" from "having a relationship with them," and only made the second one optional.

The line Quebec drew: nothing retroactive

Donations and arrangements made before 6 June 2025 are treated differently. Confidentiality for those donors is preserved by default — the law doesn't reach backward to unmask someone who gave sperm or eggs under the old anonymous system. A pre-2025 donor can still choose to consent to disclosure through the register, but nothing forces it.

This is a deliberate boundary, not an oversight: retroactively stripping anonymity from people who donated under an explicit promise of confidentiality raises its own fairness questions, and Quebec's legislators chose not to cross that line. The practical result is a register with two tiers — automatic identity disclosure going forward, voluntary disclosure looking backward.

The same bill also gave Quebec its first real surrogacy law

Bill 12 didn't only address donor conception. It created Quebec's first formal legal framework for surrogacy, which previously had no dedicated statute. Under it, a surrogate retains full autonomy over her own body and can end the agreement at any point; intended parents, by contrast, cannot withdraw once they've committed, which is meant to protect the child's interests if circumstances change mid-pregnancy. Payment beyond reimbursed expenses stays prohibited — Quebec's model, like the rest of Canada's, is altruistic-only. Both parties must attend an information session and sign a notarized agreement before proceeding.