Ruth Institute Blog

by Rebecca Taylor

I have heard countless times that parents that undergo in vitrofertilization (IVF) must love their children so very much to go through such an expensive and invasive process to have children.  I have no doubt that parents undergoing IVF believe they are doing what is best, but looking at the realities of IVF that many parents are not aware of, one has to wonder if IVF is really about the children at all. Read more…

Alana Stewart, Elizabeth Marquardt, Jennifer Lahl, call your offices! Check out this NPR interview with a representative of the IVF industry and Wendy Kramer, founder of one of the sibling donor registries. Listen to Sean Tipton, director of public affairs for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of reproductive medicine practitioners.

We think everyone is entitled to whatever they want and whatever they agree to, so we think the informed consent process is essential. So everyone needs to understand what the restrictions and rules are or are not, agree to it only if all the parties agree, and don’t have any changes to that agreement unless all the parties agree.

When asked about the fact that children haven’t given their consent to these arrangements, here is his flippant answer:

Well, as far as I know, no one has ever consented to the circumstances of their own conception. I happen to have teenage boys who I suspect currently probably would not consent to me being their father. I don’t know too many teenage boys who would consent to whoever their father is. Read more…

According to a  recent study of ovarian cancer ”After 15 years of follow-up, they found that women who had undergone IVF were more than four times as likely those who had not to develop borderline ovarian cancer, a malignancy that is treatable and survivable.”

Now, I would normally think that a four times greater risk of cancer would be cause for concern. Not so.

“This shouldn’t be a cause of concern to women undergoing IVF,” said Flora E. van Leeuwen, the lead author and head of epidemiology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. “We’re talking about in an increased risk of a very rare tumor that is highly treatable.”

That’s assuming that this particular risk is the only risk associated with IVF.  Is that how all known carcinogens are treated?

By David Picella

For couples that are experiencing infertility, the desire to have a child can be overwhelming. Every month that passes is another missed opportunity. Depression, grief, sadness, and despair eventually set in and at some point most couples become desperate enough to gamble with tens of thousands of dollars on expensive procedures like InVitro Fertilization (IVF) without fully understanding what they are getting themselves into. For the vast majority of couples who try IVF, false hopes turn false, and things that sound too good to be true prove to be so. Read more…

Tonight Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse will interview Katie Elrod. Elrod has been a humanities teacher and administrator in independent schools for over 15 years, and has taught in the Perspectives program at Boston College. She received her BA and MA in philosophy from Boston College, where she was a Lonergan Fellow. Read more…

by Richard Egan

Human cloning researchers pay women to risk death so they can pursue their doomed experiments.

In an article published in Nature on 6 October 2011, Scott Noggle and his colleagues at the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory report on their experiments in which they have derived stem cells from human embryos created by adding the nucleus of a somatic cell to a human egg. Read more…

Such children struggle with a unique anxiety: What if I fall in love with my half-sibling?

by CHRISTOPHER WHITE

Thirty-two invitro fertilized children gather at the Swedish Medical Center in 2003 in Denver. The Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine at the Center gathered the children from each of its 16 years of work in the field. Guests included Payton Kline, 4 1/2 months, the 5,000th invitro fertilized baby born at the center. – Kevin Moloney/Getty Images Read more…

by Mary Jo Anderson

The current battles over the fate of thousands of babies conceived via in vitro fertilization would confound even King Solomon.

Sensational news reports surrounding the $180,000 price tag for Ukrainian black-market babies shocked the determinedly secular segments of society, and few remain unmoved by the story of the FBI’s round-up of “baby-brokers.” Beyond the initial horror of children clinically conceived and sold as a commodity, investigators discovered that these babies have dozens of full and half siblings that were sold elsewhere. This opens the possibility that, in 25 years, a young man might unknowingly marry his sister. Read more…

My first response to this story Betsy posted earlier this week about “Twin Reductions” at IVF clinics was to be appalled. But as I have reflected on it, there is more to the story than the outrageousness of it all.

To be sure, twin reduction is intrinsically appalling. Fertility doctors routinely implant multiple embryos in a woman’s womb, in the hopes that at least one of the babies will survive.  “Selective reduction” is routine in the fertility industry, if “too many” babies survive.

“Twin reductions” is the next step in the process of killing for convenience.  Women abort one of a pair of twins, not for medical or health reasons, but for “social reasons”, that is, for convenience. There is no particularly terrible risk to carrying twins.  These mothers just can’t quite imagine taking care of two babies. They feel like they are too old to handle twins.

And by and large, doctors perform these abortions.  The procedure itself is slightly creepy. Read more…

What’s it like to have a child with someone who’s a friend but not a lover? More and more people are doing just that, to satisfy their broodiness. Helen Croydon investigates.

by Terrence McKeegan Co-authored with Tyler Ament

WASHINGTON, April 27, 2011 (C-FAM) – Costa Rica must legalize in vitro fertilization or face penalties for alleged violations of human rights protected by international law, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

In 2000, the Costa Rican Constitutional Court ruled that IVF in the country was unconstitutional because it violated the right to life of the embryo.  Four years later, the Center for Reproductive Rights petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to accept a case claiming that the human rights of two Costa Rican couples were violated by the ban. Read more…

Yesterday there was a segment on NPR titled Taming The Twin Trend From Fertility Treatments. They talked about how various forms of ART have caused an increase in the incidence of twin pregnancies:

Twins, once a rarity to marvel over, are now a common part of American culture, thanks in large part to increased use of reproductive technology. Twins are conceived naturally just 2 percent of the time; for those who get pregnant with fertility treatments the rate is more than 40 percent.

They also discussed some of the health risks associated with twins: Read more…

Women undergoing egg retrieval undertake real yet poorly studied health risks.

To retrieve her eggs, a woman first takes one set of powerful synthetic hormones to shut down her ovaries, then another to hyperstimulate them to induce a yield of eggs many times the normal number.  Whether this is done as part of her own fertility treatment, or to donate eggs to another woman, or for medical research, the process is the same.

Pressures on young women to donate eggs are increasing.  AHB joins other groups calling for more and better studies of egg donor risks so that women may be offered a meaningful informed consent before agreeing to have their ovaries hyperstimulated and their eggs retrieved.  AHB calls for a national registry to track the health and well-being of women donating eggs, the prohibition of payment for egg donation, and a moratorium on egg donation for research until the long-term health risks are better understood. Read more…

From The Telegraph

The Government has asked the fertility watchdog to assess a controversial new “three-parent” treatment for IVF.

Scientists have been invited to advise whether the new “three-parent IVF” procedure should be approved to help couples affected by devastating conditions.

An expert panel from the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) will consider its safety and effectiveness before reporting to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley. Read more…

Yet more evidence that Anonymous Sperm and Egg Donation is Over (and not soon enough, if you ask me).

newsweek.com:
Currently, in the United States, you need a license to sell a condo or cut hair in a salon, but not to broker human life. The $3 billion fertility industry goes largely unregulated, offering blank pages to those searching for information where the rest of us are free to access vital statistics of public record. “I’m not a treatment, I’m a person, and those records belong to me,” says Pratten.

On top of the serious risk of inbreeding and the medical and health concerns associated with anonymous sperm and egg donation, we all should be entitled to know our biological heritage for the sake of the effect it has on our self image and identity: Read more…

by Jared Yee

While only two women died as a result of having an abortion in Britain in 2007, seven died as a direct result of IVF between 2003 and 2005, obstetricians have noted in a recent BMJ editorial. This happened even though there are only a quarter the number of IVF cycles as abortions, according to Dr Susan Bewley, a consultant obstetrician at Guy’s and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust in London. Read more…

CBC’s Jennifer Lahl and Wesley J. Smith are occasional writers for ToTheSource.org. Recently ToTheSource interviewed Jennifer.

To The Source: How did you become interested in egg donation? What brought this to your attention?

Jennifer Lahl: I became interested in it as a broader issue within the various reproductive technologies. I’ve been writing and speaking on reproductive technology for close to a decade, and through my work, egg donors in the U.S. have found me and contacted me to tell me their stories. These were women whose stories had a negative outcome, and the donors had nowhere to go. Also, being involved in the stem cell debates, I was concerned with the growing demand for human eggs which will be needed to do the research. Read more…

Robert Edwards’ IVF technique devalued the human embryo and contributed to infertility.

by Carolyn Moynihan

There is something quite ironic in this week’s award of the Nobel Prize to Robert Edwards for the development of human in vitro fertilisation. During decades in which the whole thrust of reproductive medicine was to render fertile women infertile for 99 per cent of the time, Dr Edwards and later his colleague Patrick Steptoe were perfecting techniques for turning infertile women into mothers. Read more…

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2010 has been awarded to Robert G. Edwards for the development of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Edwards is part of the famous Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards duo, who were partners in the lab for years, trying to fertilize a human egg and thus create an embryo outside of the body by means of IVF, which literally means “in glass.” Read more…

Gotta love that headline.

by Mary Rose Somarriba

Jennifer Aniston’s big new movie made headlines this week—for flopping. The Switch, a romantic comedy about a forty-year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated, brought in embarrassingly low ticket sales of only $8.4 million on opening weekend. Hollywood reporters have tried to think of all number of reasons for why it flopped so badly, ranging from the myth of lazy August filmgoers to the theory that Aniston is a blockbuster buzzkill.

But the answer may be the story itself. Just four months ago, Jennifer Lopez’s film on the same subject, The Back-up Plan—which came out this week on DVD— opened to a low $12.2 million. As reporters Gregg Kilday and Kim Masters put it, “Artificial insemination, it turns out, is the new box-office poison.” Read more…