IVF

(Image from New Scientist)

I have never worked in manufacturing but I can imagine inventory and quality control are important parts of the process. Keeping track of inventory and making sure the right parts get to where they are needed would be a priority. The barcode has surely revolutionized the manufacturing industry.

The barcode is certainly finding a home in the human manufacturing plant, also known as the IVF clinic. Scientists from Barcelona have announced in the journal, Human Reproduction, that they now can place a barcode tag directly on an embryo to make sure you end up with the right kid. Because mix-ups do happen.

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“You think your uterus is why you’re here, but that’s not why you’re here,” the fertility doctor said, sitting behind his desk in a crisp white lab coat, his name embroidered in bright blue thread. His smile was broad and slightly distorted. He reminded me of a car salesman.

Doc proceeded to prattle on while the clock—both proverbial and literal—was ticking. We’d paid $235 for the half-hour consult. What was that, like eight bucks a minute? I just wanted to shake him and go, “Dude, can I have a baby after 40 or not?”

Our doctor reassured us I still had a shot at IVF, even at 43, thanks to a new development in genetic testing known as Comprehensive Chromosome Screening (CCS). It would cost us an extra $5,500, but when you’re throwing down 30K for a designer baby, what’s an extra five thousand?

“That’s a small price to pay for a human life,” my Dad had said.

More than empty promises, what really drove us to keep spending was hope. Hope is like a drug that poisons the rational mind with fantasy about the future. So what if your roots are gray and you love Botox and you’re a beat away from menopause? Just let science take over where nature left off. All you have to do is put your body, your heart, and your wallet on the line....

At what point, I wondered, are doctors simply exploiting our deepest, primal longings? Is that what medicine should be?

Five days after my second and last egg retrieval, we received a call from the embryologist. All 20 of our embryos had died. That was the last time I heard from anyone at the clinic. There was no call from my doctor, or my nurses, no explanations or reassurances, no one to check in and find out how I was doing. It seemed as if I was nothing more than a bad statistic, an expelled patient who had put a ding in their precious success rates. [emphasis mine]

I was wondering if you knew of any websites or resources that support people struggling after being conceived using IVF. I've been searching and searching online, and I've been unable to find a single source of advice.

I was one of three embryos created in the process, but I was the only one who survived. I mourn my siblings every single day. I can't talk about them with my parents, because bringing the subject up inevitably causes fights, and they don't feel the way I in the do. They don't regret what they did, they don't see anything wrong with IVF, and they don't count my siblings as members of the family. They never bring them up in conversation, and when I talk about them, they'll concede that they are my siblings, but it's only to make me feel better. I don't think they really believe it. If they did, they'd regret what they did. When people asked how many children they had, they'd say three. They'd talk about them as members of the family, and say how much they wished they could be there at Christmas and birthdays. My mum would light candles for them at church and have Masses said for them. But it's just me. I'm the only one who seems to care about them.

It hurts me every time I see in the news something about IVF, because the media treats it as if it's okay. There's never any mention that people die during the process. I don't even know if there's anyone else out there who feels the same way I do. If there is, I've never met them. Sometimes, I feel like a freak. The only person I've found who understands me at all is my local priest, who I've spoken to about everything, but I can't be bothering him all the time! It'd be nice to have someone else who understood.

Safety drive to stop IVF clinics putting profit before embryos

Action on safety at IVF clinics has been ordered by ministers after a wide-ranging review of the fertility industry.

 An expert study raised fears that some clinics may be offering techniques that put the embryo at risk for their own profit.

In the future, all clinics will have to publish the number of complications suffered by their patients.

The review, carried out by Dr Justin McCracken, the former head of the Health Protection Agency, was ordered to reduce the cost of regulating the fertility industry, which has grown rapidly in recent years.

However, he made a series of recommendations on how patients should be dealt with when they have fertility treatments, all of which have been accepted by ministers....

It highlighted a new technique, known as Pre-Implantation Genetic Screening (PGS), as one which is possibly being offered inappropriately for commercial reasons.

For a fee, which can run into thousands of pounds, clinics can check embryos created by a successful IVF cycle for certain genetic abnormalities and only implant those that appear normal....

 Dr McCracken said the jury was still out on whether PGS improves the chances of having a baby and warned there is a risk of harm to the foetus. He said it was vital that the regulator checks that clinics are not simply recommending it to boost profits.

“I was told that the scientific evidence base for the use of PGS is not strong despite the fact that the technique has been offered for a number of years,” he said.

“I understand that there is no clinical consensus regarding its efficacy, but there is a real risk to the embryo in carrying it out.”

We found that current IVF rules on issues such as storage limits and destruction practices are intrusive and disrespectful. Mandatory time limits in some states compel destruction of stored embryos after ten years, for instance, while rules in other states prevent a surviving partner from deciding on the use or donation of embryos.

We don’t believe that embryos should be granted a moral or legal significance in and of themselves as distinct entities. Rather, their value is relational – embryos matter because of what they mean to those for whom they were generated. This meaning is intensely personal, and infinitely variable.

But a new study has found that, for those who go on to adopt, the earlier heartbreak can ultimately make for a happier family.

A study in Sweden found that couples who had adopted children after the disappointment of failing to conceive through fertility treatment appeared happier not only than other adoptive parents but even those who had children through natural means.

"The results show that it can be important to consider adoption as soon as couples seek medical help for infertility, especially now that we know that adoption enhances quality of life.

"As things stand, the issue of adoption is pursued only once IVF treatment has failed."

The researchers said it suggested that childless couples should be urged to consider adoption at a much earlier stage. It is a finding which boost the education secretary Michael Gove's drive to increase adoption rates in the UK.

It's temping to label Ryan a madwoman, as many critics have. But that's exactly wrong. Ryan represents the next wave of industrial rationality. She's bringing the innovations of Costco and Burger King to the business of human flesh....

Ryan argues that by using a manufactured embryo instead of a leftover IVF embryo, you can avoid "the discomfort of involving the biological parents." No need to worry that they're "a family somewhere." They've never met each other, much less the embryo. All they sold were eggs and sperm. "I am not emotionally attached to my eggs," says a donor quoted on Ryan's Web site as a model of suitability. "I am not giving my couple a baby." The easiest child to acquire, like the easiest child to abuse, is one who belongs to nobody.

The trouble with adoption agencies that handle leftover embryos is that they don't see it this way. They treat embryos like babies. That's why they screen you, to make sure the embryo will be in good hands. To evade this scrutiny, Ryan calls her service embryo "donation" instead of "adoption." The linguistic change is morally and legally pivotal. Adoption is what happens to babies. Donation is what happens to eggs and sperm. "Embryo donation" is a declaration that embryos should be treated like eggs and sperm—subject to purchase, screening, sale, and disposal—not like babies. [emphasis mine]

"When a child is begotten through the conjugal act, he comes to be as a gift from God, a gift crowning the spouse's mutual gift of themsleves to each other.  When a child is 'produced' it comes to be, not as a gift from God, which in truth it is, but as a product of human control."

“It happens on a day-by-day basis with casual indifference. This sheer destruction of human embryos – most people would not know that it took place on such a scale."

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has overturned a prohibition on IVF in Costa Rica saying that it infringed provisions under the American Convention on Human Rights.

The ban was originally implemented by the Costa Rican Government in an effort to protect human life. Costa Rica’s Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that the practice of discarding ‘spare’ embryos in IVF was unconstitutional as it infringed the right to life under article 4 of the American Convention of Human Rights, which states: ‘Every person has the right to have his life respected… from the moment of conception’. It said IVF also violated the Costa Rican constitution....

Nine infertile couples petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2001 against the ban, which issued a statement indicating that Costa Rica’s prohibition infringed a number of rights. The IACHR heard the case in September last year and published its decision, dated 28 November, at the end of the year.

It ruled that Costa Rica’s prohibition on IVF violated the rights to privacy and family, and also infringed the principle of non-discrimination. It said infertility was a disease recognised by the World Health Organisation and that infertile people should be granted access to fertility treatment. It was disproportionate to require infertility couples to seek treatment abroad. Crucially, the IACHR said an embryo could not be a ‘person’ and considered that the ‘moment of conception’ occurs after implantation, and not fertilisation.

“The court appears to have radically changed the legal definition of conception, and is applying an artificial description to a natural process. Indeed, this could have a far reaching impact.”

Piero Tozzi, legal counsel with the Alliance Defending Freedom, an organisation of Christian leaders, said: ‘A preliminary reading of the ruling indicates that the Court elevated secondary rights-such as the right to privacy, a right to personal autonomy, and a right to sexual and reproductive health-above the right to life, which by necessity takes precedence over all the other rights’.

In the cutthroat field of fertility treatments, Dr. Ernest Zeringue sharply cuts costs by creating a single batch of embryos, then divvying it up among several patients. One 'horrified' critic calls it the 'commodification of children.'

Dr. Ernest Zeringue was looking for a niche in the cutthroat industry of fertility treatments.

He seized on price, a huge obstacle for many patients, and in late 2010 began advertising a deal at his Davis, Calif., clinic unheard of anywhere else: Pregnancy for $9,800 or your money back....

Zeringue sharply cuts costs by creating a single batch of embryos from one egg donor and one sperm donor, then divvying it up among several patients. The clinic, not the customer, controls the embryos, typically making babies for three or four patients while paying just once for the donors and the laboratory work.

People buying this option from Zeringue must accept concessions: They have no genetic connection to their children, and those children will probably have full biological siblings born to other parents.

Inside the industry, Zeringue's strategy for making embryos on the cheap has spurred debate about the ethical boundaries of creating life.

"I am horrified by the thought of this," said Andrew Vorzimer, a Los Angeles fertility lawyer alarmed that a company — not would-be parents — controls embryos. "It is nothing short of the commodification of children."

...Before the clinic makes a batch of embryos, it sends an extensive profile of a sperm donor and an egg donor to prospective parents.

Once the clinic gets buy-in from a few patients, it purchases the sperm from a sperm bank, harvests eggs from the egg donor and combines them in the laboratory.

A single pairing can result in a dozen embryos, and the clinic keeps the extras frozen while it looks for patients who want them.

"We want to keep the embryos moving," Zeringue said. "The goal is not to create a bank."

Doctor calls for debate on using frozen versus fresh embryos for IVF procedures

—New evidence from a study done by Aberdeen University showing that using frozen embryos implanted in the womb instead of those implanted fresh tends to reduce the risks for both mother and child, have led to calls for a debate on whether all embryos should be frozen before use in all IVF procedures. The study, conducted by examining the records of 13,000 pregnancies that came about as the result of IVF procedures, has been printed in the journal Fertility and Sterility, and is to be presented at an upcoming science festival by lead researcher Dr Abha Maheshwari. In examining the records, the team found that when frozen and thawed embryos were used in IVF procedures, the risk of bleeding over the course of the pregnancy was thirty percent lower than if fresh embryos were used; similarly, they found there was thirty to forty percent less chance of a low weight birth, twenty percent less likelihood of the baby being born early, and twenty percent less chance of the baby dying after birth. The research didn't turn up any definitive reasons for the differences in complication rates for frozen versus fresh implantation results but suggest that it might be either due to the fact that only stronger embryos survive the freezing process, or more likely the impact of the IVF process on the woman's body.

And, in fact, each bill that arrives in the mail is a step closer to that foreboding 10-year mark when we'll have to decide the blastocyst's fate, as is the case under NSW and Victoria's assisted reproduction laws. Strange, but it feels almost as if we're being asked to choose a favourite child....

Of course, it breaks my heart. All I know is that, with each passing year, this trembling promise of a life becomes more and more a measure of my vacillation and despair.

In 1978, the first child conceived by IVF was born. In the following 33 years, numerous technologies and techniques have been developed to further aid the ability to achieve pregnancies in couples for whom natural conception has failed. However, these techniques have rarely been robustly tested and approved before they are routinely offered to infertile couples. In other cases, a development in our scientific understanding of a technique has failed to be quickly incorporated into clinical changes. This raises the concern that some of the techniques offered to some patients offer little or no benefit, and in the worse cases is not confirmed to be safe. This is a particular concern as many of the techniques discussed here are often reserved for already vulnerable patients, such as those with recurrent IVF failure. [Emphasis added]

Scientists suspect that embryos that have developed in petri dishes are slightly different in some ways from embryos that develop in the womb, but they are still working out the specifics. They have some indications that IVF embryos are more likely to have certain genetic diseases and developmental problems. but they still need more data.... In other words, if you're an IVF child, then you are a walking human experiment. Scientists are waiting to see what will happen to you as you get older, so that they can complete their data collections on the effects of IVF on people.  

Sounds really ethical, doesn't it?

Current techniques do not ‘cure’ infertility, they just overcome it... The most appropriate focus of future research may be to restore fertility.

The figures show that 3,144,386 embryos have been created in UK laboratories since the passage of the 1991 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. A total of 1,455,832 embryos were discarded in the course of treatment, 101,605 were given for research in destructive experiments, and 764,311 were frozen for later use.

The rest were implanted, resulting in 94,090 births, meaning that in the region of 32 embryos are created for every live birth.

OHSS [ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome] is a little-known complication of fertility treatments that rely on high doses of hormones, which are standard in the United States and the United Kingdom; the syndrome is not the only health problem to be linked to in vitro fertilization. Fertility clinics in Europe and Japan have turned to a safer, low-dose form of IVF, but clinics here have largely resisted on the grounds that the success rates for low-dose IVF are not as high.

“Pregnancy rates are lower, and more cycles of IVF are necessary” with low-dose IVF, said Dr. Glenn L. Schattman, a fertility doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and president of the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology.

But some critics are urging the industry to reconsider.

“Mild stimulation is clearly much healthier for women,” said Francine Coeytaux, founder of the Pacific Institute for Women’s Health, a nonprofit organization based in Los Angeles. “The reason hyper-stimulation happened is because these fertility clinics compete against each other by posting their success rates.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, high-dose stimulation leads to OHSS in 10 percent of IVF patients. The ovaries become swollen and, as in Ms. Demidon’s case, can leak fluid into the chest and abdomen. Symptoms can range from mild to serious; in rare cases, OHSS can be life-threatening.

A recent inquiry into maternal deaths in the United Kingdom found that OHSS following high-dose IVF is now one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in England and Wales.

One recent study suggested that high-dose IVF contributes to lower birth weights, compared with the babies of women who receive minimal doses of hormones. And experts have debated for decades whether IVF contributes to an increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer; studies have reached conflicting conclusions.

Lupron, used to suppress the ovaries, has raised concerns as well. The drug is approved to treat prostate cancer; its use in IVF is off-label (meaning it is not FDA-approved for this purpose). Thousands of women have reported adverse reactions, including memory loss, liver disorders, bone loss and severe muscle, joint and bone pain, said Marcy Darnovsky, associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a public interest group in Berkeley, Calif.

“Lots of drugs are used off-label, but is this use appropriate?” said Ms. Darnovsky. “Considering the number of women who’ve taken these drugs over the past 25 years, you’d think much more rigorous studies and analysis would have been done on them.”

After struggling for years to have children the McCrea family had their prayers answered, and then some, thanks to In Vitro Fertilization. Now the family is sharing their extra blessings....

Deb had nearly signed on the dotted line to donate those leftover 18 embryos to a fertility clinic, but something just didn’t seem right.

“When my daughter was born, I went months and months just thinking I just don`t want to sign, I`m just not ready to sign them yet,” Deb explained, “I don`t want to give up that right to see pictures of that child and compare that child to ours, and see what they would have looked like and if they`re healthy and happy, so I always kind of pushed them to the side on the counter.”

So Deb took matters into her own hands, with the goal of fulfilling her other dream of surrogacy- in a different way.

Babies conceived through certain fertility treatment techniques are about one-third more likely to have a birth defect than babies conceived without any extra help from technology, according to a review of several dozen studies....

For more than 124,000 children born through IVF or using ICSI, in which a single sperm is injected directly into the egg, the risk of having a birth defect was 37 percent higher than that of the other children, they found.

"Children conceived by IVF and/or ICSI are at significantly increased risk for birth defects, and there is no risk difference between children conceived by IVF and/or ICSI," the team wrote....

"(The report) confirms what most people accepted anyway, that, yes, there is an increased risk in congenital abnormality associated with assisted reproductive technology," said William Buckett, a professor at McGill University, who was not involved with the review.

"Because Wife cannot achieve genetic parenthood otherwise, we conclude that Wife's interest in biological procreation through the use of these pre-embryos outweighs Husband's professed interest against procreation."

This decision is a departure from court cases in other states where the courts have decided the other way.  A court in Tennessee said that unwanted parenthood would be the greater burden and ordered the embryos destroyed.  Another court in Massachusetts said it "would not enforce an agreement that would compel one donor to become a parent against his or her will."

The Inquirer reported that the Court said that "the couple's conflict could have been avoided if they had signed an agreement spelling out what to do with the embryos in case of divorce or death, or if the state legislature had passed a law addressing the issue."

Actually, this and other cases could be totally avoided if we did not allow mass manufacturing and freezing of human lives in a laboratory.  These couples are already parents.  The question is not whether parenthood is forced on them, but whether these embryos deserve a chance to finish their lives.

Continue Reading at LifeNews >>

Nadya Suleman will do anything for her octuplets, but now she admits it was a mistake to have them.

Themother of 14, who recently posed nude to earn rent money for her family, has revealed she thinks it was a bad decision to undergo fertility treatments after already having six babies.

"Was it a mistake to go back and have IVF after having six children already?" NBC News Dateline correspondent Tamron Hall asked in an interview that aired Friday night.

"Yes," Suleman said. "Absolutely. Was I in my lucid state of mind? I don't know at that point. I could rationalize myself away and I'm good at rationalizing."

Nadya, dear, you are not alone.

Continue reading at Creative Minority Report >>

Instead of turning to God to understand why, we turned to doctors and science and began working on how to fix it. We were lost and didn’t have the foundation of the Church’s teaching to help guide us.  Our primary fault was to understand that a child is a GIFT from God, not a right. We were focused on our desires, not God’s will....

After limited thought we decided to undergo the in vitro fertilization (IVF) process after doctors advised us it was the only way to conceive. Again, we just looked at the science of having children. We didn’t seek to understand the Church’s teaching on IVF, or more importantly, what consequences could develop once initiated....

The process took another turn when, following the delivery of our babies, I needed an emergency hysterectomy. This was much more significant than my husband or I could ever imagine.

During the IVF process more than two embryos were created. The hysterectomy removed my uterus, and with no uterus, there is no place for our other children to go to be carried to term. I can’t carry them, and surrogacy is not an option in the Catholic Church. With this outcome, we now have several embryos frozen in a lab with basically nowhere to go....

We pray for them everyday, but we feel helpless as parents.