Are fertility treatments damaging our children?
(cz) The desperation of the infertile would-be mother knows no bounds. Lee Cowden, aching to conceive, was pumped full of hormones to make her produce more eggs. The result? A trip to hospital — but not to a maternity suite.
“I was 25 and felt this excruciating pain in my chest,” recalls Lee, a music therapist from Surrey. “I was rushed into intensive care in an ambulance, and it became pretty clear that, despite my age, I had suffered a heart attack.
“I’d suffered a clot caused by the fertility treatment I had undergone. I remember lying in my hospital bed, desperately worried. Not for my health, but because I thought that they’d never let me have IVF again, and I’d never become a mother.”
[…]
Louise Brown, the world’s first testtube baby, was born in 1978 and became a mother herself last year. Her son, Cameron, was conceived naturally and this was hailed in some quarters as proof that IVF really ‘works’.
Others, however, caution against attributing too much significance to this happy event. The treatment that led to Louise’s birth, they point out, was very different from today’s.
Doctors waited until one of her mother Lesley’s eggs had ripened, collected it and then fertilised it in a test tube with her husband’s sperm before replacing it in her womb.
Since then, procedures have moved on, with more than three million babies worldwide conceived through Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) — IVF, ovulation induction and intra-uterine induction.
In Britain, ART accounts for 1.4 per cent of all births every year — 10,242 in 2004 — while many more women undergo treatment unsuccessfully (the success rate among women under 35 is 28.2 per cent, falling to 10.6 per cent for those aged 40-42). more…
From: »The Daily Mail«