Rights and responsibilities in IVF
(wz) Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has come a long way since the early 1980s when a few Australian Universities and hospitals started their journey with IVF and associated technologies. Many couples went through numerous cycles of IVF without success while the clinical and scientific techniques were developed.
The first pregnancy was in the early days of 1980 at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne and was followed by more pregnancies centred around Melbourne units which ultimately became Melbourne IVF and Monash IVF.
It was not long before groups in Adelaide started to achieve pregnancies particularly at Flinders Medical Centre and The Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
Since then Australian Scientists have been at the forefront of developing these technologies particularly through the groups at Monash (Trounsen and colleagues) and the University of Adelaide (Cox, Matthews and colleagues).
Australian units were the first to introduce donor eggs, frozen embryos and frozen eggs into the repertoire of modern IVF and were at the forefront of the development of techniques around sperm injection (ICSI) and Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD). In addition they were the first to develop lifestyle programs to optimise the conditions in which women became pregnant. They have been world leaders in reducing the numbers of embryos to be transferred so that some IVF units now put back almost exclusively only one embryo and they retain world-class pregnancy rates.
All this has been done in an environment where the Federal Government, through Medicare, has made IVF treatment relatively inexpensive and as a result reduced the risk taking by both doctors and clients who participate in this process. Australian science has also been a major contributor through its fundamental discoveries in embryology, genetics and biotechnology. Close to 3 per cent of all babies in Australia are now born from IVF and we may soon approach the Danish mark of 5 per cent.
Amidst this glowing picture one must ask whether everything is as rosy as it appears. more…
From: »ABC News« (Australia)