varoblog

(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)

(sz) THERE has been a lot of talk lately about surplus embryos and what to do with them. In Victoria, there are three options: surplus embryos can be donated to research, disposed of, or donated to other infertile people. Recently, the Infertility Treatment Authority announced that it is considering a new policy - allowing people to choose the recipients of their embryos. This is a contentious proposal that raises many ethical questions.
Should donors be able to choose recipients on the basis of cultural and religious background or sexuality? Is this unfair discrimination? Will the possibility of a relationship between donors, recipients and children complicate parental roles?
There are conflicting views about “directed” embryo donation. The recent Victorian Law Reform Commission’s Report on Assisted Reproductive Technology and Adoption recommends that “donors should not be permitted to specify the qualities or characteristics of the unknown recipients of their donated gametes or embryos”. To avoid the possibility of unfair discrimination, they recommend that directed donation should be limited to recipients that are known to donors. Melbourne IVF chairman Lyndon Hale suggests that allowing directed donation might help increase the number of people willing to donate embryos. However, Donna Howlett, managing director of Monash IVF, believes that directed donation would make things more difficult for potential recipients.
It is not just policy makers who disagree about directed embryo donation. When we asked people with surplus embryos for their views, we found a wide range of opinions. more…

From: »The Age«

(cz) Last week a high-level parliamentary group urged sweeping changes to fertility laws which would result in children born from donated sperm or eggs having the information marked on their birth certificates. The losers from such legislation are likely to be single women who wish to have children without involving a biological father in the upbringing.
The very existence of such a group of women might send a shiver down the spines of politicians and moral guardians, but, for the sake of an argument, let us suppose that such women exist. Who might they be? They might, for example, be women who have just been unlucky in their relationships and have not met the right partner at the right time. Or they might have had a relationship which ended as their fertility was beginning to decline.
For such women, the idea of looking anxiously both for love and sex and for someone to father a child, more or less all at the same time, is understandably a daunting task. Having access to IVF gives this possibility to women who have the desire to be mothers and who feel themselves to possess all the skills to be excellent mothers and who also have carefully planned financial arrangements.
But the requirement that a child’s IVF origins be stated on a birth certificate will surely add a further level of difficulty for those who might embark on such a course. Such is the overwhelming approval for couples (homosexual as well as heterosexual) that lone parenthood is now considered the least desirable option. It is equated with family failure, and with damaging the possibilities of success in life for the child.
Any single woman who considers such an option risks been seen as almost insane or, at the very least, deeply selfish, and putting her own interests before that of the child. more…

From: »The Guardian« (comment)