The fertility industry is relatively new, having taken off in 1978 with the in vitro fertilization (IVF) and birth of Louise Brown, the world's first test-tube baby. Since then, reproductive medicine has been woefully unregulated and out of control. Can you say, "Octomom"?

Medicine Without Morals

Last year when Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets, the mainstream and celebrity-reality-media jumped all over the story. They claimed Dr. Michael Kamrava, Suleman's physician, was a rogue doctor-turned-cowboy in the "wild wild west" of California fertility medicine who did not follow professional guidelines. And yet, Dr. James Grifo, a fertility specialist at NYU School of Medicine said, "I don't think it's our job to tell them how many babies they're allowed to have. I am not a policeman for reproduction in the United States." Dr. Grifo, you are right, you are not a reproduction policeman. You are a medical doctor, a member of a profession with fiduciary duties and obligations to its patients—that means both mothers and children. Women were never meant to have litter births.

Legislation Without Limits

Much has already been lost in the modern medical profession as it consistently avoids roping in the baby-making business. And sadly, legislators shy away from passing laws that could restore some sanity and safety to fertility medicine, as they fall in line with bullying "choice" and "rights" rhetoric.

During the last five years, I have directly experienced the uphill battle of advocating for fertility-industry legislative regulation. Some bills have proposed a national egg donor registry to track the long-term health of egg donors, as we track U.S. organ donors. Other bills seek to prohibit large payments to young egg "donors". We have sought to protect the rights of children created by IVF, advocating for their right to know their biological parents. A Kansas bill that I helped write would compel the state to monitor and report the activities of agencies handling human eggs, sperm, and embryos—a common sense bill that would generate critical data about this baby-booming industry.

Of course, the 6.5 billion-dollar fertility industry would like nothing better than to maintain the unregulated and unlegislated conditions. They are not about to take new limits, or existing restrictions, lying down. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, led largely by fertility doctors, is already pushing against existing egg-donation regulations in several states. The resistance is powerful and predictable.

Whatever It Takes to Procreate

Chills still run down my spine when I recall testifying to the Georgia State Senate in 2009. I walked into the packed, standing-room-only hearing, swarming with reporters and a bay of television cameras. But what really caught me off guard were the throngs of women who held pictures of their IVF babies, accusing me of trying to steal their reproductive rights.

Similar outpourings of hysterical resistance just cropped up in Arizona regarding legislation that would ban compensating women (apart from their out-of-pocket expenses) for their eggs. Even more disconcerting are the doctors who not only encourage such dramatics, but willingly pay women huge sums of money for their eggs. One doctor asked, "How else are infertile couples going to get eggs if they can't pay for them?" The answer is, "The same way a kidney recipient gets a kidney donation."

Thankfully, organ buying and selling is condemned. Donating an organ saves a life, but in the case of egg 'donation', nobody's life hangs in the balance; the medical profession vehemently resists egg-donation regulation because of the money at stake, not the lives to be saved. Why else would they be willing to risk the health of young egg donors, who (by their own admission) do not receive follow-up for the negative impacts on their health.

The Murky Waters of IVF

The first IVF children are only now entering adulthood. Most are still under 20. Sadly, no long-term studies have been conducted on their health and well-being. This constitutes medical malpractice in light of the many risks that the fertility industry is aware of but tries to suppress. Here are just a few examples:

-Researchers have found a five-to-ten-percent chromosomal difference between IVF children and naturally conceived children.

-IVF children are at increased risk of birth defects such as neural tube defects and low birth weight, which predispose them to obesity, hypertension and Type 2 diabetes.

-In a new study from Europe (where IVF is heavily regulated and monitored) looking at 20,000 singleton pregnancies, a four-fold increased risk of stillbirths appeared with children conceived through IVF or Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) technology, when compared to children conceived naturally or through non-IVF fertility treatment.

-IVF displays a 60 percent failure rate. Recent U.S. data reports that of 140,795 cycles, only 56,790 resulted in births.

Much more should be done to insure that infertile couples know the financial and health risks to themselves, to their future children, and to third-party participants, including egg/sperm donors and gestational surrogates.

Legislating Morality

This month, I will be in Kansas to testify on Senate Bill 509, which creates a monitoring program to collect data on the state's fertility industry. I anticipate the same old resistance: "IVF is safe! The horror stories are anecdotal! Patients are already well informed! Regulation is a burden that infringes on people's reproductive rights!"

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has already announced its opposition to the bill and has engaged their local state members to help defeat it. But the political wind is changing, bringing a fresh political will, in some state legislators, to change the practice of reproductive medicine in their states. These leaders now see the need to protect constituents who have been ignored by the fertility industry: those left infertile, children who have a right to know who their biological parents are, and reproductive consumers who still have little or no access to much-needed studies detailing actual risks.

The fertility-industry drivers do not want to check their practices. But even if they manage to temporarily block sensible legislation, eventually the facts will catch up with them and they will have to answer to the public. As concerned citizens, we have the obligation to speak up and encourage our lawmakers to protect the defenseless by curbing the blatant excesses of an industry run rampant.

Young Delhi women donating their eggs for quick bucks

In a trend that seems to be catching on, many Delhi college girls and single-working women are coming forward to donate their eggs at fertility clinics in order to make a quick buck even as they help childless couples in the process.

Fertility specialists here are regularly getting requests for egg donation from girls studying in renowned Delhi colleges. About 10 to 12 eggs are extracted from each girl and they are paid somewhere between Rs.20,000 and Rs.50,000 for it.

“This is a new trend and more and more young girls are coming to us for egg donation,” Shivani Sachdeva Gour, consultant fertility specialist and gynaecologist with Pheonix Hospital in Greater Kailash I, told IANS.

“In the first week of January, we got four girls from a college on South Campus. Most of them stay in hostels and need money to maintain their expensive lifestyles,” she said.

Agreed Indira Ganeshan, consultant in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) expert with B.L.K Memorial Hospital in west Delhi: “Girls in the age group of 22 to 25 years do come to us for egg donation.

“A majority of them are single and working and want to donate eggs to get some extra money to maintain a good lifestyle.”

Shivani said the trend is catching up among girls in the 18 to 22 age group and usually the girls keep their parents in the dark.

“These girls get 10 of their friends who are also interested in donating eggs but they are kept on waiting as we have enough stock of eggs at present to meet the demand of our clients,” she said.

The Phoenix Hospital receives 15 demands for eggs on an average basis per month from across the world. The majority of clients are foreigners and each egg is sold somewhere between Rs.60,000 and Rs.100,000.

“Almost 80 percent of our clients are foreigners from the US, Britain and Australia. We do get some request from Indian couples settled abroad and a few from India also,” said Shivani.

There has been an increasing demand for eggs from young, intelligent girls with fair complexion and these girls perfectly meet our clients’ requirements, she said.

Thaindian News

http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/lifestyle/young-delhi-women-donating-their-eggs-for-quick-bucks_100317837.html#ixzz0h48cv6cT

AZ Senate votes to restrict sales of human eggs

Senators voted Tuesday to put restrictions on the sale of human eggs and to require warnings to women - but specifically rejected similar requirements for sperm donations by men.

SB 1306 spells out exactly what a prospective donor must be told, ranging from the effects of the drugs used to stimulate egg production to risks of the surgical procedure for harvesting them. It also requires doctors to tell would-be donors there are possibly other, unstated, risks because the processes of donating "are unstudied and unknown compared to other medical procedures and treatments."

But Sen. Linda Gray, R-Glendale, backed off her original proposal, which would have made it illegal to buy human eggs under any circumstances, limiting compensation solely to medical costs, travel and out-of-pocket expenses.

As approved Tuesday, a women still could seek compensation if the purpose of the donation was to help an infertile couple conceive. But anyone who buys or attempts to buy an egg for any other purpose, like medical research, could wind up in jail for six months.

Arizona Daily Star

http://www.azstarnet.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_6a8b17a1-4cdc-5c0c-8025-8b57390c0a44.html

Mother gets dead son's sperm, wants to give birth to his baby

ABC News recently reported the story of a young man in Texas who died from a brain injury resulting from a violent incident after he left a Texas bar. The grieving mother is pushing the envelope of current bioethical boundaries by attempting to be the surrogate mother for her lost son's children.

"But now his mother is hoping for a legacy -- a grandchild culled from her son's sperm after his death on April 5, 2009. She has heard from hundreds of women who have offered to be egg donors or surrogate mothers for her future grandchild.

Advances in the fertility industry have allowed wives, fiances, girlfriends and even parents to seek post-mortem sperm retrieval when a man dies unexpectedly."

WHAS11.com

http://www.whas11.com/home/85058967.html

What can a grieving mother do to bring some meaning to the death of her daughter, and to keep alive her memory?

After my daughter, composer and filmmaker Jessica Grace Wing, died in 2003 at age 31, one way was clear: to enable Tucson audiences to see the musical, Lost, that she composed during her two years of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment for colon cancer. This musical, based on Hansel and Gretel, opened in New York City three weeks after Jessica's death. Set in Appalachia and hearkening back to the first settlement in the New World, its unusual story and lyrical music made it a huge hit, garnering rave reviews and winning the award for Best Musical at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2003."

"As a physician, I have found another way to bring meaning to my daughter's death. In the absence of a family history of colon cancer, this disease in a young person is extremely uncommon. Jessica was an egg donor for in vitro fertilization (IVF) for infertile couples several years before becoming ill. Egg donation involves repeated self-injection of female hormones in order to stimulate the production of multiple eggs (instead of the usual one), which are then retrieved and used to produce an embryo. Many young women in the United States earn extra money in this way. (Selling eggs is not permitted in many European countries.)

When I looked for a possible link between egg donation and colon cancer, I learned to my amazement that nothing is known about this. Once a young woman walks out of the IVF clinic, no one keeps track of her health, and therefore, the long-term risks of this procedure are unknown. Before beginning the egg-retrieval process, a young woman signs a consent form which says she understands the risks. Young women don't usually realize the difference between, "There are no known risks," which is what they may have been told, and, 'There are no risks,' and often assume that the process has been shown to be safe. It has not."

Tucson Weekly

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/guest-opinion/Content?oid=1830637

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