5 Myths of Fertility Treatments
Just as the invention of contraceptives freed sex from the concerns of baby-making, new reproductive technologies have freed baby-making from sex.
Yet despite 5 million such technology-assisted births, plus the recent eight by Nadya Suleman, there remain common misperceptions about “test-tube” and “designer” babies.
The article addresses 5 common myths about fertility treatments.
Myth 1: Designer babies are coming soon
Reports that we will someday be able to artificially choose a child’s traits, “from a scientific point of view, are totally totally made up,” said Sarah Franklin, researcher, author and keynote speaker at The Politics of Reproduction conference held Saturday at Barnard College.
(…)
Myth 2: In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is easy
“The media tends to report the success cases,” said Debora Spar, president of Barnard and author of “The Baby Business,” but failures are the norm.
(…)
Myth 3: Egg donation is common
“It is egg sales,” Spar corrected. Because no one wants to think about money in relation to their child, the baby business talks about “delivering hope” not “profit,” she said, but it is a market like any other.
(…)
Myth 4: IVF increases fertility
Actually, a woman undergoing IVF must first take hormones to shut down her fertility cycle, Franklin explained.
(…)
Myth 5: The children will be fine
“The voice that gets lost in all these debates is that of the child,” Spar said. No one knows the long-term effects of spending, as an embryo, a few days in cultured media or exposed to surges of synthetic hormones, she said.
(…)
The end of the article discusses the recent octuplets births and includes a link to another article.
The Ethical and Legal Implications of Octuplets
We all know about the old woman who lived in a shoe, the one with all those kids and who didn’t know what to do. Well, one thing she didn’t do was have eight more kids. And this wasn’t because nothing rhymes with octuplets.
Having eight children at once — or seven, six, five or four, for that matter — is not healthy for the children. Such human litters rarely occur naturally because, the sad truth is, the children rarely survive to adulthood to mate and to pass along a genetic predisposition to multiple births.
It’s a simple medical fact that the more babies in the brood, the lower their average birth weight. And the lower their birth weight, the more they are susceptible to a lifetime of health and social challenges.
The article, which is much more articulate than my previous post about this, is written by Christopher Wanjek, LiveScience’s Bad Medicine Columnist. He does a good job of discussing the future of those babies and any others in their positions.