In vitro fertilization

[waltky]

The Oxford Fertility Unit's Tim Child said it would give hope to many couples...

IVF should be given sooner and to older women, says NICE
19 February 2013 - Couples struggling to have a baby should get fertility treatment more quickly and older women should gain access to IVF, new NHS guidelines say.

IVF should be offered after two years of failed attempts, not the current three, says the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. And the upper age limit should rise from 39 to 42 in England and Wales. Some fertility experts fear the guidelines may not lead to changes because they are not binding. In the past, NHS trusts have struggled to find the money to meet the IVF recommendations. A report in 2011, showed one in four NHS trusts offered the full three cycles. Each round costs £3,000. Around one in every seven heterosexual couples in the UK who are trying for a baby experience problems conceiving a child. In 2011, nearly 14,000 women became pregnant through IVF.

The new guidelines, which apply to England and Wales only, state that women aged between 40 and 42 should be offered one cycle of IVF as long as it is their first time and they have enough eggs. The age limit for NHS-funded fertility treatment is 38 in Scotland and 39 in Northern Ireland, according to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Tim Child, who helped devise the guidelines and is the director of the Oxford Fertility Unit, said the decision was not taken lightly. "When a woman reaches her mid-30s her fertility begins to decline, even more so from her late 30s. "However, many women do conceive naturally in the 40 to 42 year age group. But for those who can't, and who have been diagnosed with the medical condition of infertility, then improvement in IVF success rates over the last decade mean that we are now able to offer cost-effective treatment with a single IVF cycle."

Medical advances mean this age group has similar success rates to that of younger women when the original guidelines were introduced in 2004. The update still recommends women under 40 are offered three cycles of IVF. Some fertility experts raised concerns that the expanded recommendations may not happen in reality. Dr Sue Avery, a spokesperson for the British Fertility Society and from Birmingham Women's Fertility Centre, told the BBC: "It's good that there's the possibility there, but the funding does not match. "I can't see any prospect of it happening immediately. Our biggest concern is hanging on to the funding we've got." The guidelines also introduced rules designed to significantly reduce the number of twins and triplets being born.

'Increased risks'

 

[Zoom-boing]

This is in England, not here.

I'm opposed to in-vitro, always have been.

 

[waltky]

Uh-oh, Oops!...

Switched embryos and wrong sperm: IVF mix-ups lead to babies born with ‘unintended parentage’
Sunday 31st July, 2016 - Accidentally switched embryos. Wrong sperm. The burgeoning field of assisted procreation can involve serious medical blunders, experts are warning, including “misdirected” embryos — embryos that end up in the wrong woman’s body.

The American Society of Reproductive Medicine, in a newly published article, says fertility clinics have an ethical obligation to immediately disclose mistakes that could result in babies born with a “different genetic parentage than intended.” That could include inseminating a woman with the wrong sperm, combining the wrong sperm with the wrong eggs or transferring the wrong embryos to the wrong uterus — devastating errors that can result in babies being born to couples that were intended for someone else, the society’s ethics committee writes in the latest edition of the journal, Fertility and Sterility.

A container holding racks of frozen oocytes, or immature egg cells, are shown being pulled up from a liquid nitrogen storage tank at the NYU Fertility Center in New York​

Such calamities, experts insist, are rare, and while the body representing Canada’s largely for-profit fertility industry says it is unaware of any cases of “misdirected” embryos here, there has been a smattering of reports of IVF mix-ups in the U.S. and elsewhere that have led to emotionally wrought battles to determine legal parentage and custody. In 1999, a New York State woman of Italian descent gave birth to twin boys — one white, the other black. The woman had undergone an embryo transfer at a Manhattan fertility clinic the same day a black couple were also undergoing IVF. But an embryo from the black woman ended up in the white woman, reportedly because the pipette hadn’t been properly flushed between transfers. Only the white woman became pregnant. “The couples initially agreed to a shared custody agreement, but ended up in a custody dispute,” said Toronto fertility lawyer Sherry Levitan. “The genetic parents won.”

Levitan was involved in a case about 15 years ago involving a Toronto-area couple. An embryo was created using a donor egg and what was supposed to be sperm from the male partner. A surrogate carried the embryo. As part of a court application to obtain a Declaration of Parentage, DNA testing was performed. “The DNA testing came back, and nobody was related to the child,” Levitan said. “They ran (the test) again. It wasn’t a DNA mistake; it was clearly a laboratory mix-up. We don’t know if it was an embryo mix-up or a sperm mix-up.” The parents chose not to sue for negligence, because they didn’t want to risk losing the child.

In 2013, Ottawa’s Dr. Norman Barwin, a once-acclaimed fertility doctor and a past president of Planned Parenthood Canada was banned from practicing for two months by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario disciplinary panel after admitting to artificially inseminating three women with the wrong semen over a two-decade period. The children are likely now in their 20s. No one knows how often semen or embryo mishaps may have occurred in Canada. Levitan said that while DNA tests are always done in surrogacy cases, they aren’t typically performed for routine IVF. “In other words, most people never check to make sure that the baby they deliver is the baby that they expect.”

Don’t just let a nurse read it out to you — look at it.