Here’s the study on IVF and Stillbirths
Betsy linked to a story about a study showing that women using IVF have a 4 times greater chance of having a stillbirth than women who conceived naturally. Here is the link to that study. I’m continually amazed at how lightly people take these risks. One can perhaps understand the desperation of the infertile woman. She may say to herself that it is worth the risk of a stillbirth, to have the chance at having a baby at all. But what about the doctors, and the rest of us? What kinds of chances are we taking with the lives of children? What are we doing to ourselves, as we begin to treat each other, little tiny boys and girls, as if they were objects?
Here is a doctor, who is taking the issues seriously:
Spanish gynecologist Esteban Rodríguez Martin, member of the platform Gynecologists for the Right to Live (DAV), asserted that assisted fertilization always “implies a high cost of human lives.”
“This novel work of research demonstrates that the inefficiency [of the methods of assisted reproduction] not only increases the death of embryos in test tubes and in freezers, but it also increases the death of full term children,” he said.
Rodríguez pointed out the need for couples to be informed “of the risks implied for their children by techniques of transference and artificial production of embryos.”…Beyond the risks, Rodríguez contended that assisted fertilization is “leading to the commercialism of human life.”
“The industry of embryonic production — taking advantage of superficial sentimentalism and of the suffering of not having offspring experienced by thousands of couples in the whole developed world — obstinate in delaying and artificially planning maternity to the max, make embryos into things, treating them in ways that are unworthy of the human being,” he stressed.
The doctor said that “freezing, experiments, eugenic selections — including transfers to couples of women united by affective sexual bonds — are some examples of this commercialism” that marks the business of infertility treatment.
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It’s also important to look at the numbers here. The risk of stillbirth is very small. Multiply that by 4 and you still get a very small number.
They also have not proven causation, only correlation in this study.
The doctor quoted here has a very jaded view of IVF, believing that many women undergoing it have put off childbearing for whatever reason. The fact is that most of the women who use IVF are under 40 and are facing medical issues like blocked tubes, endometriosis, or their partners have problematic sperm.
Think about sickle cell anemia. The blood cells themselves can do their job, but they are the wrong shape to do that effectively. This is the same problem that sperm can have – it is the wrong shape to penetrate an egg but the DNA contained within is still fine. We do not question the treatment of sickle cell anemia, but do question ICSI (where the sperm is injected directly into the egg to overcome the shape problem).
Infertility is treatable and it is a medical problem for those in their 20s and 30s as well.