The American Society for Reproductive Medicine has a Ethics Committee which issues recommendations regarding various ART medical practices. Most recently, they published “Disclosure of medical errors involving gametes and embryos”  If this link doesn’t work, you can download a PDF copy for yourself directly from www.asrm.org. In this article, the Ethics Committee generally advocates for [...]

Newt Gingrich, on the eve of the primary election in Florida, promised to ban stem cell research and raised questions about the practice of in vitro fertilization which can result in the production of excess embryos. He promised evangelical supporters that he would form a commission to study the ethics of in vitro fertilization. He [...]

Every week, we field questions about using sperm donors from patients who can’t have a child unless they can use donor sperm and most buy sperm from a commercial sperm bank. They may be a married couple in which the man does not produce sperm or had a vasectomy that he doesn’t want to reverse [...]

In Mississippi, the Supreme Court approved a ballot initiative that, if successful, would define a fertilized egg as a human being. Specifically, if approved by the voters, the new law reads“The term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.” I blogged about this [...]

With technology comes new opportunities and always new ethical questions. I subscribe to a professional andrology list-serve group to keep up to date on the sperm side of things. Most of the topics are usually medically oriented  for male urologists but recently there’s been a pretty animated discussion about the ethics of posthumous sperm retrieval [...]

A recent USA Today commentary by Kevin Pho, MD,  “As health reform unfolds, involve the patients” caught my eye because the proposed “medical team” approach for delivery of health care in the future is how high tech infertility care is provided today. To provide in vitro fertilization (IVF) services, a medical team consisting of  physicians, [...]

In my last post, I mentioned how one fertility physician was trying to reduce the financial barriers for patients who wanted to only transfer one embryo. He took the financial issue off the table by offering a free follow-up frozen embryo transfer cycle if the elective single embryo transfer (eSET) fresh transfer didn’t result in [...]

I saw this headline the other day, “Doctor bucking trend by using one IVF embryo”, which talks about how at least one  physician is trying to make elective single embryo transfer (eSET) more appealing to patients. Dr. George Grunert with Fertility Specialists of Houston offers a “second transfer free” if first single embryo transfer doesn’t [...]

Third-party reproduction is a legal and ethical minefield. Perhaps the most recent example of the trouble even well-meaning agencies can get into is the class action law suit against ASRM, SART and various named egg donor agencies brought by an egg donor , Lindsay Kamakahi v. American Society For Reproductive Medicine, Society for Assisted Reproductive [...]

Two infertility related news items caught my attention today. The first was an ASRM Bulletin sent to all ASRM members to announce that Senator Kristen Gillibrant (D-NY) introduced legislation to  quote, “provide eligible taxpayers a tax credit of 50 percent of qualified infertility treatment expenses incurred during the taxable year. The FAMILY Act would apply [...]