Round-up of opinion on embryo mix-up

ROUND-UP OF OPINION FROM ACROSS THE WEB

The embryo mix-up has opened up many moral dilemmas surrounding IVF which commentators, columnists, bloggers and message board users have been debating. Here is a round-up of what is being said across the web.

Bel Mooney in the Daily Mail uses the recent problems with IVF to argue that fertility should be seen as a privilege, not a right:

But behind all these complex issues lies a more simple question: what has brought so many people to the point where they place a faith in the science of IVF that would once have been placed in God (or at least nature)?... When you have women in their 50s and 60s living by that misplaced conviction and conceiving babies artificially, something is very wrong. ...I would suggest that any young woman in her twenties, in a serious loving relationship, would be wiser not to postpone trying for a baby. That she should think of fertility as a privilege, not a right. And that - whisper it - childlessness might be a fate which (like so many of the other sorrows which afflict our lives) sometimes has to be accepted.

Also in the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips says IVF brings up questions about what to do with the spare fertilised eggs, designer babies and the false hope given to many couples but her biggest question is why the public are picking up the bill for IVF:

There is no question but that it brings great happiness to otherwise childless people whom it enables to have a baby. But it has also raised a host of ethical issues that have multiplied and remain unresolved… True, much IVF work is done privately. But given all these concerns, the question is whether it should be funded.

Melanie McDonagh in the Telegraph says this case exposes an unpleasant element of the baby-making industry, primarily that the law treats embryos as commodities, much like the Old Testament story of splitting a baby:

The clinic told the women that it would have been for the courts to decide ownership. That would have been a judgment-of-Solomon moment for the British judiciary. Alas, the courts never got the chance to offer to divide a baby with a sword. The non-natural mother, plainly not the real one in biblical terms, saw it off first… …there is the law, which treats embryos as commodities, chattels of the clinic and its clients, certainly if they end up in the wrong womb. People send things back to the shop if they don't suit; it turns out we see embryos in the same way.

Roze successfully conceived after visiting a clinic in the Ukraine. She says on the Fertility Friends message board that this story has reinforced her confidence in overseas clinics:

In my experience I have been much more confident in the overseas clinics I have been to than either of the three private UK clinics I went to. Mistakes do and will always happen in IVF as they do in most other aspects of medical care and indeed life, but I think its both a risk that people have to accept, but also that it is actually a very rare occurrence given the number of transfers and treatments that actually take place.

Also on Fertility friends, Kara76 defends the clinic and warns about the dangers of scare stories:

This is my clinic and I have the upmost respect for them, I've had all my treatment there and they are fab. I think it's a shame that with all the wonderful success stories the media only hook onto the bad ones, I suppose it's a way to sell papers. A lot of people do not understand the IVF process itself and this will just make it worst.

John J. Ray writes a blog about government-run healthcare everywhere and thinks this case is evidence that private clinics can be superior:

This should be the last straw for Britain's IVF regulator