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Fertility clinics are quick to tout their success rates to attract patients, but are they doing enough to disclose potential conflicts of interest and risks to oocyte donors?
A new report calls for professional societies to develop guidelines specifically addressing conflicts of interest in oocyte donation and to adopt tougher reporting and advertising standards (J Law Med Ethics. 2015 Jun;43[2]:410-24.).
While at least some measure of professional guidance addresses the potential conflicts that can arise at all four phases of oocyte donation – recruitment, screening and informed consent, ovarian stimulation, and follow-up – there is “a fracture between this guidance and actual practice,” the authors argued.
Some clinics and agencies may be minimizing risks in recruitment ads and websites, incentivizing repeated donations, or overstimulating donors for the benefit of recipients and clinic success rates.
One low-cost step to better inform a woman’s choice to donate would be to make complication rates publicly available along with the federally regulated annual success rates reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Aaron Levine, Ph.D., one of...