Informed Consent for Egg Donors Won’t Exist Unless We Track Donors’ Health
By Judy E. Stern,
Our Bodies, Our Blog
| 10. 01. 2015
Both a recent article in the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics and a related Ob.Gyn. News story have raised concerns about the risks of egg donation and the process of providing informed consent for donors.
Despite guidelines from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine and the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, clinical and monetary pressures can create conflicts for providers of reproductive healthcare between the needs of the egg donors and those of the couples to whom their eggs are donated — both of whom are often patients of the same providers.
The articles raise concerns that these conflicts may result in donors having an incomplete understanding of the risks and ramifications of stimulation to produce multiple eggs and retrieval of those eggs for donation.
Egg donation is a commonly used assisted reproductive technology (ART) procedure accounting for more than 12 percent of ART cycles in the United States. Conflicts can arise on several levels: donor recruitment; screening, consent and disposition decisions; ovarian stimulation; and post-stimulation monitoring.
Recruitment can involve misleading advertisements, which may not accurately convey the...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Isabelle Bartram
| 07.17.2024
Image by Kuzzat Altay from Unsplash
Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in China, are mainly located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has pursued an aggressive settlement policy in this region since 1949, with the percentage of Han Chinese in the region increasing from five to forty percent in the second half of the 20th century. Since 2014, the Uyghurs have been subject to persecution and re-education – various sources have estimated that at least one million...