Letter to the editor regarding "At Birth, Tales of Joy and Heartbreak"
By Marcy Darnovsky,
New York Times
| 10. 14. 2009
To the Editor:
“The Gift of Life, and Its Price” reports that the fertility industry’s professional organization encourages its members to transfer fewer embryos, so as to produce fewer multiple pregnancies and premature babies. The organization, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, is to be commended for these efforts.
But its guidelines are routinely flouted. The society could put teeth behind its rules by publicly suspending the memberships of fertility practices in noncompliance. And it has resisted calls for public regulation and oversight.
Recent experiences with the financial sector have dramatized the dangers of inadequate public policy. The fertility industry, too, demonstrates the limits of self-regulation. Public regulation must be carefully written and not used to advance other agendas like opposition to reproductive rights. It’s past time for the federal government to set rules for the fertility industry and establish ways to enforce them.
Marcy Darnovsky
Berkeley, Calif., Oct. 11, 2009
The writer is associate executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society.
Related Articles
By Katie LaGrone, WPTV | 06.28.2024
Image by National Cancer Institute from Unsplash
TAMPA, Fla. — A Tampa jury recently found the now-defunct Lung Institute in Tampa guilty of engaging in “deceptive or unfair practices” while it offered customers “valueless” stem cell therapy to treat incurable...
By Gilma Avalos, NBC | 07.03.2024
Image by Josh Appel from Unsplash
The dream of becoming parents is turning into a nightmare for hundreds of people caught up in a surrogacy money scandal.
Some of the individuals are facing infertility or medical challenges, seeing surrogacy as...
By Michael Hiltzik, LA Times | 07.02.2024
Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash
Second only to the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on when presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, the biggest case of the court’s recently completed session involved the age-old conflict between judges and government regulators...
By Sonia Suter and Naomi Cahn, PET | 07.01.2024
Image by Dusdn5959 from Wikimedia Commons
Since the US Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade (see BioNews 1147), there have been worries about the future of IVF in the USA. Both abortion and IVF involve decisions...