Reproductive Tourism Could Put Women, Fetuses At Risk, Experts Say

Main Category: Fertility
Also Included In: Women's Health / Gynecology
Article Date: 29 Jul 2008 - 7:00 PST

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Women who travel abroad to obtain cheaper fertility treatments, such as in vitro fertilization, could be putting themselves and their fetuses at risk, some fertility experts said, Reuters reports. According to Reuters, without an international set of standards to help people choose a safe place to receive treatment, couples sometimes end up taking "big risks" at clinics without adequate standards.

In some cases, couples who go abroad to receive IVF might not know where the eggs come from, and sometimes women will become pregnant with multiple embryos -- the single biggest risk for a woman and fetus during IVF, researchers said. Although Europe, followed by the U.S., leads in the number of IVF procedures performed, some European fertility experts see a trend of women travelling to other countries to have IVF procedures using multiple embryo transfer. According to Reuters, this means best practices are not standardized across Europe, and safety measures that have been adopted by some countries are not necessarily practiced in others, including rules on the maximum number of embryos that can be transferred to women. For example, in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the maximum number of embryos that can be transferred is one or two. In Italy, freezing embryos is banned.

Francoise Shenfield -- a fertility expert at University College London and member of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology -- said, "Patients sadly often come back with a high rate of multiples from some places of the world where the standards are not as high." Guido Pennings, an ethicist at Ghent University in Belgium, at a recent conference said, "Governments, patient organizations and doctors should organize awareness campaigns to warn citizens for possible dangers of cross-border care and to inform them of the possibilities" (Kahn, Reuters, 7/24).

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