Patients Debate What To Do With Embryos After Fertility Treatments, USA Today Reports

Main Category: Women's Health / Gynecology
Also Included In: Fertility;  Pregnancy / Obstetrics
Article Date: 01 Feb 2007 - 3:00 PDT

email to a friend   printer friendly   opinions  

As the debate over human embryonic stem cell research intensifies, patients who have embryos leftover after undergoing fertility treatments face a choice of discarding them, giving them to other couples, paying an annual fee to store them or donating them to medical research, USA Today reports. Patients with frozen embryos are the only ones legally entitled to decide what to do with unused embryos, and federal funding restrictions on stem cell research and varying state laws and programs have made the decision more "complex" for patients, USA Today reports. A 2003 RAND Corp. study estimated that there are about 400,000 frozen embryos stored at 450 fertility clinics nationwide, with 2.8% being designated for research and most the remaining saved for future fertility treatments. Some critics have said that if frozen embryos are donated to research, facilities that provide embryos to stem cell researchers will begin to encourage fertility clinics to produce more embryos for in vitro fertilization procedures that could later be donated to research. Yuval Levin, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics, said embryo banks might reduce pressure on patients to donate unused embryos because they "stand as a barrier between the researcher and the IVF clinic." Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said many fertility clinics do not mention embryo donation to their patients because of moral concerns or confusion about the laws surrounding donation. Lucinda Veeck Godsen, director of embryology at the IVF clinic at Weill-Cornell Medical School, said that the clinic has "avoided" discussing donating embryos to stem cell research and that embryo storage is a "major problem" at the facility. Godsen said 54% of the clinic's patients have unused embryos destroyed, 43% donate them to research unrelated to stem cells and 3% donate them to infertile couples. According to USA Today, some fertility doctors say as many as 10% of embryos are abandoned (Stone, USA Today, 1/30).

"Reprinted with permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

• Additional
• References
• Citations