Culturally speaking, infertile men are invisible. That’s the finding of Cambridge University medical sociologist Liberty Walther Barnes, who spent six years tracking patients of five U.S. male fertility clinics and found that more than half of the men she tracked did not consider themselves infertile— despite trying to impregnate their wives for more than a year and having a low or zero sperm count.
Tag: fertility clinics
My I.V.F. Education
When I started the I.V.F. process, I didn’t want to be like the women who come to the fertility clinics with folders full of research on the latest studies about medicines, protocols, supplements and tests.
Survival of the Unfittest: IVF Technique ‘Used Too Widely’, Watchdog Warns
A technique for injecting sperm directly into unfertilised eggs to increase the chances of a successful IVF pregnancy is being used too widely by some fertility clinics, the head of the Government’s fertility watchdog has warned.
Abandoned Embryos: Clinics Ethically Free to Dispose of Thousands of Embryos Frozen in Time, Doctors’ Group Says
It is the most emotionally charged issue in assisted baby-making: how to “dispose” of the thousands of human embryos that sit frozen in time in fertility clinics across Canada, believed abandoned by the couples that created them.
Fertility Clinics’ Ad Regulation Falls Short, Report Says
Smiling babies. Confusing statistics. Talk of miracles. There is too little oversight of how fertility clinics market themselves online, a new report charges, possibly misleading women about their chances of getting pregnant.
In the 30-plus page paper — among the first to examine how fertility clinics market themselves on the web — Jim Hawkins, an assistant professor of law at the University of Houston, looked at all 372 fertility clinics in the United States, that are registered with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology and that have websites. SART, an affiliate of the non-profit American Society for Reproductive Medicine, represents more than 85 percent of the fertility clinics in the U.S.
According to the report, nearly 80 percent of the clinics’ websites had photos of babies on their homepage. Thirty percent used the word “dream” and nearly 9 percent used the word “miracle,” which, Hawkins argues, may push patients to disregard the high costs of fertility treatment (the average cost of a single cycle of in vitro fertilization is $12,400) and create false hope.
“I don’t think this creates some sort of deception,” Hawkins told HuffPost — at least not a deception that would be illegal under current laws, he said, but showing photos of babies and using such words may suggest to some patients that success is a likely outcome. Read full article.