Re: [asa] The unexpected burden of IVF

Jack,

I think you may have missed the point.? The point is that couples who hold embryos to be sacred human lives don't have to choose to kill any?lives if they simply use a different medical procedure.? For those couples, their risk calculations include the 100% risk of death for the embryos that would otherwise be selected for death.

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Jack <drsyme@cablespeed.com>
To: christine_mb_smith@yahoo.com; asa@calvin.edu; philtill@aol.com
Sent: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 11:06 pm
Subject: Re: [asa] The unexpected burden of IVF

I dont think they mentioned it because they were not explicit in the article about the number of embryo's that are typically created in a normal in vitro procedure either.

?

And I think that is because it does not matter.? There is no question that if multiple embryos implant, the complication risk for the baby and the mother increases.? In most cases, and even in these "mini-stim" cases that the number of embryos that implant are "thinned" even if they all succesfully implanted, because the risk to the remaining four (or three, or two, or one), is significantly reduced.?

----- Original Message -----

From: philtill@aol.com

To: drsyme@cablespeed.com ; christine_mb_smith@yahoo.com ; asa@calvin.edu

Sent: Thursday, September 06, 2007 10:54 PM

Subject: Re: [asa] The unexpected burden of IVF

I am surprised at this article that it fails to mention the obvious solution for couples who want to avoid this problem.? It's a procedure called a "mini-stimulation," or "mini-stim."

I know about this only because?I?have some friends who wanted to do IVF, and they wanted the avoid having unimplanted embryos afterwards.? So they chose to have a mini-stim performed.? This procedure?only produces about 6 embryos instead of the usual 20 from the woman's ovaries.? Then, all 6 can be fertilized and implanted together.? Typically all 6 will not develop, but instead several will wash out of the woman's body in the natural way just like many of the fertilized eggs that come down the fallopian tubes but fail to implant.? This way, nature is allowed to do what it normally does without asking humans to make mortal decisions about the embryos.? So following a mini-stim you might end up having only one child, or you might have twins.? I guess you could have up to sextuplets in an extreme case!? But there is also a very large chance that you will get no children following a mini-stim because there are so few chances to get a successful egg when you have a sample of only
  6.? So you must then repeat the procedure -- perhaps several times -- in order to get the same odds of having a live birth that you would have gotten from a full stimulation with some 20 fertilized embryos.? It is for this reason that?most people choose to have the full stimulation and get it over with in one shot.?? It is more expensive and more time consuming to perform several mini-stims just to get one child. So it turns out to be purely a matter of convenience and cost that produces this moral dilemma -- it is completely?unnecessary!? (Most couples?probably get the full stimulation simply because the doctors never told them about the alternative, and so the unneccessary moral dilemma arises because of the doctor's assumptions about the convenience and cost, rather than the couple's assumptions.)

So in my friends' case the mini-stim allowed them to successfully avoid the dilemma of "left over" embryos.? All their embryos were implanted.? But in their case, none of these embryos resulted in a live birth, and so they would have needed to repeat the procedure.? (Instead, they were surprised with two live births that followed, resulting from natural fertilization.)

Again, I am very surprised that the article fails to mention this alternative?at all!? It seems that this would have been a natural thing to discuss in such an article.? Maybe it gets back to the assumptions of the authors regarding convenience and cost.? Maybe they don't believe it is reasonable to spend the extra time and money avoiding the problem.

Phil

?

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Received on Thu Sep 6 23:25:39 2007