Assisted Reproduction: "The United States is the Wild West of the fertility industry"

Allegory of Fertility by Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens; pen and ink on paper. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, (1618 - 1628)

By Michael Ollove, Stateline

The Utah Legislature took a step last week into territory where state lawmakers rarely tread.

It passed a law giving children conceived via sperm donation access to the medical histories of their biological fathers. The law itself stirred no controversy. The oddity was that the legislature ventured into the area of "assisted reproduction" at all.

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) helps infertile couples to conceive. Compared to many other industrialized nations, neither the US nor state governments do much to oversee the multibillion-dollar industry.

"The United States is the Wild West of the fertility industry," Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society said, echoing a description used by many critics of the regulatory environment surrounding ART.

The federal government requires laboratories engaged in assisted reproduction to be certified by organizations, such as the American College of Pathologists, and to report certain data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (One exception to minimal federal intervention: President George W. Bush’s ban in 2001 on the use of newly created embryonic stem cell lines in research.)

States are split about whether surrogacy contracts, usually between prospective parents and an egg donor, are permissible. But other aspects of ART are simply unaddressed by the states. For example, states don’t regulate how many children may be conceived from one donor, what types of medical information or updates must be supplied by donors, what genetic tests may be performed on embryos, how many fertilized eggs may be placed in a woman or how old a donor can be.

Lawmakers are wary of touching assisted reproduction, Darnovsky said, because of the incendiary politics that surround the issue of abortion, which touches on conception and embryos.

In terms of the number of people involved, the issue is significant. The CDC reports that about 12 percent of women of childbearing age have used infertility services and that 1.5 percent of all infants born in the US are conceived using ART.

The first infant conceived through ART in the U.S. was born in 1981. Since then, assisted reproduction has experienced enormous growth. The CDC reports that in 2012, more than 65,000 live births in the U.S. resulted from ART, which generally refers to fertility treatments in which either eggs or embryos are handled. That number does not include artificial insemination, which experts believe results in far more births.

Other countries, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and Australia, heavily regulate many aspects of reproductive technology. Many scholars, as well as some who have been through the assisted reproduction process in the US, believe this country should do the same.

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Assisted Reproduction: "The United States is the Wild West of the fertility industry"

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