IVF Exclusive: Donor eggs to be rationed
New restrictions will leave thousands childless
Sunday, 1 April 2007
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Women unable to conceive naturally will be limited to a single egg transplant under new "rationing" plans for fertility treatment.
Thousands of women may be denied the chance of having a baby because of the moves to limit to one the number of embryos implanted. The UK's fertility watchdog, the Human Fertility and Embryology Authority (HFEA), will this week call on clinics to allow women to have only a single egg fertilised and implanted in the womb, instead of the two at present.
The watchdog claims this will limit risky multiple births following a huge rise in the number of twins born because of women undergoing in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. Twin births have nearly doubled over more than three decades, from 6,000 in 1975 to 10,000 today.
The HFEA warns that multiple pregnancies can cause health problems in mothers such as fatal haemorrhaging during birth and cerebral palsy in the babies they are carrying. They also say that the high incidence of premature births among IVF twins is having a major impact on the already limited resources of special-care baby units.
However, campaigners last night attacked the HFEA's proposals, which apply to women under the age of 40, saying single embryo transfer could diminish thousands of couples' chances of becoming parents.
The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) issued guidelines in 2004 recommending that women should be allowed up to three cycles of IVF treatment on the NHS. In practice, this has never been achieved and few hospital trusts actually offer women this opportunity, largely because of the cost.
Professor Ian Craft, one of the pioneers of IVF in Britain, said he would back single embryo transfer in women who had a good chance of getting pregnant in the first place through IVF, but warned that a strict policy was not appropriate for everyone. "What I'm against is rigid rules made by policy makers that fit everybody, because some women will lose out," he said. "The whole concept of having a fixed treatment is going to disadvantage some women, whether we like it or not. I feel very sorry for women because they become part of a system where they cannot control their own destiny."
An expert group of fertility specialists was commissioned last year by the HFEA to give advice on the issue of multiple births. They recommended that single embryo transfer should be introduced as a standard for women under the age of 40 who have a reasonable chance of getting pregnant.
The aim is that the number of women bearing twins as a result of IVF will drop sharply, as it did for the triplet rate when the regulations were last tightened in 2004.
Other European countries have already introduced a single embryo transfer limit, including Finland, where the twin rate is now only 6 per cent of IVF births compared with a quarter of all IVF births in the UK.
