Reproductive Tourism Could Put Women, Fetuses At Risk, Experts Say

�Women wHO travel abroad to receive cheaper fertility treatments, such as in vitro fecundation, could be putting themselves and their fetuses at risk, some fertility experts said, Reuters reports. According to Reuters, without an international set of standards to help people prefer a safe place to receive treatment, couples sometimes end up taking "bad risks" at clinics without adequate standards.



In some cases, couples wHO go afield to receive IVF mightiness not know where the eggs come from, and sometimes women will become pregnant with multiple embryos -- the single biggest risk for a adult female and fetus during IVF, researchers aforementioned. Although Europe, followed by the U.S., leads in the number of IVF procedures performed, some European fertility experts see a trend of women traveling to early countries to have IVF procedures victimization multiple conceptus transfer. According to Reuters, this means best practices are not standardized across Europe, and safety measures that let been adopted by some countries are not necessarily practiced in others, including rules on the maximum number of embryos that can be transferred to women. For example, in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, the maximum number of embryos that crapper be transferred is one or 2. In Italy, freezing embryos is banned.



Francoise Shenfield -- a birth rate expert at University College London and member of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology -- aforesaid, "Patients unhappily often come back with a high rate of multiples from some places of the world where the standards are non as high gear." Guido Pennings, an ethicist at Ghent University in Belgium, at a recent conference said, "Governments, affected role organizations and doctors should organize sentience campaigns to warn citizens for possible dangers of cross-border caution and to inform them of the possibilities" (Kahn, Reuters, 7/24).




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