AssistedConception.org

Members of the Glasgow fertility support group Cradle, are angered at the ill-informed journalism of some of the leading Scottish tabloid newspapers.

Recent public media attention surrounding IVF and “sex selection” has once again been poorly reported on and directly linked to IVF in a negative fashion. Public perception and support for those undergoing Assisted Reproduction has once again been damaged.

Couples who have no choice other than to go down the road of ART in order to have a child are being indirectly linked to high profile sensationalised media splurges linking IVF to “Designer Babies".

The recent parliamentary proposals from Westminster’s Science and Technology committee to allow couples the right to select the sex of their babies in order to “balance out the family” has caused shock and disbelief across the UK, but only as a result of poor media reporting. It has also linked this technique of embryo selection directly with couples going through IVF.

Couples who are going though IVF for medical reasons do not wish to select the sex of any potential baby, but rather couples who wish to select the sex of a planned baby that will need to embark on IVF in order to do this.

As the Chairperson of the Glasgow Group Cradle, and someone who has two young children through ART, I can guarantee that none of our members would say that their first priority would be to select the sex of a baby. Couples undergoing ART are doing so because they have a medical diagnosis of infertility and have no other choices. The procedure is extremely difficult physically and emotionally, it has a low success rate of just 25% and is very expensive at between £3000-4000 for each attempt. Why someone who is almost guaranteed to conceive naturally again and again with a 50% chance of getting the sex of the child they want, would want to go through this distressing process is quite inconceivable.

The few Assisted Reproductive techniques developed over the past quarter of a century have brought joy and hope to hundreds of thousands of couples who experience infertility. Without it we would be childless and our children have breathed new life into us. I will support ART indefinitely as a positive a practical solution to the treatment of infertility and for use in Pre-Implantation Genetic Diagnostics for medical related inherited disease. The technology has been one of the greatest and most incredible developments of modern medical science. No one practising in this field wishes for the technique to be abused or associated with modern eugenics.

Sam MacCuish
Cradle Editor