Giving Birth to Your Sister and Other Aberrations of IVF

LifeSiteNews.com ^ | Wednesday July 4, 2007 | Hilary White

[monomaniac]

MONTREAL, July 4, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A Montreal mother has banked her ova in order that her seven year-old daughter, who is infertile, may one day give birth to her own half-sister or half-brother.

Melanie Boivin's daughter Flavie suffers from Turner syndrome, a genetic disorder in which one of the two X chromosomes normally carried by women is missing, which causes the ovaries to fail to develop. Women with Turner syndrome often turn to donor ova and in vitro fertilisation to have children. In Flavie Boivin's case, her mother decided to donate her own ova so that her daughter could have a child that is a close genetic match.

The donation was approved by an ethics committee at McGill University because, "the woman was doing it out of love for her daughter." The Toronto Star reports that Dr. Seang Lin Tan, director of the McGill Reproductive Centre, made the announcement at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology in Lyon, France, yesterday.

"She wanted her daughter to have a chance of having a baby, using (the mother's) own eggs if necessary," he told the Star.

Dr. Tan is a professor and chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at McGill University and obstetrician and gynaecologist-in-chief of the McGill University Health centre. Tan pioneered the freezing of ova, a process considerably more difficult than for sperm.

Dr. Tan explained that the process was developed as a means to help preserve fertility in young women undergoing cancer treatment. "We know that this technique works," he told AFP. "We find that 85 per cent of the eggs survive freezing and then there is 40 per cent chance of a live birth."

The various artificial reproductive technologies have allowed a host of such variations on natural fertility and have led to cloning experiments. With surrogacy, donor ova and sperm and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, a veritable baby-manufacturing industry is growing. In August 2006, LifeSiteNews.com reported that babies at the embryonic stage could be purchased at a cost of about $10,000, at a private IVF facility, the Abraham Center of Life in San Antonio Texas.

In 2003, a prominent British fertility specialist, Lord Robert Winston, head of fertility at Hammersmith Hospital, London, warned that with many procedures now considered standard in IVF facilities, women were being used as test subjects in fertility experiments. He urged that more testing be done using animals before such procedures came into use for women.

"I'm not arguing that IVF is dangerous. What I am arguing is that there isn't any form of properly informed consent…If you are using treatments that might damage somebody - such as an unborn child - then you have a duty to tell people," he said.

Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage: UK Fertility Specialist Warns Women are Being Experimented on With IVF http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2003/sep/03091103.html

Made-to-Order Babies for Sale at Texas IVF Facility http://www.lifesite.net/ldn/2006/aug/06080806.html

For many more articles on IVF enter "IVF" into the LifeSiteNews search window at http://www.lifesite.net/