UK Fertility Specialist Warns Women are Being Experimentedon With IVF

LONDON, September 11, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A prominentUK physician has serious misgivings over the use of many fertility treatmentsthat are now standard

practice in IVF facilities. Lord Robert Winston, head offertility at Hammersmith Hospital, London, said that more clinical trials wereneeded before many of the

standard IVF "treatments" could be made safe. Hefeels also that experiments should be carried out on animals and"spare" embryos left over from IVF procedures.

Lord Winston surprised an audience at the BritishAssociation Festival of Science by saying that he felt IVF patients were beingused as guinea pigs in fertility

experiments. When asked whether IVF patients were beingexperimented on, he replied: "That's exactly what I am saying."

Doctors are introducing new IVF procedures to boost clinicrevenues without proper research being done to ensure safety. "I'm notarguing that IVF is dangerous.

What I am arguing is that there isn't any form of properlyinformed 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.

Lord Winston said that practices such as the cryogenicfreezing of embryos, the "maturing" of embryos in vitro for a fewdays before implantation had not been

sufficiently tested before their use on humans. The motive,he says seems to be monetary, with the commercial aspect of IVF facilities,being emphasized over

clinical research.

Pro-life commentators have been consistently asserting thatwomen, and their children created through IVF, are being abused in themulti-billion dollar fertility

industry. Dr. Dianne N. Irving, a graduate of The Kennedy Instituteof Ethics at Georgetown University, has warned numerous panels of scientistsand politicians

for many years that the practices of most fertilitytreatments are unethical, dangerous to women and children and amount to the useof patients, without their

consent, as human test subjects.

See coverage in the Telegraph and BBC:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/09/11/nsci11.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/09/11/ixhome.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3099698.stm