WOMEN'S HEALTH Survey: Fertility clinics' policies differ

Most would help older women get pregnant; 1 in 5 wouldn't help single women.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
They'll check her ovaries and her bank account, but few U.S. fertility clinics have policies for determining a woman's emotional or mental fitness to have a child, let alone whether it's OK to help one who is past menopause, a new survey reveals.
It shines a fresh spotlight on the ethics of the largely unregulated field of reproductive medicine, which reportedly has just helped a 66-year-old woman in Romania give birth.
Answering hypothetical questions, most American clinics said they'd help a 43-year-old get pregnant. One in five would refuse single women, but 5 percent don't even ask about marital status.
One in four would help a woman who has the AIDS virus.
"A gay couple and a couple on welfare were about equally likely to be turned away," said Andrea Gurmankin, a Harvard School of Public Health psychologist who led the study when she previously worked at the University of Pennsylvania.
Results were published Tuesday in Fertility and Sterility, a journal of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.
"They were all over the place with respect to their views and values," said University of Pennsylvania bioethics chairman Arthur Caplan, who also worked on the survey.
Results mixed
States need to set guidelines on some big issues, like helping women have babies after menopause, similar to agencies that limit adoptions to people under 55, he believes.
Reproductive decisions now "are too driven by the desires of couples and not enough by the interests of children," Caplan said.
One in 10 American couples is infertile, and their ability to get medical help to have children depends on a host of subjective criteria and attitudes about parenthood by fertility clinic operators, researchers found.
About 100,000 pregnancy attempts are made each year using in vitro fertilization, in which eggs and sperm are mixed in a lab dish and the resulting embryos are implanted in the womb.
More than 177,000 babies have been born this way in the United States.
Researchers sent surveys to directors of 369 clinics or doctors' offices offering these services around the country; 210 responded.
Percentages
On average, they turn away only 4 percent of potential customers each year. Only 28 percent had formal policies on who they'd accept or deny.
A whopping 80 percent had customers meet with financial coordinators but only 18 percent had them see a social worker or psychologist.
Asked if they believed that everyone has a right to have a child, 59 percent said yes. Two-thirds believe they have a responsibility to consider a parent's fitness before helping them conceive.
Medical conditions evoked different responses. Only 1 percent said they wouldn't help Jehovah's witnesses conceive, presumably because they refuse blood transfusions that might be necessary for the mother or child.