Chicago Tribune's Judith Graham, in her column "Triage", talked to three different fertility experts about cases in which they would deny infertility services to patients. Her piece, which arose in the swarm of coverage about the California octuplets born this month to Nadya Suleman, is titled "Saying no to a fertility patient: medical experts speak".
People who are considering or entering fertility treatment would do well to be aware of the extraordinary decision-making burden that the average reproductive endocrinologist works under daily. There's more to the field than simply helping patients make babies.
The Ethics Committee of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine issued their report titled "Child-rearing ability and the provision of fertility services" in 2004.
The report summary: Fertility
programs may withhold services when there are reasonable grounds for
thinking that patients will not provide adequate child-rearing to
offspring but are not obligated to do so. (Fertil Steril 2004;82:564
–7.
©2004 by American Society for Reproductive Medicine.)
Saying no to a fertility patient: medical experts speak | Triage
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