The Big IVF Add-on Racket

ReproTechTruths co-founder Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos wrote this op-ed for The New York Times. Titled The Big IVF Add On Racket, it brings much needed attention to the unethical way IVF add-ons are developed and sold to patients seeking help to become pregnant.

This piece calls attention to several new papers published this month in Fertility and Sterility, including one Tsigdinos helped co-author along with an international team of researchers, academics and patient advocates: Do à la carte menus serve infertility patients? The ethics and regulation of in vitro fertility add-ons.

Companion papers on IVF add-ons in the December print issue include:

– Clinical adjuncts in in vitro fertilization: a growing list; 

– Add-ons in the laboratory: hopeful, but not always helpful

– In vitro fertilization add-ons for the endometrium: it doesn’t add-up

As a package, the journal papers point to a troubling pattern of the profit-driven IVF industry introducing new procedures and therapies into clinical practice before their effectiveness or safety have been validated.

As bioethicist George Annas famously said in a 1999 PBS Frontline interview, the fertility industry is the “Wild West mated with American commerce and modern marketing.” He also presaged where we are today explaining, “when you want to do a new procedure in assisted reproduction, you just do it. You could have a bad dream one night, and wake up the next day and say, ‘I’m going to try that’… with private money in a private clinic, physicians can do virtually whatever they want to do as long as they have consent. There is no regulation. There are no limits.”

You can read Tsigdinos’ full op-ed here on IVF add-ons.