This article from the New York Times was of interest as a counterpart for my post on the Business of Fertility.
Yes, it is a business and yes, it is woefully unregulated. Just anecdotally, I feel that some people I know who’ve undergone fertility treatments often seem to have an alarming rate of reproductive systems cancers, and I can’t help wondering if the gigantic pushes of hormones have something to do with it. Sometimes I wonder if people get too fixated on the goal of a live child and don’t consider what these drugs might be doing to them. It’s obviously not natural to ripen dozens of eggs at once.
Indeed, one of the fallouts from the fertility wars may be the young women who donate their eggs for (often handsome sums of) money. There’s no long-term studies done on what an artificial ripening and harvesting of eggs might do to you long-term, and the author in the NY Times article goes on to outline some serious side effects, which would certainly also possibly affect women undergoing infertility treatments (and, interestingly, the author adopted a child from Russia).
Kathy, who left a post on the blog, also had this to say:
Frankly, I’ve said a million times (much to my infertility doc’s distress) that I’d recommend to anyone that they just sidestep the drugs and stress of Infertility Wars.
I’m also posting this because in my wanderings, this sentiment has been expressed to me, almost exactly like that, by more than one person.
It’s not my part to tell other people what to do, and I have no empirical evidence myself that the fertility drugs are “bad.” But I have my green vibe and I also don’t want to force my body to do anything it doesn’t want to do. I’m not going near those drugs…my two cents.
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