A study of 3,980 articles in medical and scientific journals between 1980 and 2005 has shown significantly higher risks of long-term medical problems for children conceived through artificial procreation such as in vitro fertilisation or intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a method in which a selected sperm is injected into the ovum.This is news which confirms what many who are involved or seriously interested in the industry already know. But when has the truth ever stopped us? After all, this kind of news would only be important if we really thought about the children more than about ourselves.
...Most recently, a study published in the June 21, 2007 issue of Human Reproduction showed that children conceived through IVF visit hospitals significantly more times (1.76 vs. 1.07 times) than naturally conceived children.
Of course, a "risk" is merely that; it is not a certainty. And we are already way past that. Today, we are INTENTIONALLY creating children who have problems. For instance, with the afore-mentioned intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), we are knowingly and intentionally creating children who are as infertile as their fathers - this is a proven fact and the doctors and the fathers know this, and yet they do it anyway. Moreover, ICSI may also pass on other genetic problems such as a predisposition to cancer. But who cares?
What I hear from the parents who do this is that well, creating children who have problems is still better than not creating them at all - after all, they get to LIVE, even though they are flawed! Isn't existence better than not existing? Isn't a life with problems better than no life at all?
Indeed, children are being tailor-made with disabilities that suit the parents. Children have already been intentionally created (through PGD and IVF) to be midgets, because their parents are midgets, and children have been intentionally created deaf, because their parents are deaf.
And all these parents are supposedly doing these children a favor by creating them, because a deaf life or a midget life or an infertile life is still better than no life at all. Those darn kids should be grateful! Right?
5 comments:
I had no idea ICSI resulted in infertile males. Do you have any references?
-- Tom
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your question. You will probably be able to find some articles online about this fact.
My own reference comes from the recently published book Everything Conceivable by Liza Mundy (see book link at the bottom of my page). There, she writes on pp. 78-80:
"For sure, ICSI is permitting infertility to be transmitted...in 15% of men azoospermia (almost no sperm) and 6 to 9 % of men with low sperm counts, infertility is caused by a deletion on the Y chromosome - a skip, like the kind that happens to CDs and record albums. Up to now, a father who had a Y deletion could not pass the deletion to offspring, because he could not have offspring. Now he can, and does. In 1999 scientists tested four ICSI boys. Without exception, those boys exhibited their father's Y deletion. This is proof that ICSI has enabled infertile men to father infertile sons.
"So what else is passing into the gene line? Who knows? Chromosomal deletions are just one cause of genetic infertility. Another is cystic fibrosis, the single most common genetic disease....One physical problem associated with some CF is congenital bilateral absence of the vas deferens...In these men, the absence of the vas deferens acts as a natural vasectomy, a kink in the hose of reproduction, a way of preventing CF from being transmitted. Now that sperm can be obtained from the areas where it is manufactured, the hose has been opened, the kin uncoiled. Without genetic testing, some make carriers could now pass along CF to a child, thanks to ICSI.
"As well as cancer, maybe. Turek and colleagues have also found that some infertile men are incapable of repairing the DNA in their testicles....An inability to make this repair is associated with some forms of cancer. 'This was na accidental and quite profound finding,' Turek says, 'It made us worry: if their testicles can't repair their DNA, maybe the individuals conceived from that have a higher cancer risk.'
"In addition, men who carry a genetic defect called a Robertsonian translocation, a rearrangement of chromosomes that also causes infertility, are at risk for causing pregnancies that miscarry, and for fathering children with mental retardation and birth defects.
"...Sherman Silber and colleagues published a papershowing that, thanks to ICSI, in 10,000 years every human male could be infertile. If 1 percent of men are genetically infertile in every generation, and every one of those men were to reproduce through ICSI, then 1.1 percent of the next generation would be infertile: the ICSI babies, plus the new 1 percent of infertile males that arise spontaneously. And so on and so on: infertility would be magnified: like compound interest, it would grow, and grow, and grow, until all men were sterile. In 2004 Silber presented these whimsical findings at an ASRM presentation, to knowing looks and scattered laughter. Every man infertile! How preposterous! Yet every doctor accepts that they are literally making future infertility patients.
"And not everyone is laughing. Paul Turek certainly isn't.
"'I have enormous respect for genetic infertility,' says Turek. 'When a man is infertile for genetic reasons, maybe that's a large statement by someone who knows more than we do that it's not good for the species for that individual to reproduce.'"
A great business move from the ICSI doctors.
-- Tom
You may want to check out this recent article:
"Fertility method (ICSI) linked to low testosterone in boys" (Reuters, July 31, 2007).
http://today.reuters.com/news/
articlenews.aspx?type=health
News&storyid=2007-07-31T212646Z
_01_PAR177179_RTRUKOC_0_US-
FERTILITY.xml&src=nl_ushealth1800
(see link at bottom of my main page).
August 02, 2007
Wow. I've been doing a lot of looking into ART out of curiosity of the effects on the DC, but had not a clue about them passing on and creating infertile boys. I'm speechless.
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