Assisted Reproductive Technology: Let's Focus on One Healthy Baby at a Time
        
            By Jennifer Rogers, 
                RH Reality Check
             | 09. 16. 2010
        
                    
                                    
                    
                                                                                                                                    
                                                                            
                              
    
  
  
    
  
          
  
      
    
            The hubbub of Kate Plus 8 and Nadya Suleman is largely over. One year ago, articles covering multiple births and stories of in vitro fertilization were front-page news, but today I’m hard-pressed to name even a celebrity who has had a high-order multiple in the last few months. While I take this as good news, the data on assisted reproductive technologies (ART) tells a slightly different story.
Assisted reproductive technology includes fertility treatments in which both eggs and sperm are handled in the laboratory—this includes in vitro fertilization (IVF). It is well-documented that women who undergo IVF are more likely to deliver multiple-birth infants than women who conceive without assistance.  In fact, almost half of all IVF pregnancies result in multiple-birth deliveries.[i] Pregnancy with multiples is usually a direct result of multiple embryo transfer. This means that two or more embryos are transferred to a woman’s uterus at one time. And although the percentage of triplet-or-more births has declined from 6 percent to 2 percent from 1998 to 2007, the percentage of twin births remained stable at about 30 percent...
 
       
 
  
 
    
    
  
   
                        
                                                                                
                 
                                                    
                            
                                  
    
  
  
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[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
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            This is the 10th installment in the Legacies of Eugenics series, which features essays by leading thinkers devoted to exploring the history of eugenics and the ways it shapes our present. The series is organized by Osagie K. Obasogie in...
 
       
 
 
  
      
    
    
                
                        
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                
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