Doctors Offer Fertility, Other Treatments as Contest Prizes
By Bob LaMendola,
Sun Sentinel
| 11. 04. 2011
Attention patients: Bring the most Internet viewers to our Facebook page and win a free … pregnancy?
Doctors and medical businesses in South Florida and nationwide are increasingly giving patients free elective medical treatment as prizes in contests — particularly on the Internet — as a new way to drum up business. Fertility doctors, dentists and cosmetic beauty centers are among those leading the way.
Health care contests aren't illegal, but they draw criticism from medical school ethics professors, who see them as taking medicine too far toward becoming solely a money-making venture.
"Reproductive surgery is not a door prize," said Kenneth Goodman, at the University of Miami.
Hollywood real estate agent Dana Portal loves the idea. She and her husband, Sylvain, entered a doctor's online contest for couples who can't get pregnant. The couple who get the most people to "like" the doctor's Facebook page by Dec. 21 win $10,000 of in vitro fertilization (IVF) therapy. Dozens have entered.
"Some people have been struggling with pregnancy for 10 to 15 years and have run out of resources, so for...
Related Articles
By Daphne O. Martschenko and Julia E. H. Brown, Hastings Bioethics Forum | 01.14.2026
There is growing concern that falling fertility rates will lead to economic and demographic catastrophe. The social and political movement known as pronatalism looks to combat depopulation by encouraging people to have as many children as possible. But not just...
By Paula Siverino Bavio, BioNews | 01.12.2026
For more than ten years, gestational surrogacy in Uruguay existed in a state of legal latency: provided for by law, carefully regulated as an exception, yet without a single birth to make it real.
That situation changed with the arrival...
By Hannah Devlin, The Guardian | 01.08.2026
Scientists claim to have “rejuvenated” human eggs for the first time in an advance that they predict could revolutionise IVF success rates for older women.
The groundbreaking research suggests that an age-related defect that causes genetic errors in embryos could...
By Katherine Long, The Wall Street Journal | 12.27.2025
Nia Trent-Wilson owes $182,889.63 in medical bills for a baby that wasn’t hers.
In late 2021, she agreed to act as a surrogate through an agency that paired her with a gay couple from Washington, D.C. The terms were typical...
