Fertility Study Warns of Risks From Multiple Births
By WSJ,
The Wall Street Journal
| 04. 28. 2014
Like many women going through fertility treatments, Nikki David had one thought when she learned she was pregnant with twins: instant family.
"We were hoping it was twins," said Ms. David, a 33-year-old real-estate agent based in Cherry Hill, N.J., who had twin girls in June after getting pregnant through in vitro fertilization. "We can't necessarily afford to do this again. I would be older the next time around. The whole process of going through IVF again. There were so many reasons why we're like, 'Please let it be twins, please let it be twins.' "
While many women who struggle with infertility say having twins is a blessing, medical experts are increasingly calling for measures to be taken to reduce the country's rate of multiple births.
In an analysis posted online in April in the journal Fertility and Sterility, researchers from the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute, and the Yale Fertility Center called for a number of policy changes to encourage doctors and patients to try to avoid multiple pregnancies. Multiples have a greater risk of preterm...
Related Articles
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli, The New York Times | 09.24.2025
For some Greenlanders, sorry isn’t enough.
The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, made a special visit Wednesday to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, to apologize in person for a traumatic chapter in Greenlandic history, when Danish doctors forced birth control on...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...
Sir Francis Galton, 1890s, by Eveleen Myers (née Tennant)
npg.org
Public Domain via Wikipedia
As has been discussed in recent issues of Biopolitical Times (1, 2), there are, increasingly, companies that claim to be selling parents better babies by selecting the “best” embryos. These services don’t come cheap – think $50,000, or even more, for embryo testing, plus perhaps as much again for IVF and concomitant services. To most of us, that is extremely expensive...
By Margaux MacColl, The San Francisco Standard | 09.17.2025
Designer babies are coming soon to an IVF clinic near you.
Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi in 2020, when he was just 20, got its start analyzing genomes to weigh a person’s risk of everything from cancer to ADHD...